The Real Touch
Shannon Li included in Research PaperShannon Li
Cristina Vatulescu, Yana Makuwa
COLIT-UA 200, COLIT-UA 116
May. 5th, 2023
The Real Touch
Death Stranding is a game directed by Hideo Kojima, set in the United States. The dead are stranded on the “Beach” and become the living dead called BTs. When BTs consume the living, it will trigger a “voidout” similar to a nuclear explosion. In addition, a rainwater called timefall makes the infrastructure of the passage of time accelerated, so that they quickly collapse. The player takes on the role of Sam Porter Bridges, who is responsible for delivering supplies to the isolated colonies and reconnecting them with wireless networks. The “Seam” is a place between the living and the Beach, allowing him to travel between the world of the living and the Beach. I will start from this game to deconstruct what Death Stranding is trying to tell us.
At the beginning, I would like to discuss “object”. By object, are they real, mechanical substances? What is the matter in the so-called “materialism” as described by German philosopher Karl Marx? In Death Stranding, the player takes on the role of Sam, as a courier, reconnecting the entire United States. So, why does it have to be a courier? In the real world of 2019, a worldwide virus called Covid-19 has emerged. This virus, because of its severity, has forced many countries and regions to block communication with the outside world. Covid-19 made human contact extremely miserable, as public transportation and a lot of infrastructure were shut down due to the effects of the virus. As Karl Marx mentioned in his article Theses On Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. The point is to change it.” No matter how one tries to deconstruct the metaphysical symbols, the final question must lead to an end: what to eat tonight.
For life itself, it is true beyond all criticism. But not in a mechanical, rigid way of being. Rather, life itself, by nature, reveals itself in its most authentic form. In this way, it is neither transcendent nor mysterious. Rather, it is naked and necessary. The courier is not a profession that is often touched upon in literary works. Yet, for concrete human labor, the logistics system is fundamental to the exchange of all metaphysical values. It must be the courier, because for the inevitability of life itself, all thinking is stripped of its veneer in front of it, and their scarcity is nakedly displayed. What to eat tonight, the reality of such a problem eventually became a heavy punch that knocked people down. Because the material and real world does not change by human will, this also seems to make all our thinking meaningless. There is a serious conflict within this absurd reality and the philosophical thinking about what to eat tonight, because not eating leads to death. No matter how much philosophers deconstruct the explanation of the world, in the end the only real problem remains, and that is “death”. Why death? How does our existence touch death in the midst of such a real, tangible life? In fact, death is not the antithesis of existence. And, modern death is long and common.
In an article discussing modernity in 2022, I mention that modern people are dead. “Not because of our physical flaws, but because we live in a breeding ground of over- completeness” (Li, Modernity 16). Modern people are dead in a world of signs and simulacra because they are no longer able to make any subversive impact on existing constructs. In Death Stranding, the Internet, thanks to timefall and BT, can no longer support the task of connecting the world. The touch that was once close at hand is now out of reach. It is just like yesterday for you and me who have experienced Covid-19. In the current reality, this sense of distance and brokenness is exactly what Death Stranding wants to express. In terms of intuition, this kind of death is always in contact with us. The most direct manifestation of this is food advertising.
With food commercials, it is always straightforward to whet people’s appetite. But that elaborate food advertisement, although it uses real ingredients, it necessarily releases the final video and shows in the most false way the perfect food that does not exist in any diner’s mouth. Simulacra, a symbolic process that is constantly in progress, is an important concept mentioned by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation. The notion of simulacra, represents the death of modern life. It keeps reproducing reality, and then, at the moment of separation from reality, reality then disappears. This is too common for you and me who have lived in the Covid-19 era. When we were in the Internet class, we allowed the simulacra of an identity to exist through a webcam in a cyberspace that was not itself in any part of the world. And in the middle of cyberspace, no one is there, no one is involved anymore. The most obvious manifestation of this is to recall how many people in online classes sleep while listening to the lecture? How many people are listening to the lecture while playing on the computer and browsing other things? This is not a concept that is far from us, it is a sign of our death. For this extension of the metaphor, death can be a direct replacement of a specific person in a world that is filled with a network of sign intertwined. For identity, as an abstraction, it is able to make itself a copy of the person it represents in all its aspects, but the moment identity is established, the concrete person is erased. The person is replaced by all the semantic symbols that represent that person. In this sense, the symbol, or language, has become the synthesis of all abstraction. That is, transcendence. Language, in this sense, is transcendental. For the concrete object, it necessarily needs to be narrated by the human cognitive process pulled into the symbol and language. However, this narration depends on a symbol that is completely detached from the concrete object itself. This symbol, under such conditions, completely transcends the object itself and becomes an independent being.
