Hideo Kojima Is the Jonathan Franzen of Video Games
October 25, 2015 2:30 PM Subscribe
Hideo Kojima's new game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, is the video game analogue of Jonathan Franzen's books: technically dazzling, but built upon a bed of sophmoric ideas.
…while I don't find the ideas on which they're built sophomoric.
Things aren't looking good for this analogy so far.
posted by oliverburkeman at 2:38 PM on October 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
Things aren't looking good for this analogy so far.
posted by oliverburkeman at 2:38 PM on October 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
If Jonathan Franzen's books are the literature equivalent of landing a pink helicopter blasting Diana Ross' Upside Down in the dry regions of Afghanistan, only to then stun-gun sheep while hiding in an oversized cardboard box, why am I still reading Metafilter when I could be reading The Corrections?!
posted by bigendian at 2:47 PM on October 25, 2015 [47 favorites]
posted by bigendian at 2:47 PM on October 25, 2015 [47 favorites]
Hideo Kojima is the Philip K. Dick of computer games.
posted by dng at 2:49 PM on October 25, 2015 [9 favorites]
posted by dng at 2:49 PM on October 25, 2015 [9 favorites]
technically dazzling, but built upon a bed of sophomoric ideas
Sounds like every AAA game.
posted by saturday_morning at 2:54 PM on October 25, 2015 [19 favorites]
Sounds like every AAA game.
posted by saturday_morning at 2:54 PM on October 25, 2015 [19 favorites]
I've been playing a friend's copy of this game over the weekend. For all of the breathless hype that it's the best game of this generation, I find it kinda... boring? It seems to be one hundred miniscule variations of "infiltrate this base and [find this intel / rescue this prisoner / destroy this satellite / other thing]" and also roam around a mostly empty landscape. I guess I don't find the core stealth gameplay fascinating enough to do it over and over, and it feels almost like busywork. I'd rather be back at Mother Base raising that puppy, honestly.
I find Franzen and his recent fiction completely insufferable (The Corrections was okay when I was young and eager to love it as a Big Novel Of Big Ideas, but I doubt it has held up); Kojima has moments of hilarity and absurdity, intentional or not, so he definitely wins in this hamfisted analogy. But still. I just don't really get the love for it. MGS1 was vastly more interesting.
posted by naju at 2:59 PM on October 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
I find Franzen and his recent fiction completely insufferable (The Corrections was okay when I was young and eager to love it as a Big Novel Of Big Ideas, but I doubt it has held up); Kojima has moments of hilarity and absurdity, intentional or not, so he definitely wins in this hamfisted analogy. But still. I just don't really get the love for it. MGS1 was vastly more interesting.
posted by naju at 2:59 PM on October 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
a bed of sophomoric ideas... like every AAA game.
I have a great idea! Let's give a building full of nerdy 22yo boys an eighty million dollar budget, see what they come up with. What could go wrong?
posted by rokusan at 3:01 PM on October 25, 2015 [13 favorites]
I have a great idea! Let's give a building full of nerdy 22yo boys an eighty million dollar budget, see what they come up with. What could go wrong?
posted by rokusan at 3:01 PM on October 25, 2015 [13 favorites]
Uh, dumb question. Can anyone explain to me what 'sophomoric' means? I can't really figure it out from the article. Looking it up, I get two definitions that don't really make sense, "of, relating to, or characteristic of a sophomore" (Hideo is too invested in his previous works) or "pretentious or juvenile" (Hideo is childishly putting his name in the game too much). I feel like there's a more specific way its being used here, but I haven't read any Jonathan Franzen.
posted by weewooweewoo at 3:03 PM on October 25, 2015
posted by weewooweewoo at 3:03 PM on October 25, 2015
Painfully sophomoric, and delivered in a ham fisted manner. The exposition dialog is like listening to two stoned ten year olds pretending to be adults.
"Remember that sandwich you had with me at a certain restaurant nine years ago today?"
"Yeah, the sandwich had three types of meat, pepperoni, ham, and roast beef. It was a good sandwich. The meat was nestled between two slices of bread."
"That sandwich was made by none other than the traitor himself, but we didn't know it at the time."
"How could we not have known."
"I guess we'll never know."
posted by varion at 3:04 PM on October 25, 2015 [35 favorites]
"Remember that sandwich you had with me at a certain restaurant nine years ago today?"
"Yeah, the sandwich had three types of meat, pepperoni, ham, and roast beef. It was a good sandwich. The meat was nestled between two slices of bread."
"That sandwich was made by none other than the traitor himself, but we didn't know it at the time."
"How could we not have known."
"I guess we'll never know."
posted by varion at 3:04 PM on October 25, 2015 [35 favorites]
Can anyone explain to me what 'sophomoric' means?
I think it means "teenage".
posted by dng at 3:08 PM on October 25, 2015
I think it means "teenage".
posted by dng at 3:08 PM on October 25, 2015
Most pop culture is stuffed full of sophomoric ideas. Most Web forums are stuffed similarly.
Whatever generation you identify with, or whatever generation you hate or love, our ultimate successful expression is "sophomore".
posted by clvrmnky at 3:10 PM on October 25, 2015
Whatever generation you identify with, or whatever generation you hate or love, our ultimate successful expression is "sophomore".
posted by clvrmnky at 3:10 PM on October 25, 2015
Nope, you got it.
"pretentious or juvenile"
posted by varion at 3:11 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
"pretentious or juvenile"
posted by varion at 3:11 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
Hideo Kojima is the Philip K. Dick of computer games.
This is a way better analogy, thank you.
There are some points of contact between Kojima and Franzen, but I don't think it's gonna go like the linked dweeb thinks.
Both of them are hugely successful commercial artists, but I think Kojima tends to lead tastes and Franzen tends to follow. Franzen set out to imitate the Oprah book club picks when he wrote The Corrections (ironically). There was no model for Metal Gear. Kojima made the model. And with Metal Gear Solid, he made the model tremendously popular and successful.
I won't say there aren't sophomoric ideas in the Metal Gear series, but that's different from being built on sophomoric ideas. To the extent Metal Gear is built on anything, it's built on a few very deep and powerful gameplay ideas, a couple very powerful ideas about videogame narrative, and a couple powerful ethical and political themes. Most games (most art works) have fewer than one of any of these.
It's also a landscape of sophomoric, incoherent, gonzo experiences. So is Gravity's Rainbow. (Cf. the discussion of "systems novels," which I think is apt -- but note that Franzen self-consciously does not write these any more.)
