The Amazonification of Everything, Now as a Video Game
Amazon delivery can be tough, unglamorous work. Workers must often reckon with complicated geography, demanding bosses, ever more biblical weather, and schedules that force time-conscious drivers to urinate in bottles. Surprising, then, that this is effectively the role in which one of the year’s most anticipated video games casts the player. In Death Stranding 2, you arrange packages into swaying towers on your back, nudge the controller’s left- and right-shoulder buttons to keep your weight balanced as you trip down rocky hills, and incur financial penalties for scuffing the merchandise if you take a tumble. The premise is a long trek from the super-soldier games, such as Call of Duty and Helldivers, that dominate the sales charts—even if you must occasionally battle the odd spectral marauder from a parallel dimension to clear the way to the next address on your delivery sheet.
In the game, written and directed by Hideo Kojima, one of the medium’s few household-name directors, you play as Sam Porter Bridges, a dour, unsmiling courier, whose voice and likeness were provided by the Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus. In the game’s rugged vision of the future, much of human civilization and its infrastructure have been destroyed; society has collapsed into isolated pockets, connected only by the delivery people who haul essentials between them, and connect them to the game’s fictional version of the internet. You play, in essence, a cross between a haunted Amazon deliveryman and a telecoms engineer.
These are not vocations well suited to big-screen trailers (although the game’s publisher, Sony, has carefully edited together an action-sequence trailer showing in movie theaters), but they do provide an eccentric, yet effective premise through which Kojima explores two intertwined anxieties shaping our current moment: the creeping erosion of human intimacy by digital substitutes, and our growing unease about building technologies that might render our own roles obsolete. Kojima, beneath the idiosyncratic approach to storytelling and the distracting Hollywood cameos (Reedus is one of more than a dozen familiar faces in the game, drawn from Kojima’s deep pool of celebrity acquaintances), is inviting players to consider how technology can quietly alienate us—not simply from one another, but from our physical selves, grounding the game’s sprawling oddness in timely concerns that extend beyond our screens.
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Released at the end of 2019, the first Death Stranding arrived at a painfully opportune moment. Though the game might have seemed niche, the pandemic worked in its favor. When the world locked its doors, this weird, lavish video game about delivering headache pills, vitamin supplements, first-aid kits, and cuddly toys to isolated communities felt searingly urgent. (More than 19 million people have played the game since its release, according to Kojima.)
This sequel emerges in a different moment, when anxieties around our simultaneous reliance on, and unease with, digital connectivity and computing power are at a crescendo. These are Kojima and his team’s chosen themes. Now that remote working has become normalized and loneliness rates surge despite constant digital interaction, most question whether our social apps and productivity tools genuinely bring us closer, or merely accelerate a hollowing-out of communities. Simultaneously, advances in AI and automation invite uncomfortable questions about who will be displaced by these new technologies.
In this sequel, you make your first deliveries on foot, using ladders to bridge rivers and climbing gear to rappel down mountains as you slog across rugged Mexico. When you arrive at your destination, you’re typically greeted by a hologram version of its residents, who speak to you as if through a digital doorbell, not so different from the Ring cameras that postal workers interact with today. Once you’ve made a connection, you’re given additional errands by these residents, with whom you interact via a kind of social-media platform that allows you to frantically dispense likes by mashing a button on your controller.
Whenever you bring a settlement onto the figurative network, that region comes online in real terms as well: roads, electric-vehicle charging points, and other useful features that have been installed by other Death Stranding 2 players begin to appear in your own game, saving you from having to spend time and resources building them yourself. You, too, can contribute materials to improve or repair these structures when they break down. In this way, the game provides a convincing metaphor for the benefits of living in an interconnected society; you profit from the efforts and inputs of others, and enjoy the satisfaction of making your own contributions to the shared world.
Bridges eventually relocates to Australia and begins the work of connecting a new continent, gaining access to off-road vehicles, zip lines, and monorails—equipment that hastens the task of making deliveries across precarious terrains, increasing the number of packages and materials you can move around the game world in ways that mimic the Amazonification of society. It’s a compelling gameplay loop, designed to leave us feeling conflicted. Bridges slowly builds himself out of a job by assembling the tools and systems that will ultimately replace him.
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These mechanical advances evolve into an extended metaphor for modern life’s digital paradox. Death Stranding 2 emphasizes how technology, though ostensibly uniting us, often strips interactions of humanity. The game’s narrative eventually shows the player how digital systems can be co-opted for political purposes by the companies that run them, and how the spectral frisson of virtual likes and online exchanges can, in time, flatten us. “Communicating with someone via hologram is no substitute for being able to reach out and touch” them, one character remarks, late in the game. In this way, Death Stranding 2, a digital artifact that encourages remote cooperation among strangers, argues that a life lived virtually is no replacement for physicality.
The game is preoccupied with this idea. On his delivery routes, Bridges drinks from a flask to keep hydrated, and catches and eats bugs when peckish. A dedicated on-screen gauge even provides a readout of his urine levels. Then, at the end of each day, Bridges returns to his private quarters, relieves himself, and showers the dust and blood from his body. We are physical beings, the game emphasizes in these moments, who defecate and eat, who need sleep and water. We are used to viewing video-game protagonists as tireless ciphers. Bridges, by contrast, will become sunburned if he stays too long at work.
Yet Kojima is also concerned with the more spiritual elements of humanity. Early in the game, Bridges suffers an emotional loss that distorts reality as the game continues, shadowing him with hallucinations and night terrors. Wounding a character in such a blunt way could, in the hand of a middling fiction writer, feel like a cheap lunge at profundity. But the depiction lands with the weight of lived experience.
Kojima has spoken recently about his own childhood experience with grief. A collaboration with Prada in Tokyo, celebrating the director’s work, includes the footage and transcript of a recorded conversation between Kojima and the Danish film director Nicolas Winding Refn (another cameo in Death Stranding 2). Kojima tells Refn that, when he was a child, his father died suddenly soon after he’d returned home from work. Kojima was 13 at the time. He accompanied his father in the ambulance: “His eyes were open,” Kojima recalls, “but he could not talk because his body was shaking. I think he was trying to tell me something, but I did not know what he wanted to say. After that, I did not have a father.”
In the game, although the presence of other players is suggested through shared items and social-media likes, Bridges ultimately travels alone, echoing Kojima’s lasting uncertainty about what remains unsaid between even the closest people, whether still alive or lost to death. By the end, Death Stranding 2 feels less like a rebuke of digital life and more like a poignant appeal for balance. Kojima doesn’t merely caution against our digital reliance; he reminds us of the tactile truths we risk leaving behind—of what it feels like to soothe a crying child; to shoulder physical burdens; to exist in the immediate, tangible moment, without a hungry eye on a smartphone screen. The game underscores that the physical bonds we share with one another are easily obscured by the convenient illusions of digital connection, yet still remain our most meaningful refuge in a transient world and a momentary existence.