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New story in Technology from Time: Death Stranding Is the Weirdest Game I’ve Ever Played, and I Loved Every Minute

Death Stranding is a video game about America, death, and high speed package delivery.

Towards the end of the game, I was running medical supplies from one city to another. I had a truck, which made things easier, but the terrain was rocky. I tried to drive the truck down a cliff and over a river, but I miscalculated and got stuck on some rocks. I hauled myself out of the driver’s seat, sighed, and unloaded the cargo, strapping it to my back.

It was storming, not just a light rain, but a maelstrom that reduced visibility to just a few feet ahead of me. And in Death Stranding, the rain ages everything it touches. Every moment I spent outside the truck degraded the medical supplies, and I had miles to go yet. I trudged across the river, and could just barely make out my destination when the ghosts came — Beached Things, BTs, the dead. My Bridge Baby screamed a warning, but the rain had made it hard to see. It was too late. The ghosts found me, ripping the packages from my back and flinging my body across the map.

I raised up, the pristine grassy landscape of America replaced by crude bubbling tar. Dilapidated buildings and ruined vehicles frothed on the surface of the black pool, relics from America’s past floating on a sea of decayed matter. The tar coalesced in the distance and formed a whale that swam towards me. The tar whale screeched and eldritch tentacles burst from its face, forming a maw designed to drag me into the world of the dead. I filled a grenade with my blood, climbed to the top of a ruined building as it bubbled on the surface of the tar pool, and prayed the medical supplies would survive the encounter.

Death Stranding hits the PlayStation 4 on November 8 and arrives on PC next year. The camera hovers in a third-person, over-the-shoulder view. There’s action, but it’s not an action game. There’s ghosts, but it’s not a horror game. The story takes place in the future, but it’s not a science fiction game. It’s a game about delivering packages and building connections — what its creator, video game auteur Hideo Kojima, calls a “strand” game.

Death Stranding’s core gameplay involves walking from point A to point B delivering packages. Sometimes your parcels are as serious as medical supplies, but other times they’re as innocuous as movies and magazines.

But it gets so much weirder than that.

In Death Stranding, death itself is broken, and the barrier between the living and the dead is rendered permeable. Timefall, the water that ages everything it touches, has replaced rain. When a person dies, if they’re not cremated within 24 hours, their body explodes like a nuclear bomb. In this future, America is over. People live in isolation, afraid to group up in cities. The countryside is populated by people living in bunkers, unforgiving terrain, ghosts, and marauders.

Enter Sam Porter Bridges, played by Norman Reedus. Sam is a courier, and his adopted mother also happens to be the President of what’s left of the United States. On her deathbed, she gives Sam a mission: reconnect America. The U.S. has developed a new technology, a form of instant communication called the Chiral Network. Sam’s job is to move from the East Coast to the West Coast, connecting America’s cities and settlements to the Chiral Network. Along the way, he’ll help people get the supplies they need and rescue his estranged sister, who’s been kidnapped by terrorists.

The bulk of Death Stranding is about walking between these different human settlements. Thanks to the Timefall, America’s infrastructure is gone. So I had to make my own paths up mountains, across rivers, and around gorges. To traverse these dangers, I used ladders and ropes, built bridges and even reconstructed portions of America’s highway system.

Part of the magic of Death Stranding is that you aren’t rebuilding America by yourself. As I journeyed, I saw the ladders, ropes, and other assorted improvements other players had laid down. When I built a bridge across a chasm, other players in other games could see that bridge. If they felt the bridge helped them, they could “like” it, which made it more visible to more players.

Receiving more “likes” from fellow players allowed me to make connections with more people and see more infrastructure. When the game started, I could connect with five other players. By the game’s end, I could connect with a total of 30—all of us rebuilding America together, each working independently but sharing resources and infrastructure.

Death Stranding is epic, weird, and not like anything I’ve ever played before. The story is a core draw here — Bridges’ journey across America posits big questions about technology’s role in American life, about the isolation created by the internet, and our culture’s dysfunctional relationship with death. It doesn’t always answer those questions, and sometimes it answers them poorly. But there’s no other big-budget video game on the market today doing anything as innovative or as strange as Death Stranding.