Franzen is death in a drawing room; Kojima is a super-interesting original.
The supposed connection is not really the point of the article, of course. It's just the clickbait hook. Still, irritating.
There is also a rather specific political idiocy in lines like this:
There are a lot better articles about how weird Metal Gear is, both positive and negative. And the topic is far from exhausted! Let more articles be written! But this is not a good one I think.
posted by grobstein at 3:11 PM on October 25, 2015 [24 favorites]
This is a way better analogy, thank you.
There are some points of contact between Kojima and Franzen, but I don't think it's gonna go like the linked dweeb thinks.
Both of them are hugely successful commercial artists, but I think Kojima tends to lead tastes and Franzen tends to follow. Franzen set out to imitate the Oprah book club picks when he wrote The Corrections (ironically). There was no model for Metal Gear. Kojima made the model. And with Metal Gear Solid, he made the model tremendously popular and successful.
I won't say there aren't sophomoric ideas in the Metal Gear series, but that's different from being built on sophomoric ideas. To the extent Metal Gear is built on anything, it's built on a few very deep and powerful gameplay ideas, a couple very powerful ideas about videogame narrative, and a couple powerful ethical and political themes. Most games (most art works) have fewer than one of any of these.
It's also a landscape of sophomoric, incoherent, gonzo experiences. So is Gravity's Rainbow. (Cf. the discussion of "systems novels," which I think is apt -- but note that Franzen self-consciously does not write these any more.)
Franzen is death in a drawing room; Kojima is a super-interesting original.
The supposed connection is not really the point of the article, of course. It's just the clickbait hook. Still, irritating.
There is also a rather specific political idiocy in lines like this:
Kojima’s outlandish techno-universe may be a far cry from Franzen’s domestic realism, but he has a similar knack for political grandstanding. Kojima’s preoccupation with Western hegemony and post-Cold War paranoia is the foundation of the Metal Gear series. The Phantom Pain in particular features missives about child soldiers, the threat of nuclear arms, and the colonialism of language. Kojima is better at evoking these themes emotionally—in particular, through the homoerotic bond between Snake and his sub-commander, Kazuhira Miller. But in every other regard, Kojima’s cynical worldview feels juvenile and heavy handed. Which is probably fitting, since Snake’s left hand is literally a heavy robotic prosthetic.It is almost taken for granted that making a game about "Western hegemony and post-Cold War paranoia" counts as "political grandstanding." Kojima mixes in dumb stuff but he deserves credit for his political seriousness as well.
There are a lot better articles about how weird Metal Gear is, both positive and negative. And the topic is far from exhausted! Let more articles be written! But this is not a good one I think.
posted by grobstein at 3:11 PM on October 25, 2015 [24 favorites]
Having you spend the opening sequence crawling behind a dude in an asscrack hospital gown was a deft touch though.
posted by Standard Orange at 3:11 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Standard Orange at 3:11 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I think you are kind of joking but that is a fantastic sequence.
And then (later) they make you play it again -- with almost no changes -- and it is fantastic the second time too.
I think that is quite an achievement, and the game is full of minor (and major) coups like that.
posted by grobstein at 3:15 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
And then (later) they make you play it again -- with almost no changes -- and it is fantastic the second time too.
I think that is quite an achievement, and the game is full of minor (and major) coups like that.
posted by grobstein at 3:15 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
God I'm so glad someone said this. The biggest problem I have with games reviews is that literally none of them are actually in any way critical.
I should probably explain this. I don't mean that none of them criticize games. I mean that none of them have any kind of critical eye about the craft of game making. The graphics are judged by saying "good/bad" where good = "did not fall too badly into the uncanny valley" and bad = "I didn't like it." Some games get praised for their stunning beauty (think Ori and the Blind Forest or Braid) but not because anyone reviewing them knows anything about the art of making a game's visuals. It's usually just because someone who knows a hell of a lot more than the critic did something the critic is in no way competent to judge. Hell, sometimes it means the art is just flashy and has lots of colors. (Example: the glowing praise for both Bayonetta games.)
Likewise, no one who critiques games has any concept of what goes into the code, the sound design, the level design, the narrative... anything. It's all just mansplained by people who mean well, but don't know what they're talking about. For all of the overuse of "ludologically" that happens on neoGaf, there are precious few people who actually understand the process of making a game, and none of them are writing reviews.
Let me stick to visuals for a second and give you this link, which I think is one of the best written pieces about game art, from the perspective of someone who is giving up on his lifelong passion of making pixel art for games. The things that strike me most, besides how sad it is when someone gives up on the art they're passionate about, are the examples he draws from King of Fighters and Street Fighter 4. Here you see someone who can actually look at the artwork of the team that creates art for a video game, understand its process, see its flaws or master strokes, and explain them to the layman, while people who purportedly do that for a living are clearly utterly failing to bring anything approaching his understanding to their audience. The KoF art is called "pixelated" by an ignoramus who doesn't know what he's talking about, and Street Fighter's art is universally praised because the critical apparatus of our industry doesn't actually see that something was lost in the transition from 2d to 3d. I want this guy reviewing games! Not these fanboys whose only understanding of a game is "I had stupid fun = 10/10."
And you can see it in the universal praise accorded to MGSV. A month and a half after it came out, someone from outside the industry finally talks about how stupid the story is, how lacking the philosophical groundwork of it is, and it's not only too late, but it's written in a publication that the majority of gamers don't read.
I wish we could get more writing like this in our industry. I wish the entire stupid industry didn't live with the ever-hanging pressure of "REVIEW FAST BECAUSE NO ONE READS IT AFTER THEY BUY THE GAME, AND 90% OF GAME SALES ARE IN THE FIRST 2 WEEKS." It makes reviews less and less relevant. And by delivering review code to reviewers mere days before the game comes out, devs are (intentionally) preventing any sort of real analysis, or any ability for a reviewer to think about the game. Hell, most of the time, they can't even beat the game before the review deadline is up. But why should the devs do things any differently? The only thing that matters is selling as much as they can in 2 weeks. Their audience sure as fuck isn't responding well to nuanced criticism. Hell, half of them are fighting it because they think it values input from women too much.
