What are your hands doing right now? They’re probably playing some part in how you’re able to read this text in the first place, but you likely weren’t paying a lot of attention to them. Our hands are our most frequent and reliable way of interacting with the world around us, and as a result, we tend not to give them much thought.
And yet, hands are far more than just tools to get a job done. Ever since its discovery, the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina has fascinated people with the stencilled handprints of hundreds of human beings. Some of them reach out to us over a historical distance of nearly 10,000 years. There’s something both mysterious and mundane, distant and intimate about this sight. We can’t know the minds of the humans that left their handprints behind, but we do know that they were people like us, exploring and connected to the world around them through their hands.
The Cave of Hands made its way into several video games, Psychonauts 2 and Genesis Noir among them. They’re far from the only games to show appreciation for hands, and handprints in particular. Just think about how the bloody handprint on the wall has long become the tired cornerstone of environmental storytelling in countless horror and action games.
Death Stranding takes this obsession with handprints several steps further, making them a central symbol of its narrative. Handprints on the ground or on walls are one way of recognising the threat of the game’s invisible ghost-like BTs. Even on the skin of our protagonist Sam, they’ve left their marks. They become a symbol for Sam’s fear and distrust of human connection, exemplified by his repeated refusal to shake hands with anyone. The inhabitants of the game’s post-apocalyptic world are haunted by the intimate absences of ghostly hands, in a literal as well as a figurative sense: the inherent potential of the hand to both hurt and comfort, push away and embrace, destroy and mend, communicate and silence. Death Stranding is not exactly subtle in its symbolism, but it does succeed in highlighting the powerful ambiguity of the hand’s significance, and our ambivalence towards it.
Sometimes, this ambiguity is resolved beyond a doubt. The expressive power of the hand is great, and it can be used as an effective shorthand (excuse the pun) to convey a variety of messages or emotional states: hands folded in front of the face signal grief; a fist, aggression; a hand raised above the head stands for a call for help; a hand outstretched and turned upside down, a gesture of giving.
Hands are so good at emotional expression, in fact, that the history of political propaganda and symbolism cannot be disentangled from the history of the hand within art. The political posters of the 20th century are full of fists smashing enemies and injustices or being raised in a gesture of strength and solidarity. We also find the transgressive and groping hands of a societal bogeyman threatening the nation, or helping hands offered to the downtrodden.
Video games have made this visual language a part of their own. Just think of the satirical posters of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, full of fists symbolising the strength of American fascism, the messianic graffiti of The Last of Us 2 with raised hands as a symbol of solidarity, or the Magister’s insignia in Divinity: Original Sin 2, consisting of a threateningly splayed hand with a single eye in its palm, evoking both surveillance and totalitarian control.
It is exactly the intimate, innocuous familiarity of the hand which can turn it into a creeping and alien horror, each finger a leg or feeler fumbling towards its prey. Dark Souls 3, Elden Ring and The Eternal Cylinder all feature monstrous hands as distorted and disjointed threats. Remove the human agency from the hand, and what remains is something horrifying and uncanny. To understand why, one need only look back to the Cave of Hands and the feelings it inspires; the hand may be the most powerful symbol for our shared humanity. Take away the humanity, and it becomes an empty husk, threatening our identity as a species itself.