Aphenphosmphobia and connections: Playing Death Stranding in the middle of the pandemic

Death Stranding stands out from the crowd for AAA titles for several reasons. It has been called from a walking simulator and a delivery game to a beautiful collage of various facets of humanity.

Irrespective of where you fall on that scale, one cannot ignore Kojima and his contributions to the culturescape of video games.

Although I had followed the development of Death Stranding, I only got around to playing it after the world was brought to a stall by the global pandemic and the lockdown had set in.

The fear of touch that the protagonist suffers from is what I most relate to, among everything that awed me.

How Death Stranding shows someone afraid of touch embarking on a journey to connect a broken country

In a talk I attended back in 2021, one of the speakers half-jokingly suggested that they were waiting for the pandemic to be over so people could touch each other again. Ignoring the crude double entendre for a moment, the statement reflects the importance that touch and platonic physical affection play in our everyday lives.

"Touch is the fundamental language of connection," says D. Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and he further adds:

"Big parts of our brains are devoted to making sense of touch and the right type of friendly touch—like hugging your partner or linking arms with a dear friend—calms your stress response down."

The unexpected pandemic has halted all such social norms, almost manifesting into a phobia of touch. People have been locked in their rooms in the state of Hikikomori, the Japanese term for social withdrawal and digital survival.

This touch starvation can significantly affect a psychological and even a physical level. So where does Death Stranding come into this?

Death Standing, society and connections

For one, the protagonist’s fear of touch resonates with similar feelings that the pandemic has brought upon us. But more importantly, it is because of its and Kojima’s insistence on building bridges, at times quite literally, connecting people in the face of ever-mounting perils, along with the imageries of touch and togetherness.

In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud says:

"We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body; which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other."

While the pandemic has exacerbated the first two, Kojima intends to address the last one with his game. Death Stranding, at its core, feels like a somber contemplation of solitude, death, and connections, while becoming a prescient warning for the strange horror that the world was plunged into – harking back to Oscar Wilde's "life imitating art."

The world outside (Image via Death Stranding)

Although released in November 2019, Death Stranding came to the wider PC platform amidst the lockdown in July 2020. And despite the polarizing reactions evoked by the title, there is no denying that the world of the game eerily echoes the reality we were living through.

The world of Death Stranding replicates the anxiety and dread of living sequestered amidst what we don’t correctly understand and can’t even see.

A story of keeping on in a world grown apart

At its heart, the story is a retelling of the journey of a heroic character who overcomes humongous odds, both physical and emotional, to complete a near-impossible mission that nobody else could. It is Kojima - often called the auteur of video games - who takes it beyond and makes it so much more than just another heroic quest in an apocalyptic world.

An apocalyptic event, known as the ‘Death Stranding,’ has broken up in the United States of America, and the game world takes place after this. A company called Bridges was formed to piece together and reconnect America. There is also another delivery company called Fragile Express, which is headed by Fragile, portrayed by Lea Seydoux.

The Stranding has given rise to beings known as ‘Beached Things’ (BTs), which are not visible to normal eyes and are one of the primary reasons people have moved to remote colonies underground. BTs are souls that are unable to pass on and simply stranded in the world of the living. They trigger a massive explosion when they touch and consume a living thing.

This has led to specialized teams for transporting corpses to incinerators far from cities – something which played out at the peak of the pandemic crisis in dealing with the dead bodies. Death Stranding also introduces the Chiral Network, noted as a spiritual successor to the internet, which allows for instantaneous data transfer and is being used to reconnect with the continent.

America, after the Stranding, has been divided into remote colonies called ’Knot Cities,' which together form the UCA or the ‘United Cities of America.’ The protagonist of the story is Sam Porter, a freelance courier. For most Death Stranding, players will be tasked with delivering packages from one place to another, trudging along in esthetic settings while engaging in rugged terrain and accompanied by post-rock songs.

Much like our lives during the lockdown period of the pandemic in Death Stranding, a massive bulk of conversations happen through emails. The primary task of the narrative is to reconnect America assigned to Sam, and thus the player, to which he reluctantly agrees. Sam is to contact whoever is left in the remaining cities across the country and convince them to join the aforementioned Chiral Network.

Mathew Gault, writing in Time, reflects it perfectly when he says:

"There’s action, but it’s not an action game. There’s ghosts, but it’s not a horror game. The story takes place in the future, but it’s not a science-fiction game. It’s a game about delivering packages and building connections."

The fear of touch, the possibility of reconnecting and the video game medium

America is a stand-in for the world, while Sam is every player who plays the game. In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janeth Murray defines agency as a satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices.

The video game medium offers such an agency where the player, through possible recognition or misrecognition with the game's protagonist, writes their own narrative in each playthrough. Video games, in this sense, embody Barthes' writer-ly text – the player has to provide a non-trivial effort to traverse the non-ergodic text.