I'm depressed now. Thanks, Kevin Nguyen.
posted by shmegegge at 3:17 PM on October 25, 2015 [34 favorites]
I should probably explain this. I don't mean that none of them criticize games. I mean that none of them have any kind of critical eye about the craft of game making. The graphics are judged by saying "good/bad" where good = "did not fall too badly into the uncanny valley" and bad = "I didn't like it." Some games get praised for their stunning beauty (think Ori and the Blind Forest or Braid) but not because anyone reviewing them knows anything about the art of making a game's visuals. It's usually just because someone who knows a hell of a lot more than the critic did something the critic is in no way competent to judge. Hell, sometimes it means the art is just flashy and has lots of colors. (Example: the glowing praise for both Bayonetta games.)
Likewise, no one who critiques games has any concept of what goes into the code, the sound design, the level design, the narrative... anything. It's all just mansplained by people who mean well, but don't know what they're talking about. For all of the overuse of "ludologically" that happens on neoGaf, there are precious few people who actually understand the process of making a game, and none of them are writing reviews.
Let me stick to visuals for a second and give you this link, which I think is one of the best written pieces about game art, from the perspective of someone who is giving up on his lifelong passion of making pixel art for games. The things that strike me most, besides how sad it is when someone gives up on the art they're passionate about, are the examples he draws from King of Fighters and Street Fighter 4. Here you see someone who can actually look at the artwork of the team that creates art for a video game, understand its process, see its flaws or master strokes, and explain them to the layman, while people who purportedly do that for a living are clearly utterly failing to bring anything approaching his understanding to their audience. The KoF art is called "pixelated" by an ignoramus who doesn't know what he's talking about, and Street Fighter's art is universally praised because the critical apparatus of our industry doesn't actually see that something was lost in the transition from 2d to 3d. I want this guy reviewing games! Not these fanboys whose only understanding of a game is "I had stupid fun = 10/10."
And you can see it in the universal praise accorded to MGSV. A month and a half after it came out, someone from outside the industry finally talks about how stupid the story is, how lacking the philosophical groundwork of it is, and it's not only too late, but it's written in a publication that the majority of gamers don't read.
I wish we could get more writing like this in our industry. I wish the entire stupid industry didn't live with the ever-hanging pressure of "REVIEW FAST BECAUSE NO ONE READS IT AFTER THEY BUY THE GAME, AND 90% OF GAME SALES ARE IN THE FIRST 2 WEEKS." It makes reviews less and less relevant. And by delivering review code to reviewers mere days before the game comes out, devs are (intentionally) preventing any sort of real analysis, or any ability for a reviewer to think about the game. Hell, most of the time, they can't even beat the game before the review deadline is up. But why should the devs do things any differently? The only thing that matters is selling as much as they can in 2 weeks. Their audience sure as fuck isn't responding well to nuanced criticism. Hell, half of them are fighting it because they think it values input from women too much.
I'm depressed now. Thanks, Kevin Nguyen.
posted by shmegegge at 3:17 PM on October 25, 2015 [34 favorites]
There's a pun on sophomore (that apparently dates to the 1700s) that it's a combination of sophos (wise) and moros (fool). Something sophomoric is from a "wise fool" ... a second-year college student who's picked up enough jargon to dazzle the freshmen and thinks himself quite the scholar, but there's no there there ... his sophomoric ideas are trite, well-trodden, or thoroughly debunked but - the key characteristic of sophomoric thought - he's quite impressed with himself for thinking them and can't quite conceive of the idea he hasn't come up with a brilliant, world-changing, incisive idea at the age of 20 with half a semester of philosophy under his belt. That's sophomoric.
Also I saw an article recently that referred to Franzen as "the Great King of the Honkies" and pretty much that's all I can ever think when I read anything by or about him now because ... Yeah.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:22 PM on October 25, 2015 [20 favorites]
Also I saw an article recently that referred to Franzen as "the Great King of the Honkies" and pretty much that's all I can ever think when I read anything by or about him now because ... Yeah.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:22 PM on October 25, 2015 [20 favorites]
Let's give a building full of nerdy 22yo boys an eighty million dollar budget, see what they come up with.
Kojima revealed to be stack of 22 year old nerds in a trenchcoat.
posted by griphus at 3:24 PM on October 25, 2015 [27 favorites]
Kojima revealed to be stack of 22 year old nerds in a trenchcoat.
posted by griphus at 3:24 PM on October 25, 2015 [27 favorites]
And you can see it in the universal praise accorded to MGSV. A month and a half after it came out, someone from outside the industry finally talks about how stupid the story is, how lacking the philosophical groundwork of it is.
Haven't people been saying these things about Metal Gear since 1998.
Even granting everything about how useless the gaming press is (partly but not all their fault, as you say), it is not the case that no one called Metal Gear stupid and incoherent before.
posted by grobstein at 3:25 PM on October 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
Haven't people been saying these things about Metal Gear since 1998.
Even granting everything about how useless the gaming press is (partly but not all their fault, as you say), it is not the case that no one called Metal Gear stupid and incoherent before.
posted by grobstein at 3:25 PM on October 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
Metafilter: like listening to two stoned ten year olds pretending to be adults.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:25 PM on October 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:25 PM on October 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
I was in the room while my fiance sat through the tediously long intro full of movie scenes to MSGV, and thus got to observe the most delightful trolling of the player. (Needless to say: spoiler alert, do not read beyond this if you don't want some spoilers.)
The protagonist is in the hospital, and they're going to give him a new face so he won't be recognized by his many dangerous enemies. The character customizer is very well done, gorgeously detailed, and my fiance spent around fifteen minutes meticulously picking out a new face. When he finished out, the game continued...
...and the situation in the game IMMEDIATELY FELL APART and that new face NEVER GOT USED as far as I know, every time I've seen him playing the game since it's been with the protagonist with his same old grizzled and scarred white man face. I'm pretty sure if I'd been the one playing I'd have been pissed, but I like watching my fiance get trolled, so now when I remember it I just chuckle.
posted by foxfirefey at 3:35 PM on October 25, 2015 [17 favorites]
The protagonist is in the hospital, and they're going to give him a new face so he won't be recognized by his many dangerous enemies. The character customizer is very well done, gorgeously detailed, and my fiance spent around fifteen minutes meticulously picking out a new face. When he finished out, the game continued...