Modern online life itself has abstracted the medium of narrative and become an existence independent of it. For example, the novel is depicting a story based on the knowledge and experience of our linguistic and symbolic systems, and the film is making a replica based on our impressions of symbols. But they are never experiences and impressions per se. Even the experience and impression, that is, the semantic symbol, itself abstracts itself from the concrete object. In this way, the semiotic system based on experience, that is, language, is not able to narrate object in an authentic posture. In this mode of operation, Baudrillard’s simulacra emerges as a linguistic rupture, a fundamental divide between the signified and the thing in itself.
To that extent, all our lives have become too distant from all our own symbolic consciousness. And this distance is the brokenness of reality and symbols. Our lives have been filled with broken symbolic reproduction, and the only thing that awakens our minds in that Covid-19 online class time is the take-out we order from Doordash after class. On this level, our death exists precisely in the Symbolic. The Symbolic itself has taken itself out of all symbols and become a copy of itself, a simulacra, and the Symbolic is constantly symbolizing itself, as in the case of the food advertisement. This is the death of the Symbolic, the death of us. We can’t even touch the Symbolic anymore. Everything that is a warm replica fills all our lives. So what do we want when we die like this?
Zong! is an excellent collection of poetry by M. NourbeSe Philip. In this prose, the author attempts to use poetry as a narrative; Philip seeks to use broken but systematic language to narrate broken memories and feelings. This approach to “completeness” is a powerful rebellion against modernity. As mentioned before, the death of the symbol has also led our lives into the abyss of pure abstraction. But can the attempted revolution of language using language itself solve this problem?
For example, let’s take the two most distinctive poems in Zong! #1 and #4. In terms of description, #1 is a bunch of letters and syllables made up of letters scattered randomly across the page. #4 is a poem made up of a few prepositions and conjunction piled on top of each other. #4 has only 17 words in its entirety, and there are no verbs or nouns among them. The main feature of this prose is that language itself is not the medium of narrative, but the use of language itself is narrative.
Why is this so? For language and symbols, they are used as an experience, a judgment that makes up the process of perception of the world. Language is the child’s distinction between the Self and the Other when it enters the Symbolic, a judgment that compels the Self to use a semantic symbol to distinguish itself from the Other. At this point, the child moves away from the Real. The process of stepping from the Real into the Symbolic is a transzendental experience. Because language is based on semiotic experience, the ability to learn language and to judge the distance of the Self from the Other is transzendental, or at least the ability to learn to judge is transzendental.
But what is higher than language is contained in the experience of language. In the previous paragraphs, I have explored how language distances itself from the object to become something higher than the object. Here, however, the experience of language is not pure language. There is something mixed in with the experience of language. That is mediation, the vehicle of symbols, which is language. Mediation, the medium that carries language, such as the book, the screen, is not the semantic symbol that I mentioned earlier. In my article entitled The Language of Play, I have presented the main ideas of a German scholar Friedrich Kittler’s media theory in his book Discourse Networks. “endless circulation, a discourse network without producers or consumers, which simply heaves words around” (Kittler 4). Media, carries language. Endless circulation, in addition to creating a simulacra at the moment of filming, is also a simulacra in the learning of hamburger symbols after the viewer has watched the film. In this sense, language is a nesting doll, a constant nesting doll. The object dissolves and dissolves. Then it is given immortality in a media that does not have any object. The immortality of the symbol, the immortality of the semantic symbol, is our aphasia. So we are lost for words, unable to speak. Language is a gift of freedom, but at the same time it is a prison. We are not able to use the thing in itself for description.
The expression of a symbol of an object is the expression of a complete abstraction of the object itself. Even if the object has been completely removed, we can still express and speak of an object, and this is the freedom that language gives us. But we cannot express an object even if it has been nakedly shown. This is the shackle that language gives us. Because we have to use the symbol of object to describe an object, to communicate. Thus, a paradox arises. There is indeed something higher than language, higher than the semantic symbol of an object. It is language as a framework, as a transcendental context.
