Homo Ludens is an anthropological essay written in 1938
by the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga,
in which he discusses the importance of the play element in culture and society
and argues that it is a necessary and primary condition
for the emergence of culture in the first place.
Hideo Kojima had stated his fascination with this idea several times in the past,
but with his new title Death Stranding, he intends this school of thought to take wings.
It doesn't only show in neat little nods
like Kojima Productions' new company's mascot being christened Homo Ludens
but even more so in the spiritual direction he takes with the core themes of his game.
In case you've seen it, you might remember how this was already a core thesis
of my last video essay on Death Stranding:
Evolution
From the information we had at that point in time,
I was convinced that Hideo Kojima's plans with his new game were
- even for him - somewhat megalomaniacal:
I argued how his ambition is to... to take evolution... into his own hands
- and not just symbolically.
And Death Stranding is the vessel with which he aims to achieve that.
I highlighted how the titular Homo Ludens mascot is supposed to represent
the literal next level in human evolution.
How with Death Stranding, Kojima doesn't solely intend to break the fourth wall anymore,
but that he wants to shatter it beyond any semblance of repair...
The world we're entering in Death Stranding will not just be
a traditional virtual game space anymore,
unaware of the player's existence in the outside world,
but the bilateral communication and interaction between our world and... theirs
will be one of the central aspects of the experience as a whole.
A parallel universe into which we - the players, the Homo Sapiens
will transcend into and which we are going to permanently influence
with our actions by leaving our individual trails of ... handprints.
Now, when I say evolution, I'm not exclusively referring to
the Darwinian evolution of species through natural selection,
but the evolution of all life, matter and 'existence'
of which Darwinism is only one of the steps in the ladder of the history of the universe.
Homo Ludens is the evolution of Mankind through the means of 'play'
and Death Stranding is supposed to provide the space... the breeding ground... the habitat
for a newly emerged subspecies of Homini - the Homo Ludens.
So much for the central hypothesis of my last video-essay
within this half-hour long video, I've attempted to stitch together all the hints and clues
scattered around by Kojima and his team since the first reveal in June 2016
but no matter how convincing it may have appeared - remember that it's still a theory
and an unproven one at this point
Fast forward one year after the second trailer's reveal
and we finally got another, this time almost 8-minute-long story-trailer
and believe me, for someone who puts their unproven theories
out for everyone to see on the internet, such a reveal is always a little bit scary.
Not that I'd be devastated if one of my theories gets wholly debunked,
but there's always the risk that the revelation of new information
will stomp my conjectures in the ground.
But to my delight, this most recent trailer
- let's call it the "Explosions" trailer from now on -
pretty much right out of the bat, strongly corroborated my ideas
- the notion that evolution on a much grander, a cosmic scale
will be one of the core themes of the story and lore of Death Stranding.
The opening and closing narration by Norman Reedus
in which he mentions four explosions
is a recapitulation of the entire history of existence
by iterating the progression of the four seminal cataclysmic events
that result in one final event:
The Death Stranding Evolution Event
[Norman Reedus: "Once there was an explosion..."]
Okay, I know we're all eager to dig into the fourth and final explosion
mentioned in the trailer
the 'Death Stranding Evolution Event'.
But in order to understand and establish its significance within the evolution of the universe,
our solar system and life on earth...
especially in the context of Death Stranding
- let's be thorough and go through the other 'explosions' first:
Let's play Neil DeGrasse Tyson for a moment.
Our universe is vast.
It contains more stars than all the grains of sand on planet earth combined.
Our universe is also quite old.
It took roughly 13.8 billion years for all matter in the universe
to evolve into the present state.
So.... what does that have to do with the first explosion mentioned in the trailer?
[Norman Reedus: "Once there was an explosion..."]
["... a bang which gave birth to time and space.]
It is referring to, you guessed it, The Big Bang.
If we travel back in time as far as the universe is old
there were no galaxies, no stars, no planets... let alone life as we know it.
