Social Stranding

Sometimes I wonder if social media was a mistake.

I say this with my tongue firmly in cheek. Over the years, it’s allowed me to keep up with old friends scattered across the world, sharing pictures and life updates. When Facebook was ascendent, it was a hub where everyone was (for better and worse) that made it so easy to connect with people. Of course, that didn’t last long.

Companies needed to make money, ads made money, and people who spent longer on their sites saw more ads. And making people mad was a great way to make them spend longer on the website (archive link). No longer was it a social network about connecting people, it had become a means of getting media to the masses and ideally media that enraged you. The old adage “don’t feed the trolls” was completely forgotten. Being a troll was how you got attention — being a troll was how you got elected to the American presidency.

And of course that all filters down. Everything is about getting a reaction now. We’re not here to just talk about that new movie or tv show that came out, your blog post or tweet or Discord message has to have the Hottest of Takes. Talk is cheap. Arguments get clicks. Everything is the YouTube comments section, everything is the Xbox Live game chat. Connecting with people online means exposing yourself to griefing, bad actors, and general misery.

It’s into this awful online landscape that Death Stranding 2 wades. It carries forward its lovely asynchronous multiplayer from the first game where what you build and place to help navigate the environment is shared with other players and vice versa. You can also leave cargo for others to deliver for you or deliver cargo for other players. This is the main (and really, only) way you interact with each other: by collaborating. And if you like what someone has made you can, well, like it, sending them a like and letting the other player that, hey, what they made’s helping someone else.

I love it. It reminds me of why I like the internet, why I like being able to connect with people, why I think that bringing people together might actually be good. Someone I’ll never meet built a zipline that helps me connect a network I’m building, someone else helped me make a road, someone else delivered cargo for me. When I meet someone online here, we’re working together.

This is all by design. Death Stranding makes it so the only interactions possible are positive. There’s no way to directly impede someone else’s game. Sure, you could build a bridge over nothing or a ladder that goes nowhere, or a zipline in a very inconvenient location, but those are just minor blips on the way. And if someone doesn’t like where you put your zipline, the only consequence will be them not liking it — no one’s gonna leave a profane screed berating you and your nearest relations.

The social network of Death Stranding runs counterintuitive to the algorithms that power Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and all the rest. This is one that incentives harmony over conflict. And it turns out that when a platform like this is made, people rise to the occasion. Players don’t have to like another’s structures, and yet it happens. I know full well that all the things that make this game’s community work can’t be applied to a normal social website, where any space to actively communicate with one another invites the opportunity for harm. So I’ll take comfort in this delightful ersatz social network, one that actually makes me happy to see what everyone else is doing.