In 2025, Starbucks removed 30,000 chairs across its locations. They also removed outlets and made the seating more uncomfortable. This change marked their pivot toward an online-forward takeout strategy. From a data perspective, that made sense. With mobile orders surging, it seemed like Starbucks was entering it’s grab and go era.

However, this change did not work. Instead of saving money, they lost customers to smaller coffee shops and home barista setups.

Now, Starbucks is renovating over 1,000 stores to create spaces that are designed for customers to stay and connect.

This change aligns with growing concerns of loneliness despite having more tools to connect than ever before. Even though we can talk to anyone anywhere and play games online, there is still a lingering feeling that that is not enough, and it’s not.

It’s transient, and technology will never be able to replace the importance of human connection. Sitting down to drink a cup of coffee, sitting on a couch, looking for what to watch, and just getting bored together.

The experience is more important than the product.

In Death Stranding, the Earth has become nearly impossible to traverse without specialized equipment, and even then, there are a myriad of tar monsters trying to kill you. Oh, and if you die on your way to your destination, your body will be eaten by a giant monster with a hand for a head, and leave a massive crater.

That being said, you shouldn’t go outside.

In most video games, you play as a fighter of some kind. A dude with a gun, a person with a staff (that’s basically a gun), or a guy with a sword. There are a ton of exceptions, especially in the indie scene. However, most bigger budget games are dude with weapon.

In Death Stranding, you play as a porter — someone who moves and delivers cargo. You’re not equipped with any lethal weapons (cause if someone dies in the field, that dude will show up and explode). You have tools like:

These tools are vitally important for traversing the terrain, which is littered with sharp rocks, rushing rivers, sheer cliffs, and steep slopes.

Shortly into the game, you can start fabricating electricity “guns” and bola guns, but they don’t feel like guns. They’re there to deal with the enemies trying to steal your cargo, but more often than not, I find myself trying to avoid confrontation at all costs.

And that’s by design.

Before Death Stranding came out, Hideo Kojima (the game’s creator), talked about this concept of the stick and the rope. Sticks are used to keep things away (think of a shepherd’s staff), and the rope is used to bind things together. He argued that most games are about the stick, but Death Stranding is about the rope.

Rather than focusing on fighting enemies, Kojima wanted this game to focus on binding people together. Or what Kojima called, “a strand-type game.”

When Death Stranding first came out, many people reviled it. Like, truly hated it. “strand-type” became a joke, and gamers everywhere were disappointed.

Videogamedunkey’s first video about Death Stranding is a great touchpoint for what people thought when the game came out. Beweary: It’s very negative and a bit intense.

However, just a couple of years later, he played the game during quarantine and loved it.

This experience was true for a lot of people. Something clicked in people’s heads, and the narrative switched from “this game is a joke” to “this is exactly what I need”.

What changed?

The world did.

You remember the 2020 covid virus and the quarantine, so you definitely remember being stuck inside with little to no way to get important supplies, hang out, and make connections. As much as I hate to say it, but Amazon became a God-send, UPS, FEDEX, and USPS became the point of contact to the outside world.

Sound familiar? It’s pretty similar to the world state in Death Stranding.

There may not have been tar monsters chasing delivery drivers, but it’s not hard to see the connections between 2020 and the setting of Death Stranding.

When Death Stranding came out in November 2019, the world wasn’t ready for it because the world didn’t know the importance of connections. However, when the ability to connect got taken away, the game made more sense and changed from a joke to a prescient masterpiece.

If you didn’t know anything about Death Stranding and played it today, you’d probably think the game came out after 2020. Strangely, this game came out in 2019.

So many of this game’s themes were directly experienced in 2020, and that made the game make sense. It made sense to play as a porter because we’d experienced why that job is so important.

In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic. You can read the big report here. The first chapter of this report is all about the importance of connections, and even calls connections a basic human need. Beyond this report, connection is necessary for human survival.

Personally, I didn’t hear about the loneliness epidemic until around 2025. It’s an issue that’s been around for a while and only seems to be getting worse. People need more connections, but many of the tools that are meant to help are only hurting.

Social Media and online chat channels like Discord are both trying to help people make connections, but don’t seem to be working. And obviously, despite what some CEOs have to say, AI also won’t fix anything.

Death Stranding is all about making connections that go beyond just being able to talk and share data.

In the world of Death Stranding, most things can be fabricated using printers. Things like ladders, tools, and even roads can be printed using these fabricators. The only issue is that you can’t print metal, ceramics, chemicals, food, steel, meaningful collectables, or human connection.

That’s where the Porters come in and where the importance of connections is displayed. Without these connections, people would go hungry, lose power, and forget what makes them important.

It’s wild just how well this game is fitting into my life right now.

I picked this up a day after the game came out. I was in college, and completely forgot about how excited I was for it until my roommate said, “Did you see the new Kojima game sucks?” He and I sped off to Target so I could buy it.

It was not a good fit for playing in the dorms. It’s slow, and it takes a while to get used to what the game is asking you to do. I also wanted to use my time during the last year of college to y’know, hang out with the people I had grown close with.

However, starting this game 2 days before the birth of my second child was the best time to start this game. It matches a lot of the criteria for being a good parent game. You can save almost anywhere, I find it cozy (nice rain and beautiful vistas), and for the most part requires medium dexterity.

This has been my daily morning driver while hanging out with the newborn.

I’ll also say, you have a baby strapped to your chest that you have to soothe by moving the controller up and down, and I literally soothed my real-life baby while soothing my digital baby. It was an experience.

It’s also wild how this game speaks to current issues in the world.

While playing this game, I’ve remembered the quarantine, but I’m also thinking about the people I’ve met online. People who don’t have many connections other than the ones they’ve made online. While it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to have transient connections with people in a Discord server or online forum, I’ve seen the cries for help when some of them realize that they desperately need a tangible, real-life connection.

Just how Startbucks can’t go online-forward, we can’t be online forward.

It’s 2026, and Death Stranding feels less about the pandemic and more about the loneliness of an online world.