What Is a Strand Game?

Death Stranding was released in 2019 and was placed in the proto-subgenre of strand game, a term coined by the game director himself, Hideo Kojima.

A strand game is a game subgenre. It’s an asynchronous multiplayer online game in which players indirectly connect with each other by unifying efforts to take care of a shared-world infrastructure and its systems. By doing so, they promote social world building and usually facilitate gameplay for all the community. The absence of negative feedback in the systems is notable. The term comes from the word strand (as connection) and from the “social strand system” (explained above) present in Death Stranding. Its game aesthetics are correlated with the Japanese concept of omoiyari (altruistic sensitivity). Like most subgenres in video games, this is a gameplay-sensitive term and not a thematic one.

Strand games are not delivery games.

Games like Lake and Cloudpunk have been mistakenly called strand games by players just because you can make deliveries in them. This is because Death Stranding’s most obvious gameplay feature is the deliveries system. This confusion probably stems from the apparent complexity of defining the strand game, being simpler to associate strand game with the name of the game instead of with the root of the word, and then extrapolate the perceived main gameplay feature. Heuristics betray us once again. Witch Strandings, which has an open world in which you can repair structures, is closer to a strand game and it even calls itself an “all-new Strand-type game” that “dials into the emerging genre of physical transportation”. The problem here is that there is no genre of physical transportation (at least not called strand game). It is, nevertheless, a theme that is growing in popularity because of the success of Kojima Productions’ game. But if “delivery game” is not a short way of putting it, then what is?

One way to define the subgenre could be “asynchronous co-op environment”, or even “ghost co-op environment” (if you like racing games and are both willing to ignore their competitive part and happy to avoid the word asynchronous). Its use of online functionalities is fresh and it has all the potential to become a recognisable subgenre. Instead of games with deliveries, the games that come closer are the Souls games, due to their online systems. However, they don’t affect the actual setting nor exclusively promote connection; they rather employ a neutral kind of interaction between players, since they can help you or sabotage you, resulting in something more akin to a zero-sum game. Strand games’ online game design is a positive-sum game (or win-win game).

Death Stranding’s social dynamics push the game forward — it only gets “better”. If a player tries to troll others by building a structure in a troublesome way, you can just remove it from your game easily. It’s a complete triumph of order over chaos, or better, a smooth transition in which players make sense of their chaotic styles of play to build something together. In the Souls games, there is a ubiquitous climate of uncertainty that may, and ideally will, end up in an equilibrium, as the game also allows chaos to take the lead here and there.

Maybe the social strand system is not enough of a feature to make Kojima’s descriptor— strand game — a subgenre, as Death Stranding is, of course, a lot of things more. Nonetheless, this unique aspect of its game design makes for one of its more interesting components, one likely to influence the future of video games.

Notes and loose references:

https://twitter.com/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/status/1136074622711975936?s=20
https://gamerant.com/death-stranding-2-strand-genre/
https://gamerant.com/death-stranding-sequels-strand-genre-kojima/
https://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/03-Kazuya-Hara.pdf
https://archive.unescwa.org/win-win-situation
(Xalavier Nelson Jr.’s own concept of strand game is only partially accurate and shouldn’t be taken as an attempt to define the subgenre.)