Looking at AI Through the Lens of Meme: Thoughts After Playing Death Stranding 2

Recently I finished the story of Death Stranding 2. The abstractness of some of its performances shocked me. I could not understand why certain scenes were designed that way: why did people suddenly start singing here? Why did the villain perform the American national anthem at the end? And why was pizza kung fu so powerful? After doing some quick research, I suddenly realized something: this kind of game seems very hard to copy. Not only because of its gameplay, but even more because of its cultural expression.

---

What Kind of Game Is Death Stranding?

Unlike the game genres already on the market, it has its own new gameplay experience and worldview.

It is not like the Assassin's Creed series, which has already formed a relatively mature AAA industrial template: a big open world, repeated outpost clearing, RPG-style equipment growth, question marks all over the map (the question marks in The Witcher 3 were still pretty good), and static story cutscenes. It feels as if, as long as the budget, team, and production pipeline are big enough, you can make something that "looks about right" (though I heard Ubisoft is remaking Black Flag, so I will still have to try it on hands). It is also not like Soulslikes, which have a very clear gameplay skeleton: bonfires, death penalties, stamina bars, boss design, fragmented narrative. Change the worldview and art theme, and players can quickly understand, "Oh, this has some Souls flavor." Nor is it like a linear AAA game that gives you as many cinematic shocks and exquisite level designs as possible within a limited route.

Death Stranding is different.

Its gameplay is new, its game concept is something I have never seen before, and the pleasure it brings has a very distinctive taste.

Others can imitate its art, its long takes, its barren, absurd, realistic, or slightly mystical atmosphere. They can even make an identical "delivery game" or "infrastructure-building game." But it is very hard to truly reproduce the feeling it gives players. Because the core of the game is not a single system, but a complete experience: walking through the wilderness with cargo, planning routes, keeping balance, completing asynchronous cooperation or confrontation with strangers, slowly stepping out a path on what used to be a barren and rugged wasteland, all inside a self-consistent and rich worldview, in a work that has its own philosophical discussion and ideological expression.

Games are interactive art, so let's talk about gameplay.

If we only talk about gameplay, it seems a little boring. What it focuses on is the worst part of almost every open-world game: walking time. Most game companies keep optimizing fast travel so players do not spend too much time on the road and get tired. But Death Stranding makes this its main selling point. The game is basically about delivering cargo from A to B. Yet once you truly get into it and quietly sync with the game's wavelength, you find a strong stickiness inside this "boredom": climbing steep mountains, sneaking through watcher territory, drawing out and defeating BTs, building infrastructure along the road to make later deliveries easier, and finally delivering cargo to an NPC with zero damage, receiving likes and blueprints for new equipment. Everything you do on this journey, including the path you walk, can be synchronized into another player's world: maybe your infrastructure helps someone else, or maybe the simplest thing you leave behind is just telling others that this route can reach the destination. During the process, you feel the joy of getting new equipment and the sense of achievement that comes from forming "connections" with other players.

Its worldview also reaches a clever kind of balance. Timefall, umbilical cords, the Beach, the chiral network: a series of new terms and settings relate to each other while also corresponding to meanings in the real world, creating certain metaphors that make the world easier to understand and enter (let me complain here about the long-winded text and so-called "setting terms" in some gacha games). All settings participate in the difficulties and challenges players encounter: some as special mechanics, some as final goals, and some as potential dangers that need to be guarded against. Meanwhile, Kojima-san also adds many Easter eggs into this world, or you could say "humorous and abstract" content, just like the performances I mentioned at the beginning. At first they made me wonder: won't this break the carefully designed worldview? For such a high-budget AAA game, is it not too risky for the director to smuggle in so much personal taste?

But the result is just like the line circulating online: "Commercialization is under pressure, and finally yielded to Hideo Kojima."

For casual players, these moments bring a knowing smile during the game. But if you dig into them carefully, you find that they not only do not break the worldview, but add another layer of metaphor and philosophical thought to it. The appropriately abrupt feeling hooks players into thinking. While feeling surprised, they can also experience the corresponding meaning. Whether you understand it or not, you slowly accept this abruptness, and it becomes one of the game's unique features.

So I started to wonder: what kind of game creator is Hideo Kojima exactly?