Context, or contextual relations, encompasses content that goes beyond linguistic symbolism itself. Narrative itself is transcendent, and the understanding of narrative necessarily depends on experience. Language itself cannot be narrative until there is experience of what is being described. The communication of semantics necessarily depends on some kind of experience. Virginia Woolf, who was an English writer, tells an interesting story in one of her short stories, The Mark on the Wall, a story of misunderstanding. The protagonist thinks there is a nail on the wall, but the protagonist can’t see it clearly. The judgment to determine what is on the wall is based on the narrative of the essay, on the use of language. The essay necessarily requires the use of language for the narrative. And it is the duality and sameness of nail and snail that allows the narrative to go beyond language. It allows language to say something beyond it, which is a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding that mistakes snail for nail. However, this misunderstanding is necessarily based on narrative. The distinction between nail and snail has no meaning if the narrative already expresses itself in its entirety. For they are not, in fact, the same thing, either linguistically or materially. But language-based fiction then gradually overloads the context. The narrative itself is the narrative, and fiction itself is speech. If the very existence of this essay is a narrative, then it is a metanarrative, a narrative of the context. But it clearly does not say anything about the context: the text can only function in the English context. A linguistic context is not a narrative, because a narrative does not contain a context, and Virginia Woolf does not systematically explain any of it, but as the author, she knows the reader will understand it. But language itself is narrative, because language can say something beyond it, language can say context. narrative itself transcends language.
For example, whether it’s reading a novel, watching a movie. All are nothing more than different ways to convey a story. But the medium itself contains something beyond the story. If it is through a film in the traditional sense: the pure visual language and the silence that does not contain even a single word. The difference between a nail and a snail on the wall is simply insignificant. The story has no humor in it, because it lacks the context of words. The words themselves are the narrative here. This is also similar to Zong! The symbol itself is the vehicle of the narrative, and the narrative is not only through symbols and language. It is not that we use symbols to make a narrative, but that the use of symbols is itself a narrative. Media, in itself, is context, so language speaks a kind of transcendence, a kind of chain of signifiers that goes beyond language and signifiers themselves.
This is precisely a kind of degradation, allowing language itself to become the narrative and the narrative to speak beyond it. The narrative itself is the narrative. For the storyteller, the very act of telling a story already says enough, already says something beyond the story itself: the answer to the question of why to tell a story. It is not the story, but the degradation of language. Why is it called degradation? Because the use of language can be either unconscious or conscious. In the narrative of a literary work, it is necessarily conscious. The author writes those contents intentionally. However, the unconscious is hidden in the speech. Because the author unconsciously uses the tools used to tell the content. In Zong!, for example, Philip’s use of language, her attempts to break out of the structure of language, are conscious. However, the author is unconscious about the very act of using language. The author seems to have great freedom in trying to push the boundaries of language and the limits of its structure. But, in reality, she has been restricted: she must use language to carry out a rebellion against language itself. This precise self-degradation is a kind of postmodern resistance to death, and Philip constantly tries to break through the limits of language to write a narrative that transcends it. In Philip’s attempt, language itself no longer becomes any medium, but rather, the use of language itself is the narrative itself. By placing the words of the psalms chaotically on a page, the structure of language itself is broken apart. Or rather, the broken structure is everything that it narrates. It is not that Philip unconsciously tries to use this pattern to narrate, but that he unconsciously uses language to narrate. Even the narrative itself is a narrative, and the use of language is also a narrative. But the use of language remains unconscious. It is a kind of resistance, an obscurantist resistance. In this sense, the attempt to break through the limits of language is exactly degradation, an action to bring the transcendental narrative back into language. There is a reason for this resistance.
Jacques Lacan is a French psychoanalyst who theorizes that the birth of an infant means the first birth, and that the second birth of an infant is when the infant becomes aware of the existence of the ego in the mirror. After the mirror stage, the infant inevitably becomes aware of the minimal gap between ego and other and has to enter the symbolic order, that is, the world full of absurd others. Here, the infant has to realize that the ego is ultimately confined to the Symbolic and is castrated (Johnston 2.4.1). NourbeSe Philip is aware of this sense of powerlessness, this sense of incompleteness. As above, in the postmodern symbolic society, all narrative is replaced by its medium.