Coming back to Death Stranding, the irony in the narrative lies in the fact that this Goliathan task of reconnecting the cities of America falls on the shoulders of a man who himself suffers from a fear of touch.

As referred to in Death Stranding or haphephobia, Aphenphosmphobia is a rare specific phobia involving the fear of touching or being touched. Players get to see Sam's fear for the first time in a cutscene early in the game in a cave.

On a side note, Kojima was never subtle in the names of his characters, and Death Stranding was replete with characters like Heartman, Die-Hardman, and Fragile. Sam's full name is Sam Porter Bridges. Anyway, later, Deadman, who works in the medical field of Bridges, recognizes Sam's condition and makes an interesting remark about his choice of profession.

"No wonder you are out there alone, where no one could touch you."

Sam’s fear of making connections is further shown when, in the end, even after overcoming his phobia, he refuses to attach to anyone. For such a man, it felt like the job of connecting with the whole continent. That Sam will succeed is pretty much a given, or at least hoped, but how he succeeds makes Death Stranding such an immersive experience.

Not everyone that the player comes across wishes to join the UCA. They are afraid. Their trust had previously been broken. Promises made to them were not kept, or they saw the porters, although extremely necessary in a fragmented society, not as trustworthy.

It is up to the player to persuade them through each delivery done. Not everyone you come across needs to be connected for you to finish the game, but it is a joy to find all of them and then persuade them to believe in this fragile image of togetherness.

The world of the Stranding

It's not always easy, but Death Stranding is a game that seems to ask us to find pleasure in its difficulties. Players have to cross mountains, rivers, gorges, and rifts from one human settlement to another.

They have to balance their packages carefully and pay attention to the evenness of the ground, not doing what would result in a nasty fall. It is a single-player game but with an asynchronous co-operative multiplayer, which resonates when Kojima calls this a Strand game.

You don't see other players in Death Stranding, but you can come across stuff that they have left behind in their quest to rebuild America or their footsteps on the paths they have taken. Mayberopes, ladders, or bridges while climbing up a mountain or across a river - you are to come across others' imprints in your game.

One realizes that even though we are leading a solitary life within the gameplay, the burden of rebuilding our broken world is one shared by everyone. We are not alone in this journey.

Chiral Crystals (Image via Death Stranding wiki)

The notion of chirality plays a significant role in the narrative of Death Stranding. Several elements are in the play of the word – chiralium, chiral crystals, chiral network. An object is chiral if it is distinguishable from its mirror image – a concept that occupies an important place in our understanding of the world. The word is derived from the Greek χειρ (kheir), "hand".

Kojima carefully weaves the imagery of the hand into the playtext. A hand is the most straightforward representation of wishing to make a connection. The BTs, roaming the living world, is invisible but only leave a handprint as they move around. Each time they catch Sam, a handprint is left on his skin.

Looking at Sam (Image via Death Stranding)

In another fit of irony, Sam, with his fear of physical contact, comes across entities that only manifest in his work as a porter. Chiral crystals also form in the form of two open-palmed hands. One of the final bosses, BT, has a similar pattern to its head in the game.

The arduos task of forming connections

Death Stranding is an arduous journey across the forlorn land, which looks more Icelandic than America, delving into the metaphysics of life and death and using surreal imageries to depict it. Death Stranding reflects Kojima's deep love for the art of filmmaking and boasts of an ensemble cast.

Many hours would be spent looking through the cinematic cuts of exposition that enriches the story. Players will struggle to walk across rugged terrains, carry an increasing amount of weight, and maintain balance. It has been accused of being nothing more than a walking simulator, which is not hard to see.

But as you move further and connect people further with the hope of a better future, you realize the design of the world, the clutter-less feel of it, the soundtracks utilized, and even the asynchronous multiplayer, all of which are done so intentionally.

As Brian Tallerico wrote:

"Kojima’s made a game that feels like it’s about isolation at first but it’s really about how games and social networks unite us more than they divide us. Each chapter feels like it connects you to more players, so as the story's world opens so does the inter-connectivity of the experience."

He added:

"It's a brilliant way to replicate the game's themes within its gameplay—connecting you to other players as the world within the game becomes more connected too."

Isolated and afraid of the unseen, the player gets to immerse themselves in a similar reality. Contending that the game is about "connecting the world." However, Kojima pushes the boundaries of the medium to bring in a cultural product that uncannily anticipates our present reality. The threat of the next extinction event will erase humanity and the game's eventual delay of that eventuality.

The final speech of the newly elected president of the UCA at the end of Death Stranding reflects Kojima’s portrayal of a politically charged America. But that doesn't stop there.

It tries to further the belief that we are all connected in our struggles forward, that we can make bridges even in isolation and misery, that the burden of building the world falls on us to shed the shackles of our past to mold a new future.

The quest for connections falls into the hands of one who is deeply afraid of any touch. In the end, we can all relate when Deadman finally hugs Sam.

Edited by Yasho Amonkar