13.8 billion years ago, all matter in the universe was comprised
into a fraction of the size it is today
packed so infinitely densely, that nothing, not even light
could escape the enormous gravitational pull.
Our universe was in a state of 'Spacetime Singularity'.
In my first video on Death Stranding, I explained how one of Norman Reedus' dog-tags
showed the equation for the so-called Schwartzschild Radius.
The Schwartzschild-Radius describes the size an object needs to be shrunk to
in order to become a black hole.
To enter a state of spacetime singularity...
Simply put, our universe, 13.8 billion years ago, used to be... a black hole
a seed of a universe.
Let's keep this in mind for now, because this will be important later.
[Norman Reedus: "Once there was an explosion..."]
["... a bang which set a planet spinning in that space."]
The Big Bang was the birth of our universe.
The seed exploded, and its infinitely compressed matter began expanding outward
- ever expanding for hundreds of millions of years -
until its matter slowly began to cool off, form subatomic particles, electrons and atoms
that merged into gigantic clouds of primordial elements.
After about 9 billion years of rapidly expanding molecular clouds,
these elements eventually collapsed under their own gravity
and began spinning concentrically, heating up under the increasing pressure
and aggregating mass at the center...
over time, such an enormous amount of mass, pressure and heat
was condensed so tightly that a nuclear fusion was triggered.
This occurred billions of times in the universe
and such a reaction was also what caused the explosion that gave birth to our sun.
The leftovers of the solar nebula, a disc-shaped cloud of gas and dust particles
kept orbiting the protostar.
And gradually, big chunks of stardust began accreting
and over time their mass and therefore their gravity increased.
These rocky bodies would become the terrestrial planets
Mercury
Venus
Mars
and Earth
Eventually, the sun cooled off and the earth found itself orbiting the sun
within the small circumstellar habitable zone of our solar system,
a distance where it's not too cold for water to be permanently frozen
and not too hot for it to evaporate.
The perfect atmospheric conditions for the generation of carbon based life.
But after its formation, it was still just a lifeless chunk of rock floating through space.
It was still missing the essential building blocks for life as we know it.
What it needed, was one more bang...
[Norman Reedus: "Once there was an explosion..."]
["...a bang which gave rise to life as we know it."]
The third explosion is a bit trickier,
because technically, it could point to more than one event.
How life - or as Norman Reedus deliberately distinguishes it "Life as we know it" -
originated on our planet is a question that people have been pondering for ages.
From religious tales over scientific theories to explanations that border heavily on sci-fi.
One leading hypothesis for the origin of life on earth - is Panspermia.
The idea that life as we know it did not originate on earth itself,
but was delivered from outer space.
Microscopic life forms capable of enduring the hazardous effects of space
- extreme heat, extreme cold and extreme radiation -
trapped in debris that's ejected into space after planets
and small Solar System bodies that harbor life collide.
According to the panspermia-theory,
an asteroid or meteorite harboring pre-biotic organic building blocks of life,
one day - roughly 4 billion years ago -
crashed into the lifeless chunk of rock, metal and water
that planet earth used to be at that point in time.
Due to the its ideal atmospheric conditions
the asteroid's passengers would find a home,
an environment in which they could survive, thrive and begin to multiply.
These proto-life forms were simple, single-cellular organisms,
but they harbored the life-seed to bring about the genesis of sentient life.
DNA.
A thread-like chain of nucleotides, containing the genetic instructions
used in the growth, development, functioning and reproduction
of all known living organisms - the programming language of life.
Whenever these proto-organisms reproduced,
they would copy their genetic information onto its offspring;
but with every copy, tiny translation errors would lead to an altered,
randomly mutated DNA sequence.
It's an evolutionary lottery:
if the altered sequence would bring a physiological advantage for the organism,
it was more likely to survive and procreate than physiologically inferior species.
Natural Selection.