Why does he have so many fans around the world? Why does he dare to invest so much money into making a game that looks "not in line with the blockbuster formula"? Why was the first game so divisive when it first came out, while by the second one, many players could already seriously discuss it as a Game of the Year candidate?

What Meme Means

With this curiosity, I watched some Death Stranding 2 lore analysis videos on Bilibili and read some interviews with Hideo Kojima. I learned about a turbulent life experience full of misfortune and coincidence, one that carries the shadow of many otaku boys. I also learned how movies, games, reading, and thinking inspired his creative career. One interview especially caught my attention: when talking about his first directed work, Metal Gear, he said it mainly explored Meme.

When I first saw the word, my immediate reaction was: how could "meme images" have been a subject of discussion nearly forty years ago? After all, in today's internet context, the most common Chinese translation of "meme" is basically "funny image template": cats and dogs with captions, reaction images, abstract templates. They all seem to count as memes. But the Meme Kojima was talking about was clearly not that.

So I looked it up.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Meme, the concept of the meme comes from Richard Dawkins's 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins wanted to express that culture also has units of transmission similar to genes. A meme can be a melody, an idea, a slogan, a fashion, a skill, or any cultural fragment that people imitate, copy, transform, and continue spreading.

In other words, a meme was not originally an internet reaction image.

Reaction images are certainly memes, but memes are much bigger than reaction images. Our two-part allegorical sayings are memes, idioms are memes, books are memes, movies are memes, internet catchphrases are memes, collective repetition in Bilibili comments is a meme, gamer slang is a meme (you are not qualified, you are not qualified, and because of that you are not qualified), and even certain creative methods, aesthetic tastes, and narrative formulas are memes. Like genes inside culture, they are copied, rewritten, sometimes misunderstood, then recreated by generation after generation, and they keep living.

AI Cannot Create Cultural Genes

After understanding what meme means, and then thinking about the story design and hidden metaphors behind Death Stranding 2, I could not help connecting it to the hottest concept of our era: AI. Suddenly, the whole thing became interesting to me.

Today's large language models are not truly people with lived experience. They do not have blurry childhood memories, the joy of staying up all night playing games, the surprise of walking into the wilderness for the first time, or the feeling of being struck by a lyric or a melody late at night while emo. In essence, they are huge probability calculators, absorbing a vast amount of text, images, code, music, and knowledge left behind by humans, then searching for vector relationships among those existing materials and giving an answer that is "most like something a human would say."

In other words, through a massive amount of human corpus, AI has already become very good at using existing memes.

Ask it to write a cyberpunk story, and it knows how neon lights, rainy nights, prosthetic bodies, monopolistic corporations, and lower-class districts should be combined. Ask it to design a Soulslike game setting, and it knows roughly what ruined kingdoms, lost gods, curses, bosses, and obscure item descriptions should look like. Ask it to make an "internet-style" image, and it also knows the common templates in contemporary aesthetics.

But the problem is that most of this is still calling, stitching, and redistributing existing cultural genes. AI can quickly rearrange the familiar things we already know, sometimes beautifully, completely, and convincingly.

But New Cultural Currents Often Come from Bold Attempts and Mistakes

Looking back at new cultural currents in human history, quite a few impressive ones came from a bold attempt, a misunderstanding, or simply an accident.

Take the Renaissance as an example. Some ancient Greek and Roman knowledge of philosophy, literature, art, and science had been preserved, filtered, and used by the Church for theological purposes during the Middle Ages, partly to consolidate its rule and class structure. During the Renaissance, humanists such as Petrarch and Boccaccio rediscovered a large number of classical texts from the Arab world and monasteries. But they did not simply restore them in a fundamentalist way. Instead, they interpreted them through the eyes and needs of their own time. They emphasized the praise of human reason, secular life, and bodily beauty in classical culture, while to some extent ignoring or downplaying the superstition, slavery, and pessimism that also existed in antiquity. This created a historical and cultural explosion. Even Confucianism, which we now sometimes criticize as part of feudal tradition, was also an incredibly rebellious existence in its own social context.

AI only produces something that is highly likely to be correct based on existing memes, or cultural content. The difference already appears at the level of underlying logic. So if you ask whether it can create a truly new meme, whether it can continuously create a new mode of expression, a new structure of experience, or a new "cultural gene" that humans will understand from then on, I still feel somewhat doubtful.

