infrastructure
Metropolitan Transit Authority — Death Stranding — Deadlock — EVE Frontier
/ˈinfrəˌstrək(t)SHər/ — noun
the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.
A little over a year ago, New York City introduced congestion pricing for all cars entering Manhattan at or below 60th St (excluding thoroughfares). The goal was two-fold: reduce gridlock and help the Metropolitan Transit Authority raise funds to overcome it’s budget shortfall.
Since then, opinion on congestion pricing seems divided along lines of frequency and mode of travel by car (or political affiliation if you’re a weirdo). But aside from improvements and maintenance to existing transit infrastructure, the benefits are pretty clear: lower roadway congestion and traffic, decreased pollution (both air and noise), and other knock-on benefits that just make New York a more enjoyable place to live.
Within this context, I’ve been thinking about infrastructure: about shared means of movement and mobility; who’s using it and who its designed for; and how we imagine its role in our lives. Because living in dense space efficiently requires dense, efficient, means of movement.
And when we live and interact with the infrastructural systems that run through the space we inhabit, our aspirations and understandings of its role in our society is molded. It shapes our worldview: for better or for worse; in sharing the space; in imagining what it would be like to go somewhere, amongst one another.
When I think about media that has something to say about infrastructure: that attempts to encapsulate our experience but also our imagination for what infrastructure is and can be; I can think of none better than Strand Games.
Strand Games — Death Stranding
Death Stranding (2019, Kojima Productions) was an attempt to define a “new” genre of game — the “Strand Game”. To this day (and also because I only finished it semi-recently on my Steam Deck), I think its still a great example of what “Strand Games” can achieve (sequel pending).
When talking about his own strand game: Witch Strandings (2022), Strange Scaffold’s Xalavier Nelson Jr, broke it down best:
The first principle is the concept of nurturing, and the fact that your main goal is to take care of the world you inhabit, or at least improve it for others
The second of Nelson’s strand principles is transportation, which seems fairly obvious, but goes deeper than you may think. He argues that your transportation has to “actually change the world,” making the act of walking into more than just a fetch quest
The final principle is physicality. In Death Stranding, that’s presented by the tower of packages on Sam Porter’s back and the minute differences in the terrain, but that’s a mechanic much harder to replicate on an indie budget.
Within Death Stranding these principles coalesce as a variety of systems that could be described as touchstones from other genres:
- Placeable signage; holograms; likes; stranded packages; bridges; ziplines; highways; and other buildable objects — players have indirect interactions between their worlds: leaving behind objects, indicators, or wholesale infrastructure that shows they passed through the space; without having direct interaction with each other. This mirrors From Software’s (Demon Souls, Dark Souls) asynchronous multiplayer elements (i.e. soapstone signs & bloodstains) that help guide future players, mixed with the structure-building of open-world survival games’ (Rust, Ark, The Forest, Valheim)
- Primary core loop centered around walking and carrying things from place to place, echoing “Walking Simulators’ ” (Dear Esther, A Short Hike) focus on traversal & environmental storytelling that de-emphasizes combat as the primary core loop of play. Often what your carrying allows you to build and create new things that alter the world and the worlds of others
- Balancing and load-shifting mechanics; grabbing items and putting it down; clenching the triggers to steady yourself; a lot of thought was placed on how the physical inputs reflect the character’s actions in the world. These minute systems and mechanics are reminiscent of Bennet Foddy’s games (QWOP, Getting Over It) on rethinking the systems of basic movement, the physicality of being in a body and navigating space
But crucially, Death Stranding uses these disparate systems wrapped up in a single-player experience to talk about something else entirely: collective connection.
While the game came out before COVID-19, it predicted the conditions for how the world would handle the pandemic in many ways. “Essential workers” would bridge the gap between people, bringing goods and services to people isolated and hunkered down in their homes.
Outside, as Sam “Porter” Bridges, we’re weaving a web to interconnect the world for the sake of others and for our future selves.
We connect regions and bring them on the Bridges network to communicate with the outside world.
We create ladders and climbing ropes and ziplines to traverse verticality on foot.
We stockpile and bulk deliver raw materials to create roads.
We place bridges and jumps to make it easier to cross treacherous terrain.
And we get asynchronous “likes” from other players when they use the things we’ve built.
This is the game to me.
Its going door to door, scrounging up every scrap of material I can find to make the big haul out to build the next stretch of road. The tension escalates with all that effort on the line as my truck ekes out a last gasp of power, a blizzard outside piling the powder to my knees. The last mile is on makeshift snowboard down the mountainside with a whole-ass wobbling jenga tower strapped to my back, swaying with every carve. I’ll scuttle to the station and dump my load :) , and a new section of the highway system is complete, 3D printed in front of my eyes in seconds. And then its on the next, shoulder straps tightened, trudging on to the horizon.
