Sunday September 28, “Progressive Game Design and Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding” with Bryan Hartzheim (Tokyo Waseda University, Game Lab)

Hideo Kojima is one of the most recognizable names in video games, celebrated for creating the Metal Gear franchise and popularizing the concept of stealth gameplay. While his games are often credited for being cinematic, this talk argues that this is but one aspect of Kojima’s broader approach to what can be called a “progressive game design,” where designers attempt to contribute a degree of progress to the video game industry and, by extension, to some of the important questions of our time. In this talk, Dr. Bryan Hikari Hartzheim describes the key components of this design ethos by drawing upon designer discourses in game industry trade and consumer periodicals, as well as ludic examples from Kojima Productions’ games, with an emphasis on his most recent new intellectual properties:Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.

When: 18:00-19:30, with Apéro
Where: The Swiss Game Hub | Erika-Mann-Strasse 11, 8050 Zürich
Entry Fee: none