Fueled by the power of DNA combined with lots and lots of time,
it took another 3.5 billion years
until this evolution through natural selection reached a seminal turning point:
The Cambrian Explosion
Until then, evolution produced little more than bacteria, plankton and multi-celled algae
but eventually, around 541 million years ago,
a sudden surge of diversity and variety in life began developing at exponential rates.
In a timespan of 30 million years which scientists call the Cambrian Period,
all major animal body plans, from which all the species prevalent on earth today
eventually evolved, appeared in the fossil record, changing the biosphere forever.
The Cambrian Explosion is one of the major evolutionary events in the history of earth,
without which mankind in its current state would not have come to be.
It is as vital in the cosmic history of mankind
as all the other cataclysmic events described before
The Big Bang
The Birth of the Sun
the Accretion of the Earth
and the Insemination by Panspermia
So in this way, I do believe that both interpretations of "the third explosion"
hold equal merit, as both corresponding events are seminal cornerstones
in the ancestry of human life on planet earth
that can equally be regarded as fountainheads for Darwinian Evolution.
For our analysis, it doesn't even matter which one it is...
what does matter is their allegorical significance for Death Stranding...
because both cases firmly reinforce the notion that the Darwinian evolution of species
is one of the central chapters in Death Stranding's timeline of the evolution of Homo Ludens
a chapter that is about to be closed and put in the past when the final explosion occurs.
[Norman Reedus: "And then came the next explosion..."]
So here we are, with the questions "What is the fourth explosion?" still in the air.
I believe that all the clues necessary to piece this together have already been laid out.
According to Hideo Kojima "Something from another world arrived... stranded in our world"
And to go back to his famous "sticks and ropes" analogy:
"Most of your tools in action games are sticks.
You punch or you shoot or you kick.
The communication is always through these sticks."
"I want people to be connected not through sticks,
but through what would be the equivalent of ropes."
As I pointed out in my previous videos,
Relation is one of the major themes of Death Stranding
the notion that.. everything is connected with everything.
Many aspects in the trailers hint at this idea of interconnectedness,
like the mysterious handprints appearing out of nowhere
and leaving marks on the protagonist
the baby-canisters which appear to directly fuel the players with life
Moby dick appearing in two trailers and the Kojima Productions logo trailer
Aaand Metal Gear Solid 5
things like the rainbow, or circumzenithal arc that appears in the sky in the second trailer,
when the planetary constellation from the moon in the logo trailer
shows the ideal circumstances such a phenomenon to appear on earth.
And of course, the most obvious symbol for Relation:
the eponymous strands.
Black umbilical cords that appear to connect all... life and matter and existence.
We've also established that Relativity is another central theme.
Norman Reedus wears equations like the Schwartzschild Radius, describing black holes,
the Dirac Equation, which led to the discovery of Antimatter
and Einstein's Field Equations,
which is one of the cornerstones of modern theoretical physics...
And we've left our investigation of the first explosion with the idea that our universe....
was once... a black hole.
A seed of a universe.
But... what happened before the Big Bang?
What made this virtually infinitely compressed spot of spacetime... burst?
There are various theories about the birth of our universe, but some scientists
aren't so sure that we've ever left the inside of a black hole in the first place.
According to theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski,
we are still and have always been nestled inside a black hole.
Living in our own domain of spacetime,
nested within a mother universe that itself is only one of many universes.
And black holes may just be the passageways between them.
Or as Professor Michio Kaku calls them - umbilical cords...
"We need a theory that goes before the big bang
and that's String Theory.
String Theory says that (...) maybe
our universe is butted from another universe
leaving an umbilical cord."
String Theory is sometimes called "Theory of Everything"
because it attempts to model the four fundamental forces
Gravitation
Electromagnetism
Strong Nuclear Force
and Weak Nuclear Force
together in one theory.
In the 20th century, physicists began to apply its concepts to black holes,
finding that it finally provided a cohesive framework
to study and attempt to resolve the paradoxes of black holes.
