"Stick vs. Rope. Gun vs. Strand." : The Monomyth and the Hero as Warrior in Kojima Productions' 2019 Video Game Death Stranding

Abstract: Released in 2019, the video game Death Stranding follows the monomythic structure described by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The journey begins with the protagonist, Sam “Porter” Bridges, reluctantly accepting his calls to adventure, and, as he begins to move west, he receives supernatural aid from an increasing number of helpers he encounters along the way. Crossing the thresh-old, into the world of danger and adventure, has him meeting the threshold guardian Higgs, the primary antagonist of the game. During this first stage, the player of the game learns how to control Sam’s movements and how to navigate this world to-gether with the Bridge Baby known as Lou, who helps Sam on his journey. The second stage of the journey has Sam moving through a road of trials, overcoming both the physical obstacles of the terrain and the emotional obstacles of the people he helps along the way. He is at one point tempted to adopt the Bridge Baby Lou, his primary helper, but resists said temptation and continues on his jour-ney, until he is finally reunited with his sister, Amelie, who is threatening to end hu-manity in an extinction event. The lessons he has learnt on his journey – to focus on helping others and only using violence when the situation calls for it – leads him to his apotheosis, which is the realization of the value of other people and the relation-ships between them. With this realization, and Sam’s physical manifestation of it in his embracing of Amelie, convinces her that humanity deserves to live to die another day, and so the world is saved from falling into ruin. The third stage of Sam’s journey has him struggling to return home, aided at long last by the help of the friends he made on his journey. Sam, however, is uninter-ested in the world he helped save, and aims to return to his life of solitude. Upon his atonement with his father, however, he resolves this internal conflict and he is now free to live life as he wishes – as a father to the now freed baby Lou. The use of game mechanics in Death Stranding ultimately provides the player with alternatives to violence, giving way to a narrative that can contain as-pects of the monomythic hero that are not exclusively related to the typical warrior hero seen in most action games. Instead, the game frames the tools of the warrior as the stepping-stone to the hero as lover, who uses more peaceful means to achieve their goals. This exemplifies the potential of the video game medium as a platform for the monomyth, and how games could come to encompass a wider variety of he-roic figures than those currently available.