 Delivering others from isolation is a strangely mundane endeavor. As we travel through the remnants of a civilization lost, we marvel at the beauty of Mother Nature, all while ruining the arduous, burdensome, and monotonous task of delivering packages across America. Fortunately, others are playing that stranding when we are. They live in an alternate timeline. Resources gathered, roads built, structures assembled, all of these can be left for others, making their journey a little less taxing, a little less Sisyphean. We are alone, but alone together, isolated physically, but suffering mutually. This was the explicit intent of the lead designer of Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima, who wanted to craft a game that would force us to re-examine what connection means in a world admired by technology, and to do away with the violence endemic across all media. Isolation, frustration, melancholy contemplation, these were all emotions used to make people grateful for one another, however asynchronous it might be. By setting the game in wide open space, Kojima gave room for the idea that it is nature, not technology, that can get us to find each other once again. We forget how meaningful a single life is, but in Death Stranding, it takes time to travel to other people, and a single death is an absolute catastrophe. The context surrounding the production of the game seemed to influence its themes as well. Being left out to drive by Konami after Metal Gear Solid 5, Sony and Gorilla Games intervened to grant Hideo Kojima the funding and technology to realize Death Stranding. Kojima has spoken about how this incident influenced the design of the game, but how the serendipity of human compassion delivered him from being stranded. It was in the ties he forged over the years that called out to him when he needed it the most, and this was reflected in Death Stranding's themes. A game that, although controversial, is undeniably a game only Hideo Kojima could make. Kojima himself couldn't classify the game as he was making it, referring to his game as being part of a new genre, the Stranding genre. But strangely enough, Death Stranding is not the first of its kind. Journey, a game about the symbolic hero's journey of mythological fame, was also about connection, about using isolation to incentivize communication. The lead designer, Jenova Chen, spoke about how the game was inspired by those serene moments one has in an MMO when they encounter another being. As you venture through its desert landscape, hints of a civilization that once was lay embedded in the world, but one of the greatest joys in the game comes from encountering another being. However, during the development of the game, Jenova and his team discovered some interesting paradoxes about human interaction that forced them to change some of the design decisions in the game. If you allow people to attack each other, they will. People are effectively children in new digital universes, so to incentivize love, they removed any violent verbs. If you force people to cooperate and complete tasks together, they begin to instrumentalize each other, viewing them as a resource to be exploited, or someone incompetent to carry. Finally, if people are put into groups, strange group dynamics start to manifest. Jealousy and exclusion find a new genesis. To avoid these pitfalls, the game is set in an isolated context to get people to revel in the presence of others, and only sequenced in one other player at a time to prevent perverse group dynamics. Also, people were under no obligation to work together. Comradery was always optional. By removing our ability to attack others or forcing people to work together, the choice to be with another is just that, a choice. However, your ability is also improved in the presence of others, incentivizing staying together nonetheless. We choose to be with others on our journey to the peak, and the game was made that much more memorable because of it. Loneliness is not the same thing as isolation. We can be amidst thousands of people, and most of us are, yet feel utterly alone. This was the thesis of Sherry Turkle's book, Alone Together, which aimed to show us the potential liabilities of technology and how it can affect human interactions. She says, We expect more and more from technology, but less and less from each other. We are outsourcing the very essentials of human interaction to machines. It started with computers. They provided us a substitute plaything that seemed to have agency. But now with social media, smartphones, and a fully connected web, we have transformed the way we think about both machines and people. Turkle's interests lie with figuring out not what computers can do for us, but what they do to us. We all know this intuitively. We are perpetually wedded to our phones, annoyed by the forced pleasantries of human conversation. We keep in touch with more and more people, but these relationships become more abstract. We are dealing with names on a screen. We then placate our growing anxiety by seeking validation on social media, looking for clicks, likes, approval. But it is a losing game. We are on a hedonic treadmill that we can never get off. We manufacture personas for new digital universes, but that's all they are, fictions. She