I loved Death Stranding, and think lots of other people will too. But just as many will hate it. It’s odd, contains cutscenes that run upwards of an hour, and long stretches of the gameplay are peaceful and meditative. Its action beats are rare, but intense. It plays with big ideas about America and death, but doesn’t quite deliver on all its narrative promises.

And yet Death Stranding is also a game where Mads Mikkelsen pursued me relentlessly through the afterlife, where one of its principal villains seems to know that they’re in a video game, where directors Guillermo Del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn make up the supporting cast, and a stillborn baby in a jar is both a piece of equipment that lets you avoid ghosts and the emotional core of the story. I’ve never played anything like Death Stranding, and I doubt I ever will again. That alone is worth the $60 price tag.

New story in Technology from Time: Google Is Buying Fitbit in a $2.1 Billion Deal to Fight Against the Apple Watch

(Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc.’s Google agreed to buy smartwatch maker Fitbit Inc. for $2.1 billion in cash, a move that could shore up the internet giant’s hardware business while also potentially increasing antitrust scrutiny. Fitbit shares jumped 17%.

Google will pay $7.35 a share for San Francisco-based Fitbit, according to a statement Friday. That represents a 71% premium to Fitbit’s stock price before Reuters reported Google had made a bid on the company on Oct. 28. The acquisition is Google’s second major purchase this year, after it agreed to pay $2.6 billion for cloud software provider Looker in June.

The deal is sure to attract regulatory scrutiny. State and federal authorities are investigating Google for potential anti-competitive practices related to how it handles consumer data and operates in the digital-advertising market. Though Google isn’t a leader in smartwatches or fitness trackers, regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere will likely have questions about what Google intends to do with the data Fitbit users have shared over the years, including intimate health and location information.

The companies addressed the likely concerns by pledging to be transparent about the data Google collects and why. “Strong privacy and security guidelines have been part of Fitbit’s DNA since day one, and this will not change,” according to the statement. “The company never sells personal information, and Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.”

Google has a growing ecosystem of smartphones and laptops, and provides a free wearable operating system called Wear OS for other companies to use, but has yet to build its own watch. Buying Fitbit would give Google a new platform along with access to the company’s more than 27 million active users. Google could also combine the company with smartwatch technology it bought from Fossil Group Inc. earlier this year to help it design new products.

Fitbit has been struggling to compete with Apple Inc. and others in the smartwatch market. Its shares sunk to a low of $2.85 a share at the end of August. The stock has recovered since news broke that Google might swoop in to bid, but is still far below Fitbit’s $20 per-share price in the company’s 2015 initial public offering.

The transaction is expected to close next year, according to the companies.

New story in Technology from Time: These Researchers Are Using AI Drones to More Safely Track Wildlife

In the late ’90s, wildlife conservationists Zoe Jewell and Sky Alibhai were grappling with a troubling realization. The pair had been studying black rhino populations in Zimbabwe, and they spent a good deal of their time shooting the animals with tranquilizer darts and affixing radio collars around their necks. But after years of work, the researchers realized there was a major problem: Their technique, commonly used by all manner of wildlife scientists, seemed to be causing female rhinos to have fewer offspring.

The researchers published their findings in 2001, igniting a controversy in the conservation world. The problem, says Duke University professor of conservation ecology Stuart Pimm, is that being “collared” is extremely stressful for animals. “If you were walking through your neighborhood and suddenly a bunch of strange people came charging after you … and you got shot in the ass with a dart and woke up with something around your neck, I think you’d be in pretty bad shape too,” he says.

But Jewell and Alibhai had an idea. While working alongside the Shona tribe in Zimbabwe, they saw how the indigenous trackers were able to deduce an enormous amount of information about wildlife from animals’ footprints, including weight, sex, and species, all without getting anywhere close to the animals themselves. “We would go out with local game scouts, who were often expert trackers, and they would often laugh at us as we were listening to these signals coming from the collars,” Jewell says. “They would say to us, ‘all you need to do is look on the ground.”

