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Researcher and theorist Lukáš Likavčan and Digital Earth creative producer Leonardo Dellanoce talk about Hideo Kojima’s latest game sensation Death Stranding, climate change, global crisis and how pop culture can shape our future. Exploring the game as an artwork the pair dives into haunted landscapes shaped by the sixth mass extinction, asking how human kinship will help us survive.

Leonardo Dellanoce In November 2019, Sony and Kojima Productions released one of the most awaited, mysterious and immediately iconic games of recent times, Death Stranding. Since the first promotional materials and rumours had begun circulating, it had been clear that Death Stranding was a different kind of video game: something to do with packages, the end of the world, Guillermo del Toro, rain and fetuses in jars. The fact that it was being created by Hideo Kojima, one of the few star directors in a $152 billion industry, only added to the hype and expectations of an already star-studded game, featuring actors and movie directors including Mads Mikkelsen, Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, Nicolas Winding Refn and del Toro.

The game is one of the few examples of a single director’s artistic vision scaled up to a triple-A product – quite an anomaly for the industry. Kojima took all his artistic independence and reputation to create a world in which you are literally a delivery guy, Sam “Porter” Bridges, solitarily cruising a post-disaster landscape haunted by spectres of extinction and single-handedly reconnecting US cities by delivering supply packages and plugging the cities to a fictional “internet” network.

While on this journey, the protagonist meets a number of peculiar characters, including Heartman, played by Nicolas Winding Refn. Heartman could be seen as a twist on the classic “mad scientist” figure; he self-induces temporary cardiac arrests every 21 minutes so he can investigate the world in between life and death. At the same time, he is the vehicle through which Kojima works out the planetary-scaled events of the Death Stranding world, creating a “parascientific” framework that directly connects to our reality. Heartman – together with a small network of other experts – is studying the “Death Stranding”, a mysterious and catastrophic event that took place before the events represented in the game and which has caused the worlds of life and death to connect. Humans are still grappling with the aftermath of this event, which provides the backdrop to the game’s main storyline.

In terms of storytelling, the game’s narrative about the Death Stranding is convincingly linked to the longer line of mass extinctions that the Earth has witnessed during its 4.6 billion years of existence. You are racing against the extinction of humankind, with the disastrous traces of the unfolding sixth mass extinction everywhere and the looming presence of the Last Stranding, imagined as the tipping point of the extinction. This scenario does not seem to be too dissimilar to our current predicament, given the climate emergency, the evidence of past extinction events and the ongoing one.

Lukáš Likavčan Yes, it is Heartman who formulates the evidence for past extinctions when he says that – literally – “the Earth has a long memory,” and that “its strata tell a story, one which goes to the very beginning” of life on Earth; he continues: “the past informs the present and aids us in building the future.” What we have here is a long memory of the Earth hidden in its geological layers, telling us the story not just of what happened, but also how we can potentially survive our own predicament. There’s actually a long tradition of thinking about deep, geological time, to which Heartman is referring. This includes different philosophical notions of temporality, which are not exactly centred around our human perception of time or history. One of them is Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of “ancestrality”, which points towards the time preceding the emergence of the human mind. Beyond human history, constructed through the prism of culture, politics, society, et cetera, there is a sort of absolute, external history, one that moves at the pace of tectonic plates. This slow, long history, is exactly what is recorded in the geological memory of the Earth.

This also leads to the discussions of how we can access the memory of the Earth through digital-media technologies. Digital media can bear witness to events beyond the scale of our perception and sense of time, making tangible a new layer of planetary sensorium. What starts with global satellite systems and weather-sensor networks ends with ubiquitous computation preparing the ground for the emergence of new cultural genres – such as video games – that help us forge bonds with the “Planetary”: the inhuman realm of the metabolic processes and torrential force fields that our planet essentially is. These genres can also aid in understanding the ancestral past, preceding our individual or collective species history. In the game, the past bubbles up through the medium of “tar”, which sounds like Kojima’s allusion to fossil fuels – the past made liquid. From the tar, monsters emerge with animal and human forms, extinct creatures that were once alive. This omnipresence of spectres reminds me of some other aspects of Meillassoux’s work, highlighted recently also by Ben Woodard, in which spectres are defined as those who passed away, but were not properly mourned. The appearance of the ghost constantly reminds us of some unfulfilled work of mourning, the mourning to be done. In relation to the sixth mass extinction – both as a real-world event and as the context of the game’s narrative – we can then think of how to envision collective mourning of the spectres of all the extinct species, as a sort of reckoning with the haunting possibility of the “Spectral Earth”: the planet as predominantly populated by ghosts.