...and the situation in the game IMMEDIATELY FELL APART and that new face NEVER GOT USED as far as I know, every time I've seen him playing the game since it's been with the protagonist with his same old grizzled and scarred white man face. I'm pretty sure if I'd been the one playing I'd have been pissed, but I like watching my fiance get trolled, so now when I remember it I just chuckle.
posted by foxfirefey at 3:35 PM on October 25, 2015 [17 favorites]
That's awesome. There's a similar (though simpler) situation in the game Shadow Hearts: Covenant, where you ask a character's name, and a dialog box and keyboard appear for you to name him. It's the only instance in the game where you're offered the chance to name someone, so I thought about it for a long time before finally choosing one and typing it in, whereupon he replied "What? No, you idiot, my name's Roger Bacon!"
posted by rifflesby at 3:53 PM on October 25, 2015 [9 favorites]
posted by rifflesby at 3:53 PM on October 25, 2015 [9 favorites]
Was addressing saturday_morning's observation on pretty much all AAA games being based on juvenile humor, griphus. Obviously, Kojima is a very different creature.
posted by rokusan at 3:59 PM on October 25, 2015
posted by rokusan at 3:59 PM on October 25, 2015
Hideo Kojima is the Philip K. Dick of computer games.
This is a way better analogy, thank you.
*goes on to make a long comment ignoring the PKD comparison in favor of Franzen*
So, are you just accepting the framing that PKD is "built on a bed of sophomoric ideas" or what?
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 4:00 PM on October 25, 2015
This is a way better analogy, thank you.
*goes on to make a long comment ignoring the PKD comparison in favor of Franzen*
So, are you just accepting the framing that PKD is "built on a bed of sophomoric ideas" or what?
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 4:00 PM on October 25, 2015
"In praise of Metal Gear Solid, the strangest great videogame franchise", by Darren Franich
Metal Gear Solid is the videogame franchise you hope the aliens discover after we’re gone. Not because it’s the best. (It might be; ask me again in 50 years.) It’s because aliens are Metal Gear Solid’s key demographic. I mean that as a compliment: Only some higher machine-god consciousness can rationalize the saga’s magnificent incoherence. There’s the Chris Claremont-meets-John Le Carre-shrooming-on-John Milton in-game world, rife with terrorist clone presidents and pontificating chaingun roidfreaks and the central notion of America versus Russia as dueling military-industrial Mordors.
There’s the skin-pore grit — what we used to call “cinematic realism” when those words weren’t buzzwords. But there’s also an aggressively meta, borderline-Godard anti-realism. (In maybe the single most famous moment from the series, a floating telepath boss named Psycho Mantis has the power to read your memory card and playfully taunt you for playing so much Castlevania.)
Every Metal Gear Solid is humorless and hilarious. Accidentally, on purpose, simultaneously. The serious parts can be Leslie-Nielsen-in-Airplane! funny. The funny parts can be Vince Vaughn-in-True-Detective bad.
...
When you play enough Metal Gear Solid, you realize that Kojima is maybe the only guy on Earth who decided that Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns and James Bond movies and superhero comic books and Isaac Asimov science-fiction novels were all the same, deep down.
...
But Phantom Pain crystallized for me what Kojima’s real accomplishment has been with the Metal Gear Solid series. When you drill down to it, most popular action-adventure games are based on the twin principles of Destruction and Conquest. In the Destruction model, you go into a world filled with enemy agents to shoot/squash/explode. In the Conquest model, you begin as a weak character and become a strong owner of things: Purchasing land, purchasing improvements to yourself. There’s a weird third route — a Third Crossing, if you will — of Exploration.
All games involve some kind of exploration, but I’m talking about something like Myst, the long-ago graphic adventures by LucasArts and Interplay, where the whole central mechanic of the game was basically “click on everything everywhere.” Today, those games can feel hilariously primitive, and they were probably always pretty boring for the vast majority of people who didn’t start playing videogames until they got an iPhone. But there’s a serenity to Myst that you can’t really find in any major videogame today. It’s videogame Tarkovsky, really: The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking at everything. So Myst is boring, but only in the way Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn’t that they’re slow. The problem is that the world has made you too fast.)
If you must read the essay in the FPP, read this one afterwards.
posted by Apocryphon at 4:05 PM on October 25, 2015 [24 favorites]
Metal Gear Solid is the videogame franchise you hope the aliens discover after we’re gone. Not because it’s the best. (It might be; ask me again in 50 years.) It’s because aliens are Metal Gear Solid’s key demographic. I mean that as a compliment: Only some higher machine-god consciousness can rationalize the saga’s magnificent incoherence. There’s the Chris Claremont-meets-John Le Carre-shrooming-on-John Milton in-game world, rife with terrorist clone presidents and pontificating chaingun roidfreaks and the central notion of America versus Russia as dueling military-industrial Mordors.
There’s the skin-pore grit — what we used to call “cinematic realism” when those words weren’t buzzwords. But there’s also an aggressively meta, borderline-Godard anti-realism. (In maybe the single most famous moment from the series, a floating telepath boss named Psycho Mantis has the power to read your memory card and playfully taunt you for playing so much Castlevania.)
Every Metal Gear Solid is humorless and hilarious. Accidentally, on purpose, simultaneously. The serious parts can be Leslie-Nielsen-in-Airplane! funny. The funny parts can be Vince Vaughn-in-True-Detective bad.
...
When you play enough Metal Gear Solid, you realize that Kojima is maybe the only guy on Earth who decided that Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns and James Bond movies and superhero comic books and Isaac Asimov science-fiction novels were all the same, deep down.
...
But Phantom Pain crystallized for me what Kojima’s real accomplishment has been with the Metal Gear Solid series. When you drill down to it, most popular action-adventure games are based on the twin principles of Destruction and Conquest. In the Destruction model, you go into a world filled with enemy agents to shoot/squash/explode. In the Conquest model, you begin as a weak character and become a strong owner of things: Purchasing land, purchasing improvements to yourself. There’s a weird third route — a Third Crossing, if you will — of Exploration.
All games involve some kind of exploration, but I’m talking about something like Myst, the long-ago graphic adventures by LucasArts and Interplay, where the whole central mechanic of the game was basically “click on everything everywhere.” Today, those games can feel hilariously primitive, and they were probably always pretty boring for the vast majority of people who didn’t start playing videogames until they got an iPhone. But there’s a serenity to Myst that you can’t really find in any major videogame today. It’s videogame Tarkovsky, really: The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking at everything. So Myst is boring, but only in the way Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn’t that they’re slow. The problem is that the world has made you too fast.)
If you must read the essay in the FPP, read this one afterwards.
posted by Apocryphon at 4:05 PM on October 25, 2015 [24 favorites]
Fact 1: Hellboy is in large part a comic series about the hero repeatedly rejecting the call.