continues, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships, but use it to protect ourselves from intimacy simultaneously. We are all connected, but simultaneously disconnected, amongst others constantly, but lonely all the same. Technology does not determine us, but we must be wary of its effects. The internet grants us new opportunities for networking, but it also has its liabilities. Games, as a reflexive aesthetic technology, may be the medium we need to examine ourselves in relation to machines. They live on the bridge between two worlds. Another game in this lineage are the Souls Games. They are every bit as isolating as death stranding and journey, but they add in horror, death, and misery on top of it. The game reinforces its somber worlds of perpetual death with challenges that can seem insurmountable, that is, until you summon other people to join you in jolly cooperation. People are seemingly always on standby to lend a hand, if they aren't dying in their own world, leaving go-see apparitions in yours, and suddenly the horrors you face don't seem quite as bad. This mechanic first appeared in Demon Souls, a game far ahead of its time. To show you how even when you are suffering, there are others feeling the same and, moreover, willing to aid you in alleviating this. This was also the intent of Hidataka Miyazaki, the lead designer of the Souls series, who was inspired by certain observations in his life when crafting this mechanic. In an interview with Eurogamer, Miyazaki explains the origins of the multiplayer systems in his games. He states, the origin of that idea is actually due to a personal experience where a car suddenly stopped on a hillside after some heavy snow and started to slip. The car following me also got stuck, and then the one behind it spontaneously bumped into it and started pushing it up the hill. That's it, that's how everyone can get home. Then it was my turn and everyone started pushing my car up the hill, and I managed to get home safely. He continues, but I couldn't stop the car to say thanks to the people who gave me a shove. I'd have just got stuck again if I stopped. On the way back home, I wondered whether the last person in the line had made it home and thought that I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we'd meet in another place, we'd become friends, or maybe we'd just fight. You could probably call it a connection of mutual assistance between transient people. Oddly, that incident will probably linger in my heart for a long time, simply because it's fleeting. I think it stays with you a lot longer. And so in a game about isolation, decay, and death, we have community, camaraderie, and hope, a recognition that even when we are alone, we are alone together in suffering. When Jane McGonigal says reality is broken, she also asserts that games can clue us into what is missing in the real world, because they meet needs the real world isn't providing us. However, in this comes the allure of escapism, of retreat. Modern civilization has thrust us upon us, loneliness, isolation, depression, disconnection. In Never Alone, a game devised to tell the stories of an indigenous tribe called Inupiat, we are allowed to peer into a new type of reality, a consciousness people of the same species shared, but is far removed from our everyday. We play a little girl who travels to save her village from a blizzard, but she is not alone in her journey. Never Alone, because the Inupiat are connected with each other, with their animals, with their ancestry. They're bound to life as much as it is bound to them. We see this in mechanical form, your spirit animal guides you, your ancestors emerge to aid you, it is a new epistemology to witness reality with. Ironic then, that these stories are being preserved now with technology. Indigenous people show us the importance of living amongst the community, of integrating our life into a program of social service, of living harmoniously with mother nature. They present the idea that our conception of ourselves should not be seen in isolation, but as part of a fabric that binds us all into a web of life. All of the games in this lineage are about cycles of decay, but also rebirth and redemption. We are connected to other people's struggle across not just space, but time. Time is expressed differently by different people, though. Miyazaki thought by showing the ephemeral beauty of connection, we could appreciate others. And Jenova Chen proclaimed that we are only alive for a short time, so we should find a way to make each other's lives a little better. By using isolation, these games highlight the value of others. By making people helpful to our cause, we rediscover collaboration. By making union voluntary, we choose to be with one another. And by connecting us in mutual struggle, we transcend the instrumentalization of technology and can reconsider why we play together. These games don't provide a solution to loneliness, no game can. They just challenge us to re-examine why we play, how technology is affecting us, and what we can do to use it positively. With technology, we are cast into a new world of lonely reverie. But if we recognize our mutual condition, our mutual suffering, perhaps there lies the seeds of a revolution. A revolution that starts with the recognition that we are all alone together.