The labor is worth it. Hours later, zooming by on the newly built highway amidst the clouds, electric motor humming — likes pour in from fellow porters all around the world, worries and dangers fleet below.
For some goddamn reason, I love building roads like Robert Moses (kill me). But Death Stranding — like Moses probably would if he were alive today — posits that any user of the world’s infrastructure is singular; individualist; that we as solitary users in our own universes must get from point A to point B and that is the only thing that matters.
Its kind of the downfall of playing a game in the first place, since the game as medium (especially one that is single player) often centers itself on the player. A whole world revolving around your every move and whim.
So unlike Moses in the real world and all of the racist consequences that followed, within the confines of the game, it makes sense. We (as Sam Porter Bridges) are in our own little bubbles, ferrying the same things back and forth within our own virtual instances of the same world. The odd ephemera and marks we leave behind: infrastructural or otherwise; bleed into the realms of others like multiversal crossings of timelines; they may be shared individually, but aren’t collective means of movement.
And as a single-player game focused on collective connection we realize that these principles sit in direct opposition to one another and are being used intentionally. Death Stranding understands this: that the isolation and level of separation is only heightened in its juxtaposition — in the tangible lack of other people, constantly in your sphere of attention but just out of reach.
But within the realm of games we are rarely asked to build things for people we’ll never meet; for strangers on the internet; for passerbys that simply exist alongside us: sharing the space but never our time. So Death Stranding meets players where they are, and tries to show them what it would mean if they started to.
Once we realize that the world doesn’t revolve around us and we can not only share the space but make it better for those who come after; the way we see the world, and the way we view our shared experience on it changes. Because when we ride the bus, or take the train, we are all trying to get somewhere in this place we call home.
MOBAs—Deadlock
Deadlock, Valve Software’s in-development “secret access” Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (aka MOBA aka League of Legends, Dota 2, Titanfall, etc.) is based in The Cursed Apple (an occult, alt-history, midcentury version of The Big Apple aka New York City), and has its own nods to the city’s proud(?) relationship with its transit system.
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Two teams of six, chosen from a diverse cast of characters, lead the troops of their affiliated Patron down each of the city’s three Avenues (“lanes” in MOBA terms). To complete an otherworldly ritual to summon their Patron god, they must extend their control over New York and extinguish the other team and their Patron.
Games like these require a bevy of priorities to be juggled at once:
- fighting other players
- pushing / leading troops to the other team’s base
- taking out “bosses”
- defeating third party “neutral” enemies
- contesting powerups
- collecting resources
all in service of getting stronger and wresting control and victory from the other team’s grasp.
But Deadlock has two specific components that I want to talk about: one endemic to MOBAs in general and another that grounds Deadlock in its setting of choice.
we exist within systems
What remains a common throughline for MOBAs and MOBA-adjacent games is the centering away from the player and onto the permanence of the world. The player is no longer the focus, but is instead simply an actor in a world that exists — with or without their involvement. In most games of this type, the conflict is contextualized as a struggle between two gods; two primordial beings; two factions; or conveniently, two teams. Players reside amidst this context: unlike other team-based games, the systems and actors present in the world progress and perpetuate the state of conflict outside the actions of the players. In Deadlock, the little soldiers push forward in service to their patron, regardless of whether you’re there or not.
This sells the idea of world permanence: that this place exists; that this is a place being fought over. Its a shared commonality between teammates: we are here together as individuals in recognition that this game, this match, provides the systems and conditions for our time here. And while a bit reductive, we are left with one of two choices — within the systems that govern this place, either we win or we lose.
we use those systems to impose our will and win
But crucially, what doesn’t exist in other MOBAs are Deadlock’s zip lines: a transit stand-in that automatically extends forward as your troops push the lane; retract as your troops are pushed back by enemy players; and allows both reinforcement troops and players to quickly move from their base to the front lines. Deadlock’s zip lines are a proxy for the state of the game: a physical system that not only represents map control and vision, but can also be manipulated and leveraged for quick traversal.
Over the course of the match, maintaining the reach of your team’s ziplines is critical to victory: every push back against enemy troops increases the area that your teammates can quickly see, access, and control. Even though the infrastructure is a byproduct instead of the primary intention (players are never explicitly “building” ziplines), focusing on maintaining it at a meta level enables ambushes, space control, movement, and victory.
Because in the moment to moment: while every player might have their own priorities on where they need to go or what they need to do; when an extended scuffle breaks out and spells and abilities are flying everywhere — having a teammate show up and have your back can make all the difference. Individual priorities are secondary to the needs of the team, and the consequences of this aspect of the meta game has reverberating effects on the we: only one team can win and summon their patron.