Fact 2: Hideo Kojima is an anagram of Hellboy.
posted by comealongpole at 4:10 PM on October 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
Fact 2: Hideo Kojima is an anagram of Hellboy.
posted by comealongpole at 4:10 PM on October 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
I have not read any of Jonathan Franzen before, but I fail to see that Kojima's work is most similar to his writings. Why not liken the weirdness sprawling nature to Pynchon? Or to the density of sci-fi ideas, past to future, to Neal Stephenson? It seems like the writer is particularly familiar with Franzen's as an auteur who doesn't fit his standard for depth and quality, and juxtaposes Kojima with him, even though neither are all that analogous.
I don't think PKD is an accurate comparison, either. Dick's work is far too alienated, too humorless, too tragic. MGS has far more lighthearted moments, and even its gritty overseriousness turns into self-aware self-parody at times. The best summary of the series I've ever seen is "It's a gritty superhero story that masquerades as realistic spy drama."
A more tonally sound comparison would be to Tarantino. The fanboyness, obsessive homages and pastiches, willingness to court cheap controversy, and most importantly the pulp aspect of Tarantino's movies and Metal Gear Solid go hand in hand. Not to mention, both are meant to be taken about as seriously. That is, they can win awards in their respective mediums for technical brilliance and for evoking high-minded ideas, but ultimately still deliver the sort of visceral, juvenile action violence that appeals to the mass audience.
Not to over-exaggerate, but remember one of the reasons why Shakespeare is timeless was that he was a genius who did not write simply for geniuses- his works contained both wordplay that inspires generations of scholarly analysis, and crude sex and poop jokes for the peanut gallery. Great works can, and often do, contain both the sophisticated and the sophomoric. Because real life contains both, and art is meant to hold a mirror to life, etc.
But in every other regard, Kojima’s cynical worldview feels juvenile and heavy handed.
No one would mistake Metal Gear Solid for an accurate indictment of American foreign policy. Works that evoke complex, serious themes, without depicting them completely seriously, is rife in pop culture. Has Kevin Nguyen ever watched Japanese animes?
The seams are pretty obvious because Kojima is stitching together so many disparate elements; the word “overstuffed” comes to mind.
Has he even played a contemporary open world sandbox game? Feature creep is hugely endemic in that genre and has been growing relentlessly. Certainly compared to its previous non-sandbox predecessors, MGS V is stuffed. But is it truly any worse than other games in the genre? Nguyen would shudder to play a modern Ubisoft game, heck even the latest GTA would probably overwhelm him.
One of the game’s most important moments—an outbreak at your offshore base—involves scrolling through a list of hundreds of members of personnel and filing them into quarantine, which might be fun if you were expecting Metal Gear to be a human resources simulator from hell.
It's very amusing that this game is currently on Steam's front page. There's always been mini-games. Some are more tiresome than others. But unless they're integrated into the game in an intruding way (climbing radio towers, collecting pages from Ben Franklin's almanac, etc.), they can be forgivable if they're brief enough.
Though the Metal Gear games are as excellent as they are awful, you can see Hideo Kojima's fingerprints over all of them. And if you can't see them, he will graciously remind you by showing you his name, over and over again.
I'm not sure how narcissistic Kojima is compared to the next auteur, but what he's describing is typical auteur behavior. Not to mention that fans love the man and his work, and that's why these memes exist.
posted by Apocryphon at 4:32 PM on October 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
I don't think PKD is an accurate comparison, either. Dick's work is far too alienated, too humorless, too tragic. MGS has far more lighthearted moments, and even its gritty overseriousness turns into self-aware self-parody at times. The best summary of the series I've ever seen is "It's a gritty superhero story that masquerades as realistic spy drama."
A more tonally sound comparison would be to Tarantino. The fanboyness, obsessive homages and pastiches, willingness to court cheap controversy, and most importantly the pulp aspect of Tarantino's movies and Metal Gear Solid go hand in hand. Not to mention, both are meant to be taken about as seriously. That is, they can win awards in their respective mediums for technical brilliance and for evoking high-minded ideas, but ultimately still deliver the sort of visceral, juvenile action violence that appeals to the mass audience.
Not to over-exaggerate, but remember one of the reasons why Shakespeare is timeless was that he was a genius who did not write simply for geniuses- his works contained both wordplay that inspires generations of scholarly analysis, and crude sex and poop jokes for the peanut gallery. Great works can, and often do, contain both the sophisticated and the sophomoric. Because real life contains both, and art is meant to hold a mirror to life, etc.
But in every other regard, Kojima’s cynical worldview feels juvenile and heavy handed.
No one would mistake Metal Gear Solid for an accurate indictment of American foreign policy. Works that evoke complex, serious themes, without depicting them completely seriously, is rife in pop culture. Has Kevin Nguyen ever watched Japanese animes?
The seams are pretty obvious because Kojima is stitching together so many disparate elements; the word “overstuffed” comes to mind.
Has he even played a contemporary open world sandbox game? Feature creep is hugely endemic in that genre and has been growing relentlessly. Certainly compared to its previous non-sandbox predecessors, MGS V is stuffed. But is it truly any worse than other games in the genre? Nguyen would shudder to play a modern Ubisoft game, heck even the latest GTA would probably overwhelm him.
One of the game’s most important moments—an outbreak at your offshore base—involves scrolling through a list of hundreds of members of personnel and filing them into quarantine, which might be fun if you were expecting Metal Gear to be a human resources simulator from hell.
It's very amusing that this game is currently on Steam's front page. There's always been mini-games. Some are more tiresome than others. But unless they're integrated into the game in an intruding way (climbing radio towers, collecting pages from Ben Franklin's almanac, etc.), they can be forgivable if they're brief enough.
Though the Metal Gear games are as excellent as they are awful, you can see Hideo Kojima's fingerprints over all of them. And if you can't see them, he will graciously remind you by showing you his name, over and over again.
I'm not sure how narcissistic Kojima is compared to the next auteur, but what he's describing is typical auteur behavior. Not to mention that fans love the man and his work, and that's why these memes exist.
posted by Apocryphon at 4:32 PM on October 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
One way to understand Kojima is to understand the differences between business cultures.
Significant figures in American game dev are most often engineers, which is to say they work in areas that can be precisely measured, and based on that success, they're granted or they earn the ability to make subjective decisions. It's very singular. "I can make the machine go faster, so I get to make all the other important decisions. Follow me." And they go off and form development houses to express their singular vision.