Extremely simplified: String Theory suggests that...
everything is connected with everything
across space, matter and... time.
Now if you think about the fact that there are
an estimated 100 billion galaxies in our observable universe alone
and that at the center of each sits a supermassive black hole
with the mass of millions of suns, rotating at near light-speed
and sucking in matter with perpetual forces so intense that a bursting point
- another big bang -
is just a matter of time.
How many seeds of universes are strewn just throughout our own galaxy,
each one nesting a near infinite amount of galaxies and stars on their own?
"To see a world in a grain of sand"
When someone like Hideo Kojima writes a setting
whose lore is based on the principles of theoretical physics and String Theory,
you can expect that he and his writers will do their research
to grasp the matter several levels beyond the average layman
but that doesn't mean we should expect hard science fiction
with MIT level scientific accuracy.
The ideas we'll find in this game
will likely take theoretical physics as a jumping point
and and use their ideas... allegorically.
In Death Stranding's world
String Theory is what fueled the Death Stranding Evolution Event,
when humans found a way to traverse the connection between universes
through umbilical cords
through black holes.
At one point in time, humanity achieved a fundamental breakthrough
the apex of thousands of years of scientific progress,
turning theoretical physics... practical.
Humanity unlocked dimensional exploration,
the means to travel across parallel universes through black holes
and closing the gap between realities.
They formed an organization that would connect a virtually infinite amount of universes
that would build "Bridges" across the multiverse.
Each parallel universe unfolding after their own timeline of individual evolution
like a computer algorithm that ineluctably approximates their own apex of evolution,
their own Death Stranding evolution event.
But with an endless amount of realities to tap into
eventually there was bound to be a bad apple.
One day, something from another world arrived.
Something came from a mother universe whose inhabitants feed
on uncountable other realities
- hungrily and mercilessly -
consuming and devouring the lives and fates of souls across dimensions
inexorable like:
Rapture.
It's... it's us...
we're the something that came from that other world....
Our intrusion is the fourth explosion
we're the viewers,
the readers,
the listeners and..
the players.
We've been doing it for generations
we consume the fates and lives of imaginary people for personal gain,
pleasure, wisdom, enjoyment
through tales, make believe, through story.
We're the audience that assumes control
over the inhabitants of other realities through imagination.
In Death Stranding, this is happening literally.
We impact countless fates via
"minuscule strands of energy vibrating across 11 dimensions"
- that's how String Theory would put it
or how Death Stranding sees it: cosmic and eldritch umbilical cords.
As an audience, we've been tapping into the lives and fates of characters
all across the multiverse for millennia
and we've taken control over video game characters
from the comfort of our couch for decades.
If you think about it, that's what video games can be for many of us
a temporary escape to another reality.
In Death Stranding, humanity found a way to bridge these realities through science.
So in this setting, we're not just gonna be the invisible, godlike puppeteers,
hiding behind an impenetrable 4th wall for the actors.
Each one of us will individually, directly enter the world of Death Stranding
through our consoles and join in on the fight against the adversary.
Not just an avatar - literally you.
Norman Reedus: "And I was like alright!
And then he goes, he goes 'And they'll go play me?' and he goes 'No!
They'll BE you!'"
If you think about it, in the three trailers that we've seen so far,
we've had three characters who break the fourth wall.
And that is very much on purpose.
The first one is Guillermo del Toro
looking nervously into the camera, acknowledging the audience in front of the screen.
Now - Guillermo is not a professional motion capturing actor
his presence; and multiple remarks by himself, Kojima
and other members of Kojima Productions in the past
insinuate that this character is actually supposed to be Guillermo del Toro,
our reality's Guillermo del Toro
and he's aware of the outside world.
Just like a player is always aware of their surroundings.
Most of the time.
On his chest, he's wearing the Bridges badge.
Meaning he is a player who's entered Death Stranding's reality,
became a member of Bridges and joined the fight against the adversary,
the invaders of the Death Stranding Evolution Event.