Deadlock reveals: over the course of a single match; the benefits of infrastructure within the considerations of a small six-person team. We see how shared structures and facilities benefit not only ourselves, but the immediate people around us, enabling the group to flourish as a whole. Our maintenance and protection and efficient use of the systems that govern and weave through the game have a tangible impact on our own and the group’s end goals.
But what happens when the hammer is in our hands; when building is the point; when we’re no longer concerned with just our own or our “team’s” success; when our goals extend further than just “winning” a discrete match? What does it mean, if instead, we are building a place — a space to exist?
Space Survival MMO — EVE Frontier
EVE Online has been around for +20 years: a space opera online sandbox at civilization’s peak, where four galactic empires and innumerous player groups vie for control and conquest.
EVE Frontier is an early-stage in-development reimagining of EVE Online as space survival sim within the post-post apocalyptic. In the relics and ruins of civilization, players pick through the scraps and rebuild. As a result, Frontier has some interesting systemic changes to add tension to the moment to moment and some logistical challenges that require even greater forms of cooperation:
- Travel costs fuel and interstellar travel distance is limited by mass
- The known universe is shattered and disconnected, most solar systems are not connected by stargates and must be connected and maintained / refueled by players
- Temperature is a dictated by proximity to a star, to energy usage, it burns you up; if you get too hot your ship will overheat and fail
- The world is a hostile place — NPCs will attack you, structures will decay and be destroyed, and even other players may choose to shoot first and ask questions later
Despite this, it is entirely possible to survive in Frontier’s universe on your own. But it’s also just as likely that you’ll ensure your own demise. You could, for example: expend the majority of your fuel on a one-way jump into a new star system, only to realize you no longer have enough fuel to leave and there are no raw materials present to scavenge more. You would then be faced with two options: putz around your self-made tomb until the final wisps of fuel burn up in your engine, and succumb to the fiery embrace of a self-destruct sequence; or make a call out into the void and pray that a kind soul will answer the call and be uninterested in the cargo you’ve accrued. But again, this is only one of many possible outcomes for you.
Maybe instead you’ll find that the harsh landscape also brings forth unparalleled cooperation and kindness. Players will go out of the way to rescue you; coordinate logistical operations to “gear up” each other; build public-use free gates and other infrastructure to reconnect disparate star systems and encourage mobility for the players that come after; or create non-aggression zones to enforce a tenuous level of safety.
Frontier carries both the glimmer of collaborative possibility and a warning in each hand. Even as it brings forth the inheritance of “Strand Games” : nurturing, transportation, and physicality; borne through by its player collectives, the tools they create, and the infrastructure they build — it also threatens the perpetuation of the world as it has become: desolate, isolated, intangibly void. If its players don’t act, or let the power of destruction win out over collaboration, whatever is left will stay that way: in inevitable decay, in perpetual entropy.
I can’t help but draw parallels to our world, because systems and art are created and informed by the world around us. And when we dream of possibilities to improve the lives of ourselves and each other, it exposes us to ways in which we can be torn apart. In a relative sense, the world has become more hostile: fascism is rising, warfare is changing, borders and freedom of movement are hardening, and competing power structures are more aligned with the interests of capital than the interests of life. The collapse of American hegemony and stability to enrich a handful of people is creating a degradation of society we did not vote or ask for and was not done in our interest.
But I think these games center my optimism in searching for what can be; what is worth building; even in times of uncertainty.
My uncle just passed late last year, after a lifetime of work at the MTA.
My biggest regret is never asking why: after graduating from the same school I would graduate from half a lifetime later; what it was about the MTA that would cause him to spend his entire career there.
In what feels like an inflection point in a long arc of history, New York is building new train lines; creating new bike lanes (credit: Streetsblog NYC); new pedestrian places — new infrastructure as spaces to live here and go somewhere amongst one another. Its an expansion of the realm of possibility of who gets to take part in this shared dream, what we can do, and where we can go with it.
The cost of not doing these things, of letting things stay as they are, is also a tacit admission who gets to be a part of the we, we’re all fighting for.
And I refuse to think any answer other than all of us, is acceptable.
So tentatively, despite everything, I’m hopeful. It feels refreshing for once.
Thanks for reading!
This one has been marinating for a while but I like where I’ve ended up. Deadlock and EVE Frontier are still in-development games but I wanted to capture the space they are occupying in the moment. Hopefully they’ll still stay true to the things I’ve captured here and this won’t be woefully out of date in a years time.
If you need an invite to Deadlock, or a referral for Frontier let me know ;)
Death Stranding by Kojima Productions
Deadlock by Valve Software
EVE Frontier by CCP Games