On the other hand, you often see that significant figures in Japanese game dev are artists inside pre-existing organizations. Kojima was essentially a filmmaker and designer for Konami. Miyamoto designed toys for Nintendo. Ueda was an animator for WARP and then went to work for Sony. The organization acts as the patron of these artists, nurturing them, and then organizing an army of faceless developers to do the work to realize the work of the artist. The artists then stay with their organizations (not always, but often for long periods of time), because they're interested in the art, not the business or the corner office or proving how smart they are.
Which way is better? Doesn't matter and that's kind of the wrong question to ask, anyway. But it kind of explains the landscape, and maybe explains why some people look at MGS and go, "Why is this so weird?"
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:49 PM on October 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
Significant figures in American game dev are most often engineers, which is to say they work in areas that can be precisely measured, and based on that success, they're granted or they earn the ability to make subjective decisions. It's very singular. "I can make the machine go faster, so I get to make all the other important decisions. Follow me." And they go off and form development houses to express their singular vision.
On the other hand, you often see that significant figures in Japanese game dev are artists inside pre-existing organizations. Kojima was essentially a filmmaker and designer for Konami. Miyamoto designed toys for Nintendo. Ueda was an animator for WARP and then went to work for Sony. The organization acts as the patron of these artists, nurturing them, and then organizing an army of faceless developers to do the work to realize the work of the artist. The artists then stay with their organizations (not always, but often for long periods of time), because they're interested in the art, not the business or the corner office or proving how smart they are.
Which way is better? Doesn't matter and that's kind of the wrong question to ask, anyway. But it kind of explains the landscape, and maybe explains why some people look at MGS and go, "Why is this so weird?"
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:49 PM on October 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
Is it possible that this isn't even really about Kojima at all, but rather the author trying to back-door his critique of Jonathan Franzen into the "conventional wisdom"
posted by Navelgazer at 4:52 PM on October 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by Navelgazer at 4:52 PM on October 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
Wait, so this video game doesn't consist of the player operating a character who wanders around scolding people to get off various lawns? I don't get it.
posted by nevercalm at 5:02 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by nevercalm at 5:02 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
This is a little confusing because MGS V is one game in a massive overarching alternative timeline filled with extremely modern ideas dealing with genetics, identity, parental and sibling issues, information and societal control, nuclear proliferation and disarmament, memes, and now more recently language. To say that MGS V is built upon sophomoric ideas is fine, but to say that the entire lineage of these games created by Kojima are built upon sophomoric ideas is reaching quite a bit. MGS V's greatest trick happens in the very beginning of the game and literally creates everything about the storyline that the other games have already covered, e.g. memetics and information control and the proliferation of ideas.
SPOILERS
It is one of the coolest tricks anyone has ever pulled. We've spent decades waiting to play as this legendary character only for Kojima to say that it's actually us, the players, who are the legends and who have made everything in the entire storyline revolve around us, not Big Boss. It's fantastical and brings the real world into the game world so perfectly well. I don't find that juvenile at all, it's clever and a great send off and kudos to the people who have believed in him for so many years.
posted by gucci mane at 5:12 PM on October 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
SPOILERS
It is one of the coolest tricks anyone has ever pulled. We've spent decades waiting to play as this legendary character only for Kojima to say that it's actually us, the players, who are the legends and who have made everything in the entire storyline revolve around us, not Big Boss. It's fantastical and brings the real world into the game world so perfectly well. I don't find that juvenile at all, it's clever and a great send off and kudos to the people who have believed in him for so many years.
posted by gucci mane at 5:12 PM on October 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
I have not read any of Jonathan Franzen before...
...Has Kevin Nguyen ever watched Japanese animes?
This is such a tonally perfect reproduction of the typical fanboy defense of... anything... that I wonder if you're secretly @dril or some other weird twitter personality.
posted by shmegegge at 5:14 PM on October 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
...Has Kevin Nguyen ever watched Japanese animes?
This is such a tonally perfect reproduction of the typical fanboy defense of... anything... that I wonder if you're secretly @dril or some other weird twitter personality.
posted by shmegegge at 5:14 PM on October 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
Shows what you know, I'm actually Sam Hyde IRL
posted by Apocryphon at 5:21 PM on October 25, 2015
posted by Apocryphon at 5:21 PM on October 25, 2015
Can someone explain the appeal of the Metal Gear franchise? I don't get it. I've heard people raving about it for at least 25 years but it looks just like a first-person shooter.
I don't understand the appeal of Franzen either. His prose is pretty pedestrian.
posted by Nevin at 5:22 PM on October 25, 2015
I don't understand the appeal of Franzen either. His prose is pretty pedestrian.
posted by Nevin at 5:22 PM on October 25, 2015
I first played the original MGS for Playstation within a few days of the first time I saw El Topo. If anything, Kojima is the Jodorowsky of video games.
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:25 PM on October 25, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:25 PM on October 25, 2015 [5 favorites]
Has shmegegge actually played a Metal Gear before?
posted by Apocryphon at 5:29 PM on October 25, 2015
posted by Apocryphon at 5:29 PM on October 25, 2015
it is not the case that no one called Metal Gear stupid and incoherent before.
I know, but what I'm getting at is that, if you're a prospective buyer of a game like MGSV, there is very little you're reading the day it comes out that says "this game is bad." And I would say that the game IS bad. That while anyone who wants to is free to enjoy it and buy it simply for the fun of it, that there are aspects of game making beyond fun that are largely ignored or under-analyzed by the gaming press.
Frankly, I think most organizations assign MGS fans (and mind you, I loved MGS 1 and largely forgave 2 its flaws) to reviewing MGS games, and that that bias works in favor of game sales, but against the quality of the games we play. MGSV got a 93 across a hefty cross section of review sites, and sites like Gamespot gave it a 10/10. They're calling it perfect.
That's just... bad cricital analysis, to my mind. Like, unforgivably bad.
posted by shmegegge at 5:31 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I know, but what I'm getting at is that, if you're a prospective buyer of a game like MGSV, there is very little you're reading the day it comes out that says "this game is bad." And I would say that the game IS bad. That while anyone who wants to is free to enjoy it and buy it simply for the fun of it, that there are aspects of game making beyond fun that are largely ignored or under-analyzed by the gaming press.
Frankly, I think most organizations assign MGS fans (and mind you, I loved MGS 1 and largely forgave 2 its flaws) to reviewing MGS games, and that that bias works in favor of game sales, but against the quality of the games we play. MGSV got a 93 across a hefty cross section of review sites, and sites like Gamespot gave it a 10/10. They're calling it perfect.
