In this presentation, Nathan Wainstein, ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow, Department of Communication interrogates this critical transformation of aboutness through a reading of the 2019 video game Death Stranding. This is, first of all, a work for which it became a kind of meme to post the comment, “I still don’t know what this game is about,” beneath each new trailer in the lead-up to its release. Yet Death Stranding also challenges the critical notion of aboutness on a deeper level, both through its overwhelming thematic scope—grappling explicitly with topics as far-reaching as climate change, U. S. infrastructure, and the meaning of death—and through its ludic form as a simulation of boring labor that forestalls critical attempts to “discover” labor itself as the artwork’s hidden meaning. The excessive literalness of Death Stranding resists interpretation and makes us reconsider what we talk about when we talk about what a work of art is about.