This is one of five models I envision in my recent book Introduction to Comparative Planetology (Strelka Press, 2019), and it brings a peculiar political and design strategy: being able to navigate our interventions on the surface of the Earth with this constant thinking about all the extinctions that happened and all those that can potentially happen, exactly in order to prevent them. Such an approach produces its own kinds of visual cultures: Death Stranding is the case for the 21st century, but this approach was here in the past, too. When scientists in the 19th century became acutely aware what fossils meant – traces of past extinction in many cases – they speculated about the future extinction of humankind. Take the example of Henri De la Beche’s “Professor Ichtyosaurus”, who educates his lizard companions in the cartoon Awful Changes from 1830 about the unfortunate destiny of Homo sapiens.

LD This spectrality you refer to in your book is reinforced on the game’s graphic level. Kojima naturally draws from Japanese culture, but also from ancient Egyptian visions of death: the Ka or soul and the Ha or body and how the properly mourned body, through mummification for instance, allowed the soul to reach the afterlife and interact with the afterworld’s other entities. The ghosts you encounter in the game are like souls that have become tied to the landscapes, and despite their malign presence, they are actually meant to be liberated. What is fascinating about the game in this respect, especially coming out in 2019 (and considering how we started 2020), is that it makes visible the loss intimately related to extinction in a very direct and honest way. This is cleverly done by situating you as a player in a haunted landscape, where nothing is really present, but the absence of the dead is visualised in these “liquid ghosts”.

LL The ghosts almost seem to be mediators between the Planetary – the realm of inhuman, impersonal forces and metabolic torrents – and the individual. The haunting that happens in the game is not there just to scare the shit out of you, it also bears information about the positioning of your individual human existence within this giant mesh of planetary flows and forces. Instead of beings ruling the landscape, we are exposed in the spirit of Nietzsche’s philosophy as the “most unfortunate, most delicate and most transitory beings”. The ghost is then a necessary navigational tool, a companion that can guide you through a precarious landscape.

Thinking about the climate emergency and present as well as possible future pandemics, this is a type of landscape we all inhabit now by default. I cannot help but once again refer to Meillassoux here, and his wonderful argument for treating contingency as the only thing we can know about reality with certainty. What is ingenious about Kojima’s approach is how he lets us experience the Planetary from the sofa in our living rooms. He was able to articulate the contingencies and complexities of our epoch in a tangible way, without reducing them. You can feel and touch the urgency.

LD Even Kojima Production’s motto – “from sapiens to ludens” – relates to these productive transitions between knowledge and play. The game makes extinction very sensorial, but without aestheticising it – which is the trap of, for instance, so many post-apocalyptic movies. Of course, the outbreak of Covid-19 is an acute experience of the Planetary, but it is just a matter of degrees of separation to align it to issues like air pollution causing child asthma or heat waves, forest fires and floods causing people to leave their homes.

LL All these disasters sit on a spectrum of slow violence, as [the academic] Rob Nixon would say. And in all these cases, they are confronted not through exercising some privilege or mastery over planetary processes, but on the contrary opting for retreat: retreat as social distancing, but also retreat as the de-intensification of, say, pollution-heavy industry.

LD The aspect of retreat is a relevant one. For us today, experiencing a global pandemic in our lifetime, retreat has become very personal and sudden, being either forced by governmental rulings or withdrawing by choice to safeguard our health. Retreating is also a common trope in much apocalyptic imagery with preppers’ shelters and so forth, imagery that used to be far from our lives, but which we now experience daily. Empty streets, empty supermarket shelves, masks – the list goes on. All of a sudden most of the population, especially urban, lives in an antagonistic context: the subway is to be avoided, sidewalks and entrances might be too narrow to keep the 1.5-metre distance. The density of population becomes a direct biothreat.