That's just... bad cricital analysis, to my mind. Like, unforgivably bad.
posted by shmegegge at 5:31 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I don't understand the appeal of Franzen either. His prose is pretty pedestrian. -- Nevin
Funny, at least to me: just last week I called Franzen's writing pedestrian-pretty.
posted by rokusan at 5:33 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
Funny, at least to me: just last week I called Franzen's writing pedestrian-pretty.
posted by rokusan at 5:33 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
Nope, you got it.
"pretentious or juvenile"
Well, at least they didn't use any of the buzzwords for "teenage girls like it."
That's just... bad cricital analysis, to my mind. Like, unforgivably bad.
Well, there was an attempt begun to look at video games critically, and the response was to shut those people down as hard as possible.
One of the major goals of GamerGate (outside of mysogyny) was to shout down all independent critical review and retain the status quo of talking about numbers of pixels and "gameplay".
I mean, you can try talking about actual substantively critical elements, but you'll get death threats over it.
posted by happyroach at 5:42 PM on October 25, 2015 [10 favorites]
"pretentious or juvenile"
Well, at least they didn't use any of the buzzwords for "teenage girls like it."
That's just... bad cricital analysis, to my mind. Like, unforgivably bad.
Well, there was an attempt begun to look at video games critically, and the response was to shut those people down as hard as possible.
One of the major goals of GamerGate (outside of mysogyny) was to shout down all independent critical review and retain the status quo of talking about numbers of pixels and "gameplay".
I mean, you can try talking about actual substantively critical elements, but you'll get death threats over it.
posted by happyroach at 5:42 PM on October 25, 2015 [10 favorites]
There are problems with game journalism that have been around for a long time, and people on the internet have been mocking conventional gaming review outlets as well. MGS V getting perfect review scores is probably due to two things 1) big budget, big title, AAA games with big names are going to get those no matter what. And it's just as true for a GTA, a Call of Duty, or a Super Mario title as MGS.
But also, 2) because it's a legacy recognition. Did Return of the King really deserve Best Picture, eleven Oscars? Probably not, but just like with the film industry/medium, people in video gaming are sentimental and will heap on extra praise for the end of a series and the end of an era, especially with the whole Kojima-Konami mess. Is it right? Maybe not, but it is an understandable motivation, and differentiates the MGS V praise from the usual "New Halo? Five stars!" business as usual.
Not that film doesn't have its share of review issues, what with Rotten Tomatoes and Armond White getting vilified and all that.
Bioshock Infinite getting a 94 is a more damning indictment of gaming journalism, I feel.
posted by Apocryphon at 6:02 PM on October 25, 2015 [5 favorites]
But also, 2) because it's a legacy recognition. Did Return of the King really deserve Best Picture, eleven Oscars? Probably not, but just like with the film industry/medium, people in video gaming are sentimental and will heap on extra praise for the end of a series and the end of an era, especially with the whole Kojima-Konami mess. Is it right? Maybe not, but it is an understandable motivation, and differentiates the MGS V praise from the usual "New Halo? Five stars!" business as usual.
Not that film doesn't have its share of review issues, what with Rotten Tomatoes and Armond White getting vilified and all that.
Bioshock Infinite getting a 94 is a more damning indictment of gaming journalism, I feel.
posted by Apocryphon at 6:02 PM on October 25, 2015 [5 favorites]
This article seems to be written for those who've never played Metal Gear nor read Franzen but would like to have an opinion about both.
posted by straight at 6:08 PM on October 25, 2015 [9 favorites]
posted by straight at 6:08 PM on October 25, 2015 [9 favorites]
MGS V getting perfect review scores is probably due to two things 1) big budget, big title, AAA games with big names are going to get those no matter what.
3. Corruption. Starting with privileged access, threatening to withhold access, and kickbacks.
Seriously, let's not beat around the bush here- call out the problem with the AAA game companies and reviewers for what it is. As long as the reviewers are financially dependent on the big game companies, there will never be independent, critical reviews. And crucially, the audience is sculpted to accept that situation as normal.
posted by happyroach at 6:08 PM on October 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
3. Corruption. Starting with privileged access, threatening to withhold access, and kickbacks.
Seriously, let's not beat around the bush here- call out the problem with the AAA game companies and reviewers for what it is. As long as the reviewers are financially dependent on the big game companies, there will never be independent, critical reviews. And crucially, the audience is sculpted to accept that situation as normal.
posted by happyroach at 6:08 PM on October 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
I dunno. MGS was the first thing that I remember where the player, the console, the mechanics, etc were all part of the game. That is, you had to be thinking and feeling things at certain moments of the game to get the full experience. To that end, certain parts were designed to evoke those thoughts and feelings. I'm not entirely comfortable with dismissing that as a technical accomplishment.
Rather, I think that the statements being made in MGS are coded in the experience of games. Apocryphon's link is great because it captures some of this. MGS makes you feel very incisive things about playing a game. I feel like the author of the original article is confusing the reflective aspect of the games with a lack of insight.
posted by ethansr at 6:10 PM on October 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
Rather, I think that the statements being made in MGS are coded in the experience of games. Apocryphon's link is great because it captures some of this. MGS makes you feel very incisive things about playing a game. I feel like the author of the original article is confusing the reflective aspect of the games with a lack of insight.
posted by ethansr at 6:10 PM on October 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
Frankly, I think most organizations assign MGS fans (and mind you, I loved MGS 1 and largely forgave 2 its flaws) to reviewing MGS games, and that that bias works in favor of game sales, but against the quality of the games we play. MGSV got a 93 across a hefty cross section of review sites, and sites like Gamespot gave it a 10/10. They're calling it perfect.
I haven't played the game, but the Idle Thumbs folks, who are some of the smartest people I know talking about video games, loved MSGV. They thought the story and the self-indulgent cutscenes and the sexist fanservice were all garbage, but thought the actual game, the open(ish) world and all the systems and tactics for invading enemy bases were fantastic, some of the best ever done in a video game.
So I guess it depends on what you want out of your video games, but I know there are smart gamers who recognized all the flaws and immaturity in Kojima's storytelling but still thought MGSV was one of the best games of the year.
posted by straight at 6:21 PM on October 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
I haven't played the game, but the Idle Thumbs folks, who are some of the smartest people I know talking about video games, loved MSGV. They thought the story and the self-indulgent cutscenes and the sexist fanservice were all garbage, but thought the actual game, the open(ish) world and all the systems and tactics for invading enemy bases were fantastic, some of the best ever done in a video game.
