Sins of the Father

Playing Mom in Death Stranding

When I played Death Stranding in 2019, I played for nearly ten hours before I even saw an enemy NPC. When you finally do, you see they look just like you, wearing the same gender-neutral jumpsuits—and you pretty much just run away and try not to trip. Like in Kojima’s previous games, you can choose to kill enemy NPCs, but this doesn’t just cause you to lose points. Death Stranding goes beyond disincentivizing killing—the game barely provides the mechanics to do so and penalizes flagrant video game killing with both a fail state and a permanent crater-sized pockmark in the otherwise gorgeously designed open world. My mom would like the game. I love it. Continue Reading

“We Must Be Better”

Hegemonic Masculinity and Dadification in God of War (2018)

In an interview with Polygon, Cory Barlog, director of God of War (Sony Santa Monica 2018; hereafter GoW4), notes that the studio’s explicit goal is to address the underlying social implications of the franchise in order to “pull [Kratos] back from the brink” and make him “whole” (Plante, pars. 8 and 9). The interview’s headline says it all: “God of War’s director on toxic masculinity and why Kratos had to change.” Barlog attributes this impulse to redeem Kratos to his own experiences with fatherhood and a desire to prevent the continued dominance of problematic notions of masculinity: “This lesson that I hoped to pass on to [my son]: that the concepts of strength and emotional vulnerability and the ability to sort of be free to feel the range of emotions, that these are not two warring or diametrically opposed concepts” (qtd. in Plante, par. 7). Continue Reading