As cities become precarious landscapes for the majority, the people who keep these urban systems running, grocery-shop workers, infrastructure technicians, delivery riders, and so on, find themselves not only in direct danger, but also navigating these new landscapes in a way conditioned by the fact that the virus is an invisible threat – to the human eye that is, but not to the technological one. The navigation and survival of precarious landscapes is also the big challenge posed by the game – let’s not forget that the protagonist is a delivery guy saving the world. The question you are always confronted with when playing is how you can cross a haunted landscape that is perceivable only thanks to the help of specific technology – you are equipped with a system of sensors: a BB, a still-born child with a special capacity to detect dead entities, and a scanner called Odradek that enhances BB’s capacities. These two experiences, one of the Covid-19 city, the other of the game, are not only similar, but also very relatable as they happen on a similar experiential scale. Zooming out to the planet, we again encounter similar problems, maybe invisible to our senses, maybe too slow to be detected without technological aid, yet extremely urgent, like the climate crisis. This then brings out some bigger questions, such as: how do we navigate planetary events like extinctions, both communally and individually?

LL How do you avoid the ghosts? You camouflage, you hide, just like in a stealth game, which is actually the genre that Kojima helped bring to life with the Metal Gear series. Now, consider the “dark forest” metaphor from the second part of Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Imagine a forest full of living organisms, who are nevertheless hiding as much as possible because any exposure increases the risk of being killed by a predator. The forest is teeming with complex life, but it evades easy detection. Going back to Spectral Earth, this figure of the planet lets us imagine the Earth as a dark forest. To navigate this hostile territory means to discreetly follow different traces. A hot summer turns arable land dry, exposing the erosion of the soil. Ocean acidification leads to an explosion in the population of jellyfish. These are indexes or naturally occurring diagrams of the climate emergency. Reading these signs complements the existing strategies of reading planetary changes through computational models. After all, every model is informed by some field research. A climate scientist may need to go to the Arctic to get some samples of ice cores, hiding tiny bubbles of the air from the past, and these are also traces of planetary changes. Just as the tar in the game bubbles up, so the past bubbles up in these air bubbles.

LD Don’t you think it’s fascinating that such a young medium as video games has become an entry point to discussions that are important to the present moment and the decades to come? Kojima offers us a playable world on which to build new vocabulary to talk about real urgencies, not necessarily through linguistic means, but by sounds and visuality, crafting the planetary sensorium you’ve also been talking about.

LL Science fiction becomes the main narrative device to talk about present realities. Perhaps after 2020, science fiction will no longer be possible. Take the example of Kim Stanley Robinson writing about the second half of the 22nd century: he is writing about our future. He simply extends the already present historical trajectories into the future, which is a very realist thing to do. It is about foresight and potentially also about planning; it is not a whim of the imagination, but speculation as a grounded iteration of existing trends, limits and historical trajectories. Even those more surrealist sci-fi texts like Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy gain unexpected relevance: his Area X is a metaphor of the opaque planetary reality, sometimes spectral and sometimes chthonic, but definitely indifferent towards our fate.

LD Yes, since I’m from northern Italy – one of the first areas to be heavily affected by coronavirus in Europe – it reminds me of this recent video of the army truck convoy in Bergamo, carrying corpses of Covid-19 victims. It honestly looks like something from an apocalyptic cyberpunk future; it’s something that belongs to the world of Children of Men, not to our present. In this emergency situation, the bodies of the deceased need to be transported to the incinerator without keens, funeral or any last act of mourning by the families to avoid further contagion in a fully locked-down city. With coronavirus, what we would have called a dystopic future in December 2019 is everyday life in April 2020.

LL And we learn these insights through the medium of a video game, a medium that until recently has been considered mere entertainment or a means of distraction. Suddenly, it educates us about how to live the new normal. The game works as a vehicle for building a vocabulary liberated from the anachronisms of postmodernism, Cold War dichotomies and trivial gestures, such as certain famous philosophers making analogies between Covid-19 and 9/11. Of course, as Heartman says, the past informs the present and helps us to cope with the future. But the past informing the present doesn’t mean the future looks like the past. We are living in a situation that is not the state of exception – which is the conclusion Giorgio Agamben keeps repeating – but rather the new normal. And if that is the case, our vocabulary has to be dramatically updated. It seems, unfortunately, that this will not happen through theoretical invention itself. An additional medium is needed. Gaming, and visual cultures in general, constitute a vital ground in which new vocabularies can grow. They create this cosmic background, these reservoirs of imagination that can be globally distributed through contemporary computational technologies. We need this cultural background to make these new theories happen.