For language, the narrative it performs is a fundamental impossibility. Simulacra here is not merely an upgradation of the semantic symbol and the thing in itself; it is a leap that leaves language itself behind. For language, its own narrative is no longer an end in itself. It makes a concession, it takes a step backwards, and then lets context take its place. Narrative, no longer the specialty of language, is the result of the simultaneous efforts of language and medium. Under such conditions, then, the effort of language no longer seems necessary. Perhaps language is necessary, and narrative necessarily needs to be carried out through language. Symbols have an indispensable role in narrative. But narrative is no longer special in this condition. The media itself is capable of narrative. Why is this so? The narrative of the media comes from the language it carries, but the narrative of the language is based on a non-linguistic context, which relies on the media that carries the language. Thus, in a narrative process, language, media and context - which I have thought of calling experience - are all part of the narrative. So how do fragmentation and fracture unfold?
It is the very nature of narrative that makes any attempt to narrate, to consciously transcend the transcendence of language itself, the reality that language can deliver context, ultimately dependent on the unconscious use of language. In all symbolic narratives, all contexts, or experiences, are not objects, and in the attempt to use language for narrative, there is no possibility of touching the narrative itself: a story about how something is. The Real is untouchable. The transcendence of language is so accurately expressed in its own limitations. It is because it cannot be an object at all to any degree that it can become transcendent. The rupture, precisely, is when we realize that the narrative itself does not touch life in any possible way. Reading itself then becomes impossible. Because everything that reading depends on is metaphysical. Even if it is a documentary film, it is always a little different from life without symbols. Narrative, it is not possible. In the previous passage we have already mentioned the components of narrative. And those components of narrative never reflect the appearance of the object itself. Fracture, exactly. Broken, even more so. Fracture is the difference between language and reality. Brokenness, the impossibility of language itself, is the impossibility of narrative itself.
Such brokenness and fractures compel people to take a new and sober look at everything around them. The desire for completeness is what gave birth to this work by Zong!. For language, for the act of narrativization performed by the symbol as a vehicle beyond the narrative itself, there is a more transcendent quest. The ultimate quest for pure, existential existence. This is why in Death Stranding, Bridges tries to use a Chiral Network, similar to the Internet, to bring everyone back to the beautiful era of interconnectedness, to the pre-modern perfection. This is an attempt to find an anchor point in language. To find an anchor point in language that is established by language. For example, the basic question that most people may ask: What is the meaning of life? We are not going to answer this question here, but rather, the very asking of this question answers quite a lot. For life, there is no need to mention much. But for meaning, it is well worth mentioning. Meaning, precisely, is narrative. It is a very modern narrative. It is the result of the abstraction of EVENTS. For an action of life, or activity, the very fact that it can be narrated is an indication that it must pass through language before it can enter the narrative. For all narratives are linguistic. The metanarrative, then, is the result of an abstraction of the act. In this way, meaning emerges. But meaning is not self-contained; it is not born there. Meaning is dependent on the description of language. But, as we mentioned earlier, narrative is linguistic, but narrative is not a description of the thing in itself. Metanarrative, or grand narrative, as a high level of abstraction, depends on the semiotic deconstruction of events. This structure, in turn, is limited by the limits of language. For meaning, it is itself symbolic, because it is a high abstraction of events, of human activities. The abstraction, in turn, is language-dependent, because narrative is linguistic. That is why meaning is nowhere to be found at all. Therefore, the world is filled with fractures. But does a complete, beautiful world, not limited by language and symbols, exist?
Back to “Object”, one finally realizes that all metaphysical matters ultimately put us into a post-mortem world. There, we lose the freedom of being a baby. In Death Stranding, BB is able to see BT, that is, to communicate with the Beach. BB is the premature baby that Bridges removed from the dead mother. And BT, Beached Thing, is the one who cannot really die after dying on earth, stranded in the middle of the Beach. This is also the perfection in Lacan’s sense, the baby surviving in the perfection of the Real register. In this way, if we interpret Death Stranding in terms of Lacan’s theory, the Beach has to be placed in the place of the Real register. A world that is untouchable, but so complete. The irony is that in Death Stranding, the Internet-like Chiral Network essentially sends information to the Beach and then takes it out after it has traveled some distance in the Beach. This also reveals the inaccessibility of the Beach as the Real register.
So, what does Kojima do? Since language itself is narrative, the use of symbols is narrative. But the fragmentation of language itself means that narrative itself cannot exist outside of language, and what Kojima does is not just a narrative, but an experience of narrative itself. It is some kind of context-based experience. In my article The Language of Play, I have studied games: “games are the most valuable activities that human beings can engage in” (Li, Game 7). This is a deduction based on a German philosopher, Karl Marx, in his book Capital. Why is this so?
