Helldivers 2

A sixty-second countdown is running, and four people who do not know each other are about to die together.

The setting is a planet whose name they have forgotten, one of dozens in the rotating war the game's metagame is running this week. Their objective is complete. The Pelican is inbound. The bugs are coming. The bugs are a thirty-millimeter-long swarming species the game calls Terminids and the four people call, simply and habitually, bugs. The four people are arranging themselves on a hill that has been selected, in the last sixty seconds, by an informal process of consensus that no one initiated and no one objected to: this is the hill they are dying on. One of them is laying mines. One is calling in an orbital strike on an approaching swarm. One has run halfway up the ridge to cover the flank. The fourth is, briefly, dead. The remaining three will respawn the fourth on the ship the moment the ship lands. The fourth knows this. The fourth is not panicking. The countdown is running. The bugs are coming. The ship is coming. The hill is being held.

Forty-five seconds.

The four people are not friends. They have not spoken to each other before this mission, and after the extraction they will not speak to each other again. Three of them are using voice chat. One is silent. The silent one is communicating through the game's quick-emote menu and through the directionality of his fire, which is sufficient. There is no captain. There is no plan. There is, instead, a layer of coordination that has assembled itself over the past forty minutes through the small accumulating evidence each player has been providing the others: when this person calls in a strike, the strike lands well; when this person says moving up, they actually move up; when this person picks up a downed teammate, the pickup is committed and finished. The trust has been built in the way trust is built in the field. By the time the countdown started, the four people were a unit.

The frame this essay wants to give the reader: most contemporary adults' lives have been progressively losing the conditions under which this specific kind of coordinated synchrony happens. The loss is not subtle. The loss is one of the more thoroughly documented social-historical findings of the past two decades, with measurable consequences for human well-being that the contemporary culture has been mostly unable to articulate. Helldivers 2, the Arrowhead Game Studios cooperative shooter that became one of 2024's largest commercial gaming phenomena, is one of the small commercial cultural products that has accidentally restored the conditions the surrounding adult environment has been withdrawing, and the audience's response has been to show up at scale for the restoration without quite being able to name what was being restored.

This is a frame that travels. The reader who has it can apply it to their own life with specific results. The question is when the reader last did, in the literal sense, the same thing at the same time as other people in coordinated action. Not parallel things in the same room. Not sequential interactions where one person speaks and another listens and then speaks back. The actual same thing, in actual synchrony, for an actual sustained duration. The honest answer, for most contemporary adults under fifty, is going to be "in school" or "during the brief period I was on a sports team in my twenties" or "during the months when I was singing in that choir before my schedule got busy." The current week's calendar, in most cases, will contain none of it.

The empirical documentation of this loss is some of the most-replicated work in the contemporary American social sciences. Robert Putnam's 2000 Bowling Alone assembled the cumulative evidence: declining church attendance, declining union membership, declining participation in civic organizations, declining membership in bowling leagues, declining choral singing, declining participation in almost any kind of regular synchronized adult group activity outside paid work. Putnam's central argument was that the decline was real, gradual, and continuous, and had accelerated through the second half of the twentieth century to a degree the population had not collectively noticed. The decline has continued, by every available indicator, through the first quarter of the twenty-first. Putnam's more recent 2020 collaboration The Upswing traced the decline against the longer arc of the twentieth century and concluded that the present moment is the bottom of a U-curve a hundred and twenty years long. Whether the U-curve is about to begin its upward leg is a question the available evidence does not yet settle.

What has been left for adults after the decline is mostly sequential interaction. The phone call. The email. The Slack thread. The work meeting. The dinner with one friend. In each of these the structural arrangement is the same: one person speaks, then another person speaks, then another. Synchronous activity, the activity in which everyone is doing the same thing at the same time and the doing is the social fact, is, in the daily life of the median adult under fifty, rare. The sites that still produce it are mostly small. Some sports leagues. Some music scenes. CrossFit, sort of. Choir, sort of. Religious communities, much smaller than two generations ago. Military units. The handful of other configurations.

The cognitive consequences of the loss have been documented at the neurological level. Robin Dunbar's lab at Oxford, across two decades of research, has been productive on the question of what synchronized activity does at the level of body chemistry. The consistent finding has been that shared rhythm releases endorphins. People who row in a synchronized boat have measurably higher pain tolerance than people who row alone on identical ergometers. People who laugh together have measurably higher pain tolerance than people who watch the same comedy alone. People who sing together form social bonds with strangers faster than people doing matched non-synchronized activity in the same room. The body, for reasons Dunbar's evolutionary explanation is one available account of, responds to synchronized group activity with specific neurochemicals it does not deploy in non-synchronized contexts. The body, in synchrony, treats the situation as one where something useful is happening. The body, in the available evidence, is correct.

This is the cognitive and physiological substrate the contemporary adult environment has been withdrawing the opportunities to engage. The substrate is real. The opportunities have thinned. The body has been registering the thinning without the surrounding conversation having had the vocabulary to name what was being registered.

Émile Durkheim, in his 1912 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, gave the foundational sociological framework for what synchronized group activity does. Durkheim's central argument was that religion's most important social function had never been the beliefs the religion organized itself around. The beliefs were the surface. The actual function of religion was to produce, on a regular schedule, episodes of intense shared emotion in groups of people acting in synchrony. The chanting. The dancing. The praying together. The marching together. The eating together. The shedding of blood together when the ritual required it. These episodes were what generated, in the participants, the felt experience of being part of something larger than themselves. The recurrence of these episodes was what kept the larger something alive in the participants' interior emotional lives between the rituals. The rituals were not symbolic of the community. The rituals were how the community was manufactured, week after week. The community was the ritual.

