Delivering Packages in Apocalyptic Times: Utopia and Collectives in Death Stranding

In his radical and provocative text An American Utopia, Fredric Jameson embarks on a search for the pivotal institution of contemporary society able to fulfill the role of vehicle for implementing revolutionary change, the first one being the post office. While he quickly moves on to examine other institutions, I believe it is worth staying with the profession of delivery man/woman a moment longer to consider its utopian potential. Interestingly, 2019 was marked by a highly anticipated game featuring an America faced with a potential apocalypse on the horizon, and who should be central to the utopian quest of reconnecting the disparate parts of the country into a unified whole but a delivery man? Death Stranding (2019), directed by famous videogame director Hideo Kojima, is a game about a divided America and isolated population which needs to be relinked to form a new collective entity in order to avoid total collapse and ultimately the end of the world. I thus take Jameson’s text as a point of departure, in dialogue with Death Stranding, to argue that the delivery man/woman as a conceptual device allows for a reconfiguration of the relationships between the whole and its parts fundamental to the utopian project of imagining alternative collectives. I begin by revisiting Jameson and the need for a utopian political project in parallel with the setting and overarching narrative of Death Stranding. I proceed to explore the narrative and gameplay implications of building the protagonist around the profession of delivery man and its role in reconnecting the leftover parts of the country, in conjunction with the moment-to-moment experiences by the players. Finally, I conclude by problematizing Jameson’s and Death Stranding’s struggle with existing within and thinking beyond America, and the space of the nation itself as the space for utopian possibilities.