Chiral Matter is a fictional substance in the game Death Stranding. In the game, Chiral Matter as a resource, it is also extremely simple to obtain: the player only needs to control Sam using a weapon loaded with Sam’s blood, after actually killing those half-dead Beached Thing. These Chiralium are shaped like two arms placed parallel from elbow to wrist, and then the two hands are stretched out to the opposite side. The two hands thus formed a shape that looked like they were holding something. When I played this section, I intuitively guessed that I was holding a baby, but this was just a symptomatic reading based on my context and experience. Although the reading itself, based on our previous inference, is already impossible. At least, the reading is not credible. However, in terms of this contextual understanding, Chiralium is taken from Chirality, which refers to the symmetry and difference of the two hands. The left hand and the right hand are the same shape, but opposite to each other. In the midst of their completely opposite differences, they are nevertheless the same, and always hold some topological commonality, at least when viewed in one direction. The hand, in this form, is a difference and a connection. The difference lies in the fact that a person is not able to shake hands with himself. The connection lies in the perfect fit between one person’s right hand and another person’s right hand when shaking hands, due to chirality.
Before we get into the discussion of chirality, the hand, in itself, means something, and Kojima decides to use the hand, which is also a conscious unconscious speech. But let’s focus on the hand itself. The hand is human labor. Both in virtual works and in reality, human beings are constantly working. Human labor creates value in the Marxian sense. “A use-value, or useful article, has value only because abstract human labor is objectified” (Marx, Capital 129). The hand, represents exactly human labor, in all senses of the word. In the game, Sam is a courier. He delivers supplies to everyone who needs them. And putting these supplies to use, to create something, are concrete human labor. chirality, in its own difference and repetition, is able to find an energetic social relation. The subjective nature of human initiative. In the midst of the game, Chiralium is eternal: it is not affected by timefall. It always exists in the most shining, orange-colored crystal form. That magnificent edifice that all human achievements, all myths, literature, art, philosophy, science, have constructed since the beginning of human existence. What is it? It is the fruit of human labor. In this sense, it is non-verbal. Language becomes invalid at this moment. Not because of the limitations of language itself, but because of the transcendence of human labor. Human labor, as it was written at the beginning of this article, is human survival. Survival is the sole purpose of everything. This is the only truth that I can firmly believe in, precisely for all human activity. It is the eternal pursuit of human activity, the construction of eternity itself. This is the construction of language, the construction of meaning.
The hand is the subjective activity of man, the abstract labor of man. Play, however, is the sum of all human activity. Human labor creates value, but human labor equally creates the cornerstone of existence and all life. In this sense, labor is necessary, a necessity for survival. But what if the necessities of human existence no longer require the participation of human labor? Perhaps Chatgpt and those AIs like it are finally coming into the picture in the present, but this kind of automation is not new in human history. Back during the industrial revolution, there was considerable clamoring by workers that factories and machines were taking away their jobs. Let’s think one step further. What if all jobs were replaced by those automated machines? Human labor is not a necessity, but a choice. But man keeps on choosing to labor. Because at this point, all human labor becomes a game. It is a game of overcoming unnecessary difficulties. The human initiative, to which the hand refers, is not limited only to work, but reaches eternity in a wider space. The eternity of human historical achievements.
The next thing you know, Kojima destroys everything. The eternity of historical achievement is not some great light that simply stands in the light and solves all problems once and for all. It is not so. Rather, it is a destruction. In the previous passages, I have demonstrated how language has led to the death of modern man. In Kojima’s game, this death is not just for the individual, but the capsizing of the whole world. It is the postmodern scarcity of meaning. The hand, as an abstraction of human labor, as a transcendence of pre-linguistic. It ultimately fails, like all those other attempts at transcendence. The construction of eternity is the construction of meaning.
This construct has a long history, starting with the familiar skepticism of Descartes. The search for being and reality has been a topic of intense discussion among a wide range of thinkers. But we do not need to know what the outcome of the discussion will be. The mere act of discussing it in itself says enough. Reality is never something that simply sits there like a cat. Reality is always shown in its most false light. Such a rupture is similar or even largely identical to the one mentioned earlier due to narrative.