Durkheim's term for the specific affective state these episodes produced was collective effervescence. The translation is awkward; the phenomenon is precise. Collective effervescence is what happens when a group of people acting in synchrony enters a state of heightened emotional intensity that the participants do not produce individually and could not produce alone. The state is real. The state is also reliably manufacturable. Durkheim's claim was that all functional human societies had figured out how to manufacture it, and that the manufacturing was the thing the societies were doing when they assembled for what looked, from the outside, like religious worship.

The cultural-historical question Durkheim could not have anticipated is what happens to a society whose machinery for producing collective effervescence has been progressively dismantled across four generations. The contemporary developed-world society is the empirical test case. The answer, on the available evidence, is that the population has gotten lonelier, less politically functional, less able to coordinate at scale, and more individually anxious, in ways that the standard public-policy vocabulary has been mostly unable to address.

Helldivers 2 is, on this account, a synchronized-ritual site disguised as a cooperative shooter. The disguise matters. The participants are not, generally, telling each other they are doing a ritual. The participants are telling each other they are playing a game. The frame is recreational. The frame is also, in the standard adult vocabulary, faintly embarrassing: "I spent four hours yesterday playing a video game" is a sentence that costs a certain kind of social capital to say. But the body, for reasons that have nothing to do with the cultural prestige of the activity, registers the four hours of synchronized squad play as ritual participation. The body's response is the response Durkheim and Turner and Dunbar were describing. The body does not need the participant's permission to bond.

Victor Turner, the British anthropologist whose 1969 The Ritual Process extended Durkheim's framework through African initiation rites, developed a more specific concept for what happens to participants during these episodes. His word was communitas. Communitas is the specific group bond that emerges in liminal moments, when the status hierarchies that organize the surrounding social field temporarily dissolve and the group experiences itself as undifferentiated, equal, and present. Turner argued that communitas was rare in modern adult life and that its rarity was felt as a loss even when the loss was unnamed. People sought communitas-substitutes wherever they could find them: pilgrimage, music festivals, group travel, certain sports, certain protest movements. Turner's framework did not anticipate video games. The framework applies cleanly.

A Helldivers 2 squad in a long extraction is communitas in Turner's precise sense. The hierarchies that organize the rest of the four players' lives, the boss, the spouse, the credentialing institution, the political party, the asset class, the accumulated grievances of a particular family history, are temporarily not in the room. The four people are equal. They are present. They are doing one thing together. The doing of the one thing is the social fact. When the ship lands and the four people return to whichever lives they were in before the mission, they will return to the hierarchies. During the mission, the hierarchies were suspended. Turner's whole argument was that the suspension was the point. The suspension was what people came to the ritual to receive.

The May 2024 Sony PSN incident, when Sony briefly tried to require PSN account linking for the game's PC players and the community's coordinated protest forced Sony to walk the requirement back within seventy-two hours, was the clearest public demonstration of what the synchronized ritual the game had been producing was actually doing to its participants. The community's protest vocabulary was the game's vocabulary. "For Managed Democracy." Salutes posted as in-character gestures of solidarity. The slogans the game had supplied for the in-fiction war effort were repurposed, with no visible coordination, against the platform's actual decision. The participants in the protest were the participants in the ritual. The vocabulary they reached for was the vocabulary the ritual had supplied. When the threat appeared, the participants did not need to invent a new political register. The register they had been rehearsing during play was sufficient.

This is what synchronized adult ritual produces. It produces, in its participants, the capacity to act as a coordinated body when an external pressure threatens the conditions of the ritual. The fact that the ritual is, in this case, a cooperative video game does not change the effect. Durkheim's argument from 1912 was that this was always what religious community was producing, even when the community members described themselves as gathering for purposes of worship rather than for purposes of social production. The argument generalizes. Any sufficiently dense site of synchronized adult ritual will produce, as a byproduct, the social capacity Durkheim was describing.

The frame the reader can carry: the cultural products that produce collective effervescence in their audiences are doing something the surrounding adult environment has been progressively failing to provide, and recognizing them as the small specific cultural-historical goods they actually are is more useful than the surrounding conversation about them tends to allow. Helldivers 2 is one. Sea of Thieves is another, in its specific moments. Deep Rock Galactic, Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, the broader category of games whose design requires actual synchronization rather than parallel play, are doing similar work in their specific registers.

The practical implication for the reader is direct. If the reader has noticed, in recent years, a sense that something has been thinning in their adult social life that the standard advice about "making friends as an adult" has not been able to address, the noticing is probably accurate. The thing thinning is the synchronized-ritual substrate. The thing is, on the available evidence, harder to replace than the standard advice acknowledges, because most of the standard advice is oriented around producing more sequential interactions (one-on-one coffee meetings, dinners, scheduled hangouts) when what the body has been registering as missing is the synchronous category, which sequential interaction cannot substitute for.

What the reader can do about this: identify the small handful of contemporary activities still capable of producing synchronized ritual at adult scale, and treat them as the small specific cultural-historical goods they are. A regular pub quiz with the same team. A weekly group ride. A monthly choir rehearsal. A team sport, even an amateur one. A cooperative video game whose design genuinely requires synchrony. A book club whose members actually finish the book and discuss it together rather than each performing their separate reactions. The list is short, in any contemporary adult life. The items on it are doing work the rest of the calendar is not.

A planet whose name the four players have forgotten. A hill they are dying on. A countdown that has now reached twenty seconds. The bugs are coming. The ship is coming. The hill is being held. None of the four players have spoken to the other three before today. None of them will speak to the other three again. They are, briefly and precisely, a unit. The body knows what is happening here even if the surrounding culture has lost the vocabulary for it. Durkheim would have recognized it. Turner would have recognized it. The ritual is older than the game. The hunger is older than the ritual. The game has found a way, almost by accident, to honor both.

Fifteen seconds.

The ship lands.