Death Stranding and the real life Covid-19

In Death Stranding, you are Sam "Porter" Bridges, a lone delivery guy who uses every possible means to deliver essential goods to the people who need them. Threats both tangible and invisible (Beached Thing, MULE) loitering around, preventing the people from stepping out of their shelters, and only "shippers" like Sam dare to step out onto the road.

The image of America that Death Stranding describes is very strange at the time the game was released. It was an empty, quiet and quiet America, separated by electric fences and patrols. Sam's customers never met him face-to-face, they only took delivery on conveyor belts, and thanked him with the pale green hologram. After finishing the delivery, Sam left again to continue driving through new lands, still strangely empty and deadly.

Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding tells a murky story about the post-apocalyptic world, where people are forced to stay indoors and avoid communicating with outsiders out of fear of outside threats. The game is designed to make gamers feel lonely, isolated from others because of a danger in the past, although you are wearing the burden of connecting the fragments of human civilization together.

Both the world and Sam are not real, but the images in the game that Hideo Kojima created suddenly became very real in the past few months.

Because of the COVID-19 epidemic and the worldwide trend of social isolation/self-isolation, I cannot avoid comparing Death Stranding's America to real life America. You can see the disturbance in everyday life due to the disease through information from abroad. Many countries areolate themselves and encourage people to stay home and avoid the streets to minimize the risk of disease.

In countries where COVID-19 caused serious effects, restaurants, schools, streets and places of interest and other public places all become deserted, people are restricted to going out and relying on a shipper (like Sam Bridges) to satisfy his food and cargo needs. Like Sam Bridges, those deliveries people are at great risk of completing their tasks, except that they do not face Timefall (rain of time) or Beached Thing (an enemy in Death Stranding).

Another similarity between COVID-19 and Death Stranding is the costly life we ​​have to pay. In Death Stranding, civilization only exists in big cities while small towns and villages are completely destroyed and become deserted, while a small number of people withdraw to shelters to hide. In real life, there have been nearly 2.6 million infections and 177,000 deaths worldwide, creeping numbers caused by COVID-19.

Of course, isolation in the real world is far from what Death Stranding represents, but through the examples above, you might have noticed a bit of similarity between the haunting virtual world of Death Stranding and what real life has been over the past months.

Death Stranding is an extreme image of a post-disaster country, when its people struggle to survive without any help, guidance or coordination from the surrounding community. The detachment of individuals from the community creates the loneliness that humans - who live in a society - can hardly endure. Sam Bridges is a victim of this loneliness, expressed through the awkward meetings and interactions between him and other people (although partly because of his fear of touching - Haphephobia).

There are indeed many similarities between the virtual world that Hideo Kojima created with the real life of the early months of 2020, but they also have a fundamental difference: the game shows a maximum isolation status among people in terms of distance and affection, but in real life despite the physical distance, we still keep in touch with each other mentally. The more rigorous the rules are to prevent the spread of disease, the faster we can get together.