In this way, Death Stranding is a response to how people in such a post-modern society face the coming flood: the death caused by the fragmentation of the symbol and the rupture of the subject, even the death of the symbolic no longer exists, which leads to the creation of BT. However, Hideo Kojima’s insurgency is not a strike in the traditional sense, but a more subtle attempt. As mentioned above, language itself becomes the narrative, so does the narrative of language still matter? Perhaps it is not a question of whether it matters or not, but rather a question of what language itself can convey. The symbolization of everything depends on the symbolization of language. Language should be said to be the symbol of everything. But it is this that triggers the ultimate voidout, the ultimate death of the symbol. This is the most ironic point of all, that the tools we use to construct everything in the world, in turn, deprive us of the very essence of understanding everything. Language is not reliable, and it never has been.
In this context, Kojima’s insurgency is so valuable: we try to find some way out, something real and reliable, in the middle of a linguistic prison. Our survival is the insurgency of the symbol, the search for the Object. Then, object emerges. The player plays Sam carrying those supplies on his back, traveling thousands of miles to a person’s home when it is more “real” than any message sent on the Internet. These supplies, is really more real than all the symbolic things: today’s dinner. internet as almost everyone can access, an invisible and untouchable object, it has given birth to the most false network, that is, simulacra. it is just like language, as a castration, so that people have to It is like language, as a castration, so that people have to follow its will. This is the reason why Zong! ended up as a case of a failed attempt to “break out of jail”.
What Kojima is doing is a video game. The game, as a medium, does perform the same functions that I mentioned in the previous article. A narrative, and not just the “story” I mentioned in the article. The game is an experience. Of course, perhaps in the English context, there is no difference between saying “experience” and saying “experience”. I think that the function of language to convey context is also shown. The first experience emphasizes the event and the corresponding action, while the second experience emphasizes a knowledge and a verified judgment. The game in this condition refers to the first experience. I am eager to demonstrate in this essay the ability of games as media to smash all symbols directly through transzendental experience. The media of games, the narratives they perform, are fundamentally subversive. The media itself is the narrative, and the experience of the game is pure, not symbolic. Games are permeable in a practical sense, radically a revolution against postmodern death. But for reasons of space I do not have the means to elucidate. This is the end of our journey to the perception of the real touch.
Death Stranding, the voidout of postmodern society under the weight of symbols, is the complete collapse of all our knowledge, experience, and reason. The limit of language is the limit of symbols, which will inevitably make us lose all the floor we can stand on, all the space we can survive. It leaves us in total denial, in destruction. Postmodern, is voidout. what Kojima expresses in the game is not a simple delivery, but a practice. It is a practice of insurgency against all philosophies, of strike, of unite, of do something, where all philosophies are invalidated and the boundaries of language are irrelevant. The interwoven web of life and death, truth and falsehood, finally breaks up. Because it was not necessary to exist in the first place. Go twice with your feet into two rivers, then walk into the muddy ground. To bring our dinner, to our doorstep.
And this tells the story of the two explosions and the two deaths in Death Stranding.
“Once there was an explosion. A bang which gave birth to time and space. Once there was an explosion. A bang which set a planet spinning in that space. Once there was an explosion. A bang which gave rise to life as we know it. Once there was an explosion. And it was our last”.
One of these explosions brought time and space, the “life” of everything. Then, there was an explosion that destroyed everything, the “death” of everything. In the life of a baby, there are also two explosions. The first explosion gives life to the baby, and the second explosion makes the baby die, because the baby has to go into the Symbolic of endless suffering. However, in the first explosion, the baby also died, because the baby lost the most real world. In the second explosion, the baby is also reborn, because the baby finally sees the existence of all that is interwoven by birth and death and truth and falsehood, and reveals itself in the most naked form. This is the object in Death Stranding, which is our dinner.
Work Cited
“Death Stranding.” PlayStation 4, Kojima Productions, 2019.
Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulation.” University of Michigan Press, Jan. 1995, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9904.
Johnston, Adrian. “Jacques Lacan.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), 24 Dec. 2022, plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/lacan. Accessed 22 Mar. 2023.
Li, Shannon. “The Language of Play; Understanding the Role of Games in Media and Education.” 2022. New York University, unpublished paper.
Li, Shannon. “The Thing We Lost in Modernity.” 2022. New York University, unpublished paper.
Philip, M. NourbeSe, and Setaey Adamu Boateng. Zong!: As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng. Wesleyan UP, 2008.
Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1989.