I still remember the first time I watched someone else finish my journey for me.
In the final scene of Journey, you trudge through snow toward the mountaintop, cape stiff, movement heavy. When I played it, I thought I was alone. Then a second traveler emerged from the white noise, their chime answering mine. We huddled together until the wind swallowed us.
If you want to see the moment two cloaked figures lean on each other as they cross the snow, followed by the quiet reveal of the strangers' IDs in the credits:
Only after the credits did the game reveal the IDs of the strangers who had walked with me. Until that moment, they were not usernames. They were simply: someone who waited when I fell behind.
I cried, a little. Not because of the ending, but because a videogame had given me a glimpse of the world I wish we lived in.
"We build our games like a Japanese garden, where the design is perfect when you cannot remove anything else."
— Jenova Chen, Interview with Game Developer
Journey really is a Japanese garden: no chat, no kill feed, no leaderboard. Just sand, wind, music, and one other person.
After COVID, the world feels darker to me. We are more connected than ever, yet the default interaction in games and increasingly in politics is to aim, shoot, and move on. I scroll through store pages full of military skins, tactical reload animations, and battle passes. The industry has optimized fun around domination and spectacle.
Meanwhile, the games that moved me most in the last decade did something much quieter: they asked me to carry, not to kill.
The Weight of Care
On the surface, Death Stranding is a delivery simulator. You are Sam Porter Bridges, a courier trudging between isolated cities in a ruined America, carrying packages for clients who rarely step outside. You stack boxes higher than your head, strap more onto your legs and back, and wobble across rivers and up cliffs.
One early sequence gives you the shape of the whole game in miniature: Sam carrying his mother's body across a canyon toward a crematorium, the camera lingering on the weight of the corpse, the straps digging into his shoulders, a lyric soundtrack swelling underneath:
From the outside, the premise looks almost parodically slow. Yet watching people stream their playthroughs, I kept noticing the same thing: they started with jokes about "walking simulators" and ended up talking about love, loneliness, and the weight of care.
"In Death Stranding we're using bridges to represent connection — there are options to use them or break them. It's about making people think about the meaning of connection."
— Hideo Kojima, Interview with BBC
Most online games treat other players as either opponents or background noise. Death Stranding quietly inverts this. You rarely see another player in real time, but you inhabit a shared landscape. Every ladder someone places, every bridge they build, every rope they leave dangling from a cliff can appear in your world.
You see usernames attached to structures that saved you from sliding down a slope or drowning in a river. You add your own pieces, knowing that somewhere, in someone else's instance of this world, your effort might turn a frustrating climb into a small relief.
The design reframes what "progress" means. The optimal strategy isn't just to maximize your own deliveries. It's to build infrastructure that outlives your current session.
We usually talk about bridges as metaphors for connection. Death Stranding literalizes that metaphor and lets players inhabit it, step by step, with aching knees.
Singing for Others
If Death Stranding is about carrying the weight of others, Journey is about lightening it.
In most online games, the design vocabulary for interaction is narrow: aim, shoot, emote, trash talk. Journey removes almost all of that and leaves you with a chime. A single button that emits a musical note and a brief glow.
The music of Journey is diegetic. Your chime charges your companion's scarf, letting them fly higher. Their chime recharges yours. The soundtrack swells not as a backdrop, but as a direct consequence of your combined play. You are not talking about cooperation; you are literally breathing life into each other through sound.
It's hard to overstate how radical this is in a medium dominated by power fantasies. Journey's most important design decision is what it refuses to let you do. You cannot grief. You cannot teabag. You cannot yell slurs into voice chat. The only power you have over another person is the power to wait for them.
Games reflect the values we uphold. When we reward headshots and optimize time to kill, we're not making "neutral" design choices. We're encoding a theory of what counts as skill, what deserves applause. After COVID, as misinformation and anger metastasized through social media, I found myself less able to shrug off hours of simulated violence as "just fun".
I don't think all shooting games are bad. I grew up on them. But I do feel a quiet longing: what if the mainstream of games shifted, even slightly, from perfecting the art of killing to perfecting the art of caring?
Asynchronous Empathy
Both Death Stranding and Journey rely on a particular design trick: asynchronous cooperation.
In Death Stranding, you lay a ladder now so that someone else, days later, won't slip into the ravine. In Journey, you might be guiding a newcomer up a dune while a veteran once did the same for you. The emotional payoff arrives with a delay. You don't get an immediate dopamine hit for pressing the button. The game asks you to trust that your kindness will matter.
This feels closer to real life than the zero sum loops of traditional multiplayer. Most of the meaningful bridges we build are like this. You answer a coding question on Stack Overflow for someone you'll never meet, who might not even thank you. You write documentation for a future teammate you haven't hired yet. You teach your child to be gentle, hoping they'll carry that gentleness into a world you'll no longer inhabit. Like the workers building GaudÃ's Sagrada FamÃlia since 1882, we build for strangers across time.
These games understand that gratitude doesn't always arrive as a push notification. Sometimes it's encoded in the relief of a developer three years from now, finding your answer at 2 AM. Sometimes it's the awe of someone a hundred years from now.
The creators of collaborative architectures understand that gratitude doesn't always arrive as a push notification. Sometimes it's encoded in the awe of someone a hundred years from now.
Bridge Builders
When I think about the future of games, I don't dream of higher resolutions or larger maps. I think about small, stubborn design choices that prioritize bridges over walls.
Kojima again:
"Caring for each other is what makes people feel good."
— Hideo Kojima
Chen, from another angle:
"Games have to be relevant intellectually. You also need depth. You have the adventure — the thrill of the adventure — but you want the goosebumps too."
— Jenova Chen
The goosebumps I felt at the end of Journey, or watching Sam carry his mother's body up a mountain to cremation in Death Stranding streams, didn't come from spectacle. They came from something quieter: grief, responsibility, the choice to show up for each other when it's hard, slow, and boring.
Once you've felt what it's like to build a bridge that helps a stranger, it's hard to pretend all we want from this medium is better guns.
I don't think violence in fiction is inherently immoral, but we are leaving so much on the table. Games are uniquely capable of simulating systems of care, of making you feel the drag of an overloaded backpack or the relief of a companion's chime in a snowstorm. They can show us how to build more bridges and sing for each other.
Somewhere out there, as you read this, someone is booting up Journey for the first time. Another player is silently joining their session, ready to walk beside them with no promise of reward. In another instance of Death Stranding, a ladder you placed months ago might still be helping couriers cross a canyon.
None of you will ever meet. But the bridges are real.