Next up, there is Mads Mikkelsen's character
- it's been confirmed that he's going to be one of the game's antagonists -
likely the leader of the 5 monolithic floating figures seen in the other trailers.
He directs; no, he outright controls the skull soldiers via strands
that look suspiciously like electric cables
- like a player's connection to their video game characters
sending signals through the cable of their input device.
He looks us straight in the eye, fully and.. impishly aware of our presence.
"Hushhhh!
Don't spill the beans!"
He's not a part of Bridges but he's part of the adversary
either invading Death Stranding's reality from "our" world
or from another, darker mother universe.
My guess is that the game will feature something comparable
to an invasion system from the Soulsborne series
in which the players will take on the role of antagonists as well.
One of the things that indicate that is that all the decives,
all the creatures, all the characters in some way are connected to strands
Like the planes, like the tanks, like the crabs and the whales
And many other things.
Everything is connected, everything is controlled.
But that's...
I can't prove that yet.
What we do know is that... Mads knows
he knows that we're there behind the screens.
And with that I mean Mads' character,
not Mads himself, because he seems to be quite clueless what Kojima is schemeing.
Just like Norman Reedus too and everybody else.
And lastly, the baby.
It is featured in every trailer so far
- but in the last one, we see it inside of Norman Reedus' belly.
Which finally puts the scars we see in the first trailer - on his belly - into perspective.
In this one, the baby gives the viewers a thumbs-up.
(...as well as horrible mpreg nightmares.. hrmph)
And this... is us.
The baby is a constant throughout all three trailers.
And if you think about it, it's present in one way or another all the time.
It is each player's incarnation in Death Stranding's world
and the characters we meet and play
They're aware of that.
It's our connection through which we take over.
Yeah, we're literally gonna be born into this world
the baby being the vessel through which our consciousness and intelligence
transcends into the bodies and minds of this worlds' inhabitants.
Yes, Death Stranding's "story" is more confusing
than Birmingham's Spaghetti Junction in the dark.
And this video might probably have made it even more confusing than it felt before.
I'm... sorry?
But if anything else - to me, this new trailer strongly reinforced the ideas
that I brought up in my previous videos
- the notion that we are directly entering Death Stranding's universe
to have a permanent impact on this world
through our thoughts, actions and interactions with it and its inhabitants.
In Death Stranding, humanity has found a way
to not only bridge a multitude of universes together
they also found a way to tap into our intelligence
and channel our thoughts into their reality.
Instrumentalizing video gamers into a collective consciousness.
Something... something...
Human .. Instrumentality...
Project?
Is it mean of me to jump off at a point like this?
Almost like a cliffhanger?
But who knows; maybe I'll come back to it in another video.
Who knows?
There are probably a plethora of ideas that are swirling in your mind right now
about how Death Stranding might implement these notions in practice
and I'll be frank - it's the same for me.
As convinced as I am that the eponymous strands in Death Stranding
will be something like an allegorical representation
of a multiverse connected through umbilical black holes
and as convinced as I still am that we, ourselves are supposed to become
permanently part of Death Stranding's virtual multiverse
there is literally no way for me to say with certainty
how these elements will be implemented into the actual game.
And that's fine!
Because as the maker said: We are already playing it.
The game that is.
We're already contributing to the collective consciousness,
are an active part of the Death Stranding Evolution Event
by sharing and our thoughts and ideas in this alternate reality like scavenger hunt.
So I'd honestly love to hear your ideas.
How will the game play?
How will Hideo Kojima rewrite the way we experience death in video games
incorporated in a science-fiction action open world game?
So by all means, participate in the comments.
I'm looking forward to it!
Before I go, I would like to thank everyone who supports my channel on Patreon,
without the help of my Patrons, I couldn't keep doing these videos.
So thank you!
And if you're thinking of helping out and pitching in for yourself,
I'd be very grateful
- so feel free to follow the link in the description of this video.
This month, I'd like to give out a special thank you to:
you to...
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