Might it be possible, they wondered, to apply those time-tested techniques to conservation efforts?

Yes, it turns out. In 2004, the pair founded WildTrack, a nonprofit organization that developed a footprint identification technique (FIT) and specialized software for researchers to track wildlife populations. WildTrack can identify individual animals with 95% accuracy, it says, all without getting up close or using camera traps. Furthermore, Jewell says WildTrack’s technique can help solve one of the core challenges in any conservation effort: figuring out how many animals are in the wild, and where exactly they are.

While the process was inspired by indigenous trackers, Jewell says WildTrack’s technology is still limited compared to their capabilities. “It’s humbling in a way to look at what these expert [trackers] can do in the field,” she says. “We can only still emulate a tiny bit of that.”

WildTrack’s method is being used in dozens of conservation efforts around the world, from monitoring rhinos in Namibia, to eurasian otters in Portugal, to tigers in Nepal. In China, where panda researchers formerly had little option but to measure the lengths of undigested bamboo pieces in feces to identify and track individuals, the FIT protocol, which is faster and more accurate, has been a breakthrough. “This is extraordinary, exciting work,” says Pimm. “It’s technologically very clever, and it feeds directly into good natural history.”

With hundreds of footprint images now coming in every week from monitoring efforts across the world, the researchers at WildTrack are looking to new advances in computing, especially artificial intelligence (AI), to speed up their work. Jewell and Alibhai have been working with software provider SAS since the late nineties. In 2018, they collaborated to create a machine learning algorithm that can automatically identify footprints or find marker points in footprint images, a task researchers used to carry out by hand. The team soon trained an AI system to recognize different species of big cats just from looking at paw prints. “After a while, you get it to tell the difference between a cougar and a snow leopard, or any of the big cats really,” says Craig Mann, a software developer on the WildTrack project at SAS. Although the AI software doesn’t yet do all the work of human researchers, it has made the time-consuming FIT process about five times faster.

AI advancements aren’t just being used to help conservation efforts in the lab — WildTrack’s researchers are also using AI to improve their footprint-gathering technique. Together with European drone company SenseFly, they’re developing an AI-powered drone to track footprints and collect information about animals from the air. In August, the researchers tested a drone typically used for mining, surveying and agriculture to scan a large area and locate human, dog and horse tracks. Their hope is to develop a drone that can scan footprints in higher resolution, as well as follow animal tracks across grasslands or deep snow.

Some of WildTrack’s work has attracted interest from outside the conservation community. The group has received financial support from the U.S. Army, which often funds projects in which it sees a possible long-term benefit. Some of that interest came from the Army’s own conservation work, which includes helping park rangers prevent poaching and illicit trafficking of elephant tusks and rhino horns, activities that can fund extremist groups. But it’s also interested in using similar techniques to track humans. “We see this as a long-term investment,” says Stephan Lee, a chief scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. “The techniques developed can be obviously applied to studying if [we can be] identifying individuals specifically.”

For Jewell, it’s a fortunate coincidence that the U.S. Army’s goals align with those of WildTrack. She says stopping trade in body parts like rhino horns from endangered animals is beneficial both for conservation and regional stability. “We feel very encouraged that the U.S. Army Research Office is working with us to support the conservation of endangered species and glad that we have a common mission,” she says over email.

That military research may eventually pay dividends in the defense sphere, but it’s also a potent reminder of the potential for all technologies, even those developed for as agreeable a purpose as wildlife conservation, to be used in different ways than originally intended. But for conservationists faced with a slew of threats — poaching, habitat loss, climate change — there may be little alternative but to use every technological advancement and financial opportunity at their disposal to prevent the extinction of vital species. And if that means monitoring rhinos from military-funded, AI-powered footprint tracking drones gliding high above the savanna, then so be it. “Non-invasive monitoring, I think it’s very much an idea that’s time has come,” says Pimm. “It’s going to be the wave of the future.”

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Four killed, several injured after shooting during Halloween party

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EXCLUSIVE: Enormous price of Warren's 'Medicare-for-All' plan revealed; campaign still insists it won't raise middle-class taxes

11/01/19 3:08 AM