Not to be a Hideo Kojima hater on mainagain, but I despise the way he executes his kooky ideas. This is particularly upsetting to me because I like his games on paper. I love absurdity, I love dense texts that comment on contemporary issues, and I especially love video games that use the medium in unique ways to create that commentary.
Death Stranding, in theory, should be my favourite game. It’s unabashedly weird and physicalises its themes of connection by quite literally creating connections through landscapes and ‘Strands’ with other players. Butplaying it makes me want to smash my face into a wall just so I can feel anything other than boredom and frustration.
Kojima’s Ideas Are Wild
That said, I do love the wild concepts he throws out seemingly willy nilly. Case in point:on a recent episode of his radio show, KOJI10, Kojima shared some ideas he’s had about games that revolve around time.
One is a ‘forgetting game’, where the protagonist forgets information and abilities if you take a break from the game. They might forget how to use a gun. They might forget their job. They might even, god forbid, forget how to move their limbs entirely. Kojima jokes that players would have to carve a week of completely free time just to play it.
Another is a game in which you start as a baby and age over the course of the game into an old man, with all the accompanying debuffs that come with age – bad eyesight, running slower, all that jazz. One last idea was that you create something that takes time to mature, like wine or cheese.
Many have already responded to these ideas with something akin to ‘this is just real life’. We already forget how to play games when we take time away from them – as someone with truly abysmal powers of recollection, taking a week off playing a game is enough for me to need to click into the controls menu to refresh my memory. Likewise, as someone who’s noticed definite signs of aging (hangovers now last three days instead of one, and I have strange, inexplicable nagging pains and clicking in my joints), a game that physicalises aging feels very close to home.
The Industry Needs Silly Ideas
These games would likely be hell to play. When Kojima says that nobody would buy these games, he’s wrong – a lot of people like his gamesbecausethey’re hell to play. I am not one of those people, but as I said earlier, I respect Kojima’s ideas more than his actual creations.
At this point in video gaming, a lot of big titles follow predictable formulas. They might try to mash genres together or integrate popular, interesting mechanics, but by and large, big-budget games stick to what’s already established to be safe bets, lest all the money pumped into development go down the drain. There’s very little innovation to be found in the space, and whatisinnovated gets locked away from everyone else through patents, likeMonolith’s Nemesis system.
So you kind ofhaveto respect the audacity of a guy who wants to make video games do things that they never have before – even if those games would be frustrating and inconvenient to actually sit down and play. Without developers who dream up ridiculous ideas that absolutely wouldn’t be fun in real life, we’re doomed to playing the same games, reskinned ad infinitum. If Kojima decides to make his getting old simulator, I fully support that.Somebody’sgotta try something new, damn it. But I absolutely will not be playing it.