That brings me back to why the performance arrangements and gameplay design of Death Stranding feel so precious to me.

It does not simply invite Hollywood actors, shoot a pile of luxurious cutscenes, and then stuff them into an open-world gameplay loop everyone already knows. It did invite recognizable actors such as Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, and Mads Mikkelsen, and it does have cinematic shots, music, and narrative ambition. But it does not treat these things merely as gimmicks to make money. Instead, it uses a very strange, risky, and unstable gameplay system to push a new experience in front of players.

"Delivery" is such an ordinary thing, even boring-sounding.

But in Death Stranding, it becomes a way of connecting people. What you carry is not just cargo, but also weight, responsibility, route choice, risk, and time. A bridge you build may be used by another player you will never meet. A charging station you place may just happen to save a desperate player. The game's "connection" is not a line of dialogue. It is built into terrain, physics, resources, and asynchronous multiplayer systems. Even when I continued building facilities later, I started thinking about whether this device would still help other players after entering their worlds.

This feels very much like the birth of a new meme.

Before it, it was hard to imagine that a big-budget game could turn "walking" and "delivery" into the core experience. After it, whenever people see similar asynchronous assistance or confrontation, they may say: "This feels a bit like Death Stranding." That sentence itself shows that it has already become a cultural unit that can be recognized, quoted, and spread.

From now on, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have not played Death Stranding, and those who have.

As for the bizarre performance effects mentioned earlier, I think it is precisely these bizarre performances that, in return, become strange memes. They give this distinctive game an additional kind of "connection" with other cultures and fans, and create new memes belonging to its own players, like a secret key for connection among the game's fans.

From Another Angle, the Relationship Between AI and Meme May Not Be So Pessimistic

If AI only keeps repeating old memes, then of course it will make culture more average, more similar, more "correct but boring." We can already see this flavor in many places: copy that is as pretty as a template but stiff, images that are as polished as templates but incomplete, and expressions that are fluent but lack personal experience. They are not bad, but they are also unlikely to leave long-lasting traces.

But from the opposite direction, AI may also become a tool that helps memes keep growing.

In the past, when someone had a strange idea and wanted to turn it into a game, animation, software, short film, or other cultural work, they often needed a lot of money, a team, technical accumulation, or the ability to absorb trial-and-error costs. Many ideas were not worthless; they died before they could land. Modeling, programming, art, sound effects, editing, testing: these are not merely "repetitive labor," but they really are high walls that must be crossed before an idea becomes a work.

If AI continues to develop and can truly reduce costs in modeling, code, animation, scripts, level prototypes, and other parts of the process, letting more people bring their ideas into reality with smaller teams, less money, and shorter trial-and-error cycles, then that might be a beautiful thing. (My own little website also developed this quickly and gained this many effects precisely because of AI.)

Because culture is not created only by big companies and big budgets.

Many new memes may begin as one person's strange thought, a small team's obsession, a gameplay idea that does not look very commercial, or a simple sentence: "I just want to try whether this works." If AI can drag these thoughts out of people's heads and into reality, allowing more works that previously had no chance to take shape to be seen, then it is not replacing culture. It is widening the entrance through which culture can happen. Of course, the premise is that we still provide something truly human. AI can help us reach the work faster. But new memes may still have to grow out of human loneliness, curiosity, stubbornness, failure, and experience.

The inspiration Death Stranding 2 gave me is probably this: when a creator truly presses their feelings, aesthetics, and sense of problems into a work, it has the chance to become a new cultural gene. At first, people may find it strange, alternative, or unlike a "normal game." But as long as it really strikes something, it will be remembered, discussed, imitated, or misunderstood, and then it will keep spreading.

Finally, I want to use the closing words Hideo Kojima gives to players in Death Stranding 2 to look toward our future and development in the AI era. Even if we do not know what the future will be like, we should not stop exploring, and we should not stop trying.

Though the future is a product of every present that precedes it,

Tomorrow does not belong to today.

To live is to imagine ourselves in the future.

And there we inevitably arrive

Yet our place in said future may not be the one we envision.

-- Kobo Abe, The Search for the Present