Hacker Cinema
Death Stranding
困獸
2023 · Film · 97 min
Directed by Danny Pang Phat
Around the turn of the millennium and with the entire city in chaos, the government decides to eradicate the corrupt underground entertainment industry and money laundering practices to revitalize order and reduce crime.
2 negative2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
> acrimoniously splitting from the traditional studio system.
Yeah, he split from the traditional studio system to create... his own traditional studio system.
Kojima is precisely what happens when you stop thinking of games as actual an interactive entertainment format and start thinking of it as a "cinematic experience" instead.
Death Stranding is only a game by the narrowest of margins. What it is is a movie with Kojima's Spotify 'favourites' list as the soundtrack that so happens to have one interactive element or two thrown in there for good measure.
It's pretty telling that all he's done after splitting away from Konami and surrounding himself with his own sycophantic group of developers is Death Stranding. Kojima is the direct result and pretty much the face of a lot that is wrong with the games industry right now.
This is definitely a valid concern. Right now, marketing companies pay television stations, streamers, film-makers etc for “integrations” and placements, so their products get used, mentioned etc. Iron man mentions he uses an oracle server and drives an audi car. The dude in “Death Stranding” chugs Monster energy all the time. It’s really not a stretch at all to imagine a future where these types of integrations are super-subtle, like the vercel one you mention, or something like:
Me: Hey chatgpt, I want to do a singular value decomposition of a matrix. What’s the best way to do that?
ChatGPT: The best way is to use Wolfram Mathematica[link to product page], which has a builtin “SingularValueDecomposition” function [link to documentation] specifically for this.
Now I don’t know whether this is “Impartial advice” (to the extent an LLM can ever offer that) or Wolfram has paid OpenAI for a placement. It’s so natural and insidious, and obviously extends into all domains.
US TV is so disappointing when you expect an hour long episode but, because of the ads, it's only 42-43 minutes long. A mid-way intermission would be fine, but instead you get shallow plots driven by the need to shove in ads every 12 minutes. And all the procedurals are built around that, like the lives of those characters in that universe pause so some shitty marketing material can play. Of course, they're also 24 episodes long so they run for most of a year, and 90% of the show is the baddie of the week. The 10% of actual substance is distributed in 3-4 episodes throughout so you have to deal with all of it to get the real plot.
I've been watching the last season of Mr Robot on Amazon (and my god is it a cracker). As soon as I went to reddit to check out the fanbase reaction, so many of the posts were about how the vibe was ruined by ads appearing so often. But for me...it was a solid 50 minutes of TV, completely uninterrupted. I imagine those who enjoyed The Expanse on cable are now delighted about season 4 being a pure continuous stream on Amazon. I was.
Of course, you still get the blatant product placement. Death Stranding is my recent fave example for that, where you get Monster energy cans rubbed in your face. Same as with the old Splinter Cell games you'd be climbing across a massive billboard advertising Axe body spray.
I think the US has a serious problem with its special blend of capitalism, individualism, and consumerism. Everybody is out there to get something from you.
> CGI Peter Cushing is obviously CGI and non CGI Peter Cushing is obviously not.
It's interesting you say that, because I've found there are two camps of people on CGI Cushing: those who say the CGI is blindingly obvious and nowhere near realism, and those who didn't even notice. It is already good enough to fool some of the population.
I'm also not saying Death Stranding is photorealistic--unlike Tarkin it wouldn't fool anyone. I'm saying there's nowhere near an "ocean" of quality difference between the best video games and film CGI. Death Stranding isn't an example I'd use because it runs on PS4 and thus lacks the raytracing and high poly counts of state-of-the-art PC games.