Trudging as Environmental Mourning in the Sixth Great Extinction of Death Stranding

Abstract

In Hideo Kojima's game Death Stranding, the unavoidable, literal entanglement of human beings and the nonhuman natural world situates players in the shared trauma of environmental loss. The game's core mechanic of difficult land traversal facilitates an opportunity for extended meditation on this loss, but positions the environment as an antagonistic force, in tension with its status as victim. Further complicating this is the game's uncritical engagement with the postapocalyptic resource of chiralium—an analog for fossil fuels. The player's chief goal of connecting isolated cites to the Chiral Network seems counterproductive to the grief embedded in the nation's bereft landscapes, but players are powerless to refuse—other than to cease playing altogether. Using lenses of eco-trauma and environmental grief, this paper interprets Death Stranding as an unheeded environmental wake-up call that potentially enacts a collective ecological mourning as the very real Sixth Great Extinction looms.