So I guess it depends on what you want out of your video games, but I know there are smart gamers who recognized all the flaws and immaturity in Kojima's storytelling but still thought MGSV was one of the best games of the year.
posted by straight at 6:21 PM on October 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
Honestly people, not all games writing is on IGN and Gamespot. There's a ton of high quality writing being done, as well as podcasting and video.
Critical Distance is a good place to start.
Cool Ghosts does fun work.
The Idle Thumbs network et al.
Hell, even Kotaku manages to do good work between stupid anime statue articles.
If you can't find good, critical work about games, you aren't looking for it.
I haven't played and MGS games, but they seem pretty sprawling. Which one is Zelda? Is it the main dude with the eyepatch? Is he a Solid Snake as well? What are the Metal Gears? Are there less-dense things? So many questions.
There's a Liquid Snake, if that is more to your liking.
posted by Reyturner at 6:33 PM on October 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
Critical Distance is a good place to start.
Cool Ghosts does fun work.
The Idle Thumbs network et al.
Hell, even Kotaku manages to do good work between stupid anime statue articles.
If you can't find good, critical work about games, you aren't looking for it.
I haven't played and MGS games, but they seem pretty sprawling. Which one is Zelda? Is it the main dude with the eyepatch? Is he a Solid Snake as well? What are the Metal Gears? Are there less-dense things? So many questions.
There's a Liquid Snake, if that is more to your liking.
posted by Reyturner at 6:33 PM on October 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
I've ben spending an embarrassing amount of time with this game recently, and I really, really don't get how anyone can see the plot / storytelling ass anything other than an embarrassing and unfortunate thing to deal with. It doesn't outweigh the gameplay, but it's bad enough that I feel like I have to apologize in advance when recommending the game to anyone.
It reminds me of Moe's take on postmodernism from the Simpsons: "weird for the sake of weird".
I've never read any Franzen, but if that's what the article's author is saying, I'm all for it.
posted by graphnerd at 6:34 PM on October 25, 2015
It reminds me of Moe's take on postmodernism from the Simpsons: "weird for the sake of weird".
I've never read any Franzen, but if that's what the article's author is saying, I'm all for it.
posted by graphnerd at 6:34 PM on October 25, 2015
Franzen isn't weird. Franzen is aggressively not weird. Saying that the extremely weird Kojima is his video-game analogue is bizarre. They might both be bad, but if so, then they're bad in distinct ways.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:54 PM on October 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:54 PM on October 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
And then (later) they make you play it again -- with almost no changes -- and it is fantastic the second time too.
I found it mostly just tedious the second time, honestly; it'd be different if the structure of that long slow first mission was such that you had secretly had a lot of undocumented agency in terms of acquired player knowledge that would change how the whole thing plays the second time, but in practice it's mostly just...long and deeply hobbled as contrasted with the actual gameplay experience.
I like the idea of revisiting the mission, and I liked the use of the twist, but it could have used some serious pruning and some more elaborated exploration of said twist in what was kept the second time around. But that presupposes that they'd gotten around to making the rest of the narrative content, and without that going for an approach that pads out what they did have may have just seemed like the only option to give the final outing the kind of duration needed to make it feel like a finale.
I played the hell out of this game and really enjoyed it but it's hard to take an honest look at the second chapter compared to the first and not see all the damage done to it by the real world business shit that loomed over it. That repeated mission, repeated very nearly verbatim, seems like a classic example of something being long because the folks making it didn't have the time to properly shorten it.
posted by cortex at 7:17 PM on October 25, 2015
I found it mostly just tedious the second time, honestly; it'd be different if the structure of that long slow first mission was such that you had secretly had a lot of undocumented agency in terms of acquired player knowledge that would change how the whole thing plays the second time, but in practice it's mostly just...long and deeply hobbled as contrasted with the actual gameplay experience.
I like the idea of revisiting the mission, and I liked the use of the twist, but it could have used some serious pruning and some more elaborated exploration of said twist in what was kept the second time around. But that presupposes that they'd gotten around to making the rest of the narrative content, and without that going for an approach that pads out what they did have may have just seemed like the only option to give the final outing the kind of duration needed to make it feel like a finale.
I played the hell out of this game and really enjoyed it but it's hard to take an honest look at the second chapter compared to the first and not see all the damage done to it by the real world business shit that loomed over it. That repeated mission, repeated very nearly verbatim, seems like a classic example of something being long because the folks making it didn't have the time to properly shorten it.
posted by cortex at 7:17 PM on October 25, 2015
Metal Gear Solid and its progeny have always defied objective measurement in my mind. I've never been one to shy away from a game whose primary appeal is spectacle—I did spend years deriding World of Warcraft players for wasting their time and money, only to decide it was enough of a cultural phenomenon to start playing myself. These games are something else, though: the Pynchon comparison feels the most viable to me. Vast and intricate, incoherent, inane, and (above all) provocative... I'm not going to begrudge a reviewer from slapping their highest recommendation on a game this interesting, even if it's unpleasant and offensive in spots.
Having said all that, it's unfortunate and a bit anticlimactic that the Metal Gear series would conclude that "the player is actually the biggest boss of all" right around the same time that Undertale hit the market, since the latter game takes that concept and trumps The Phantom Pain's use of it in every conceivable way.
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 9:08 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
Having said all that, it's unfortunate and a bit anticlimactic that the Metal Gear series would conclude that "the player is actually the biggest boss of all" right around the same time that Undertale hit the market, since the latter game takes that concept and trumps The Phantom Pain's use of it in every conceivable way.
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 9:08 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
naju: 'd rather be back at Mother Base raising that puppy, honestly.
's funny how for MSGV most people talk about spending time with the puppy.
Everyone I know is most excited for dressing up Link in different outfits in the new Zelda game.
posted by ShawnStruck at 9:12 PM on October 25, 2015
's funny how for MSGV most people talk about spending time with the puppy.
Everyone I know is most excited for dressing up Link in different outfits in the new Zelda game.
posted by ShawnStruck at 9:12 PM on October 25, 2015
...and the situation in the game IMMEDIATELY FELL APART and that new face NEVER GOT USED as far as I know, every time I've seen him playing the game since it's been with the protagonist with his same old grizzled and scarred white man face. I'm pretty sure if I'd been the one playing I'd have been pissed, but I like watching my fiance get trolled, so now when I remember it I just chuckle.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW
That wasn't trolling, at least not for most definitions of trolling. The face you create is narratively important in a way that's not revealed until the very end of the game (the game's "true" ending). So is the ability to send random people from your base who are not Big Boss out on combat missions.
One of the nice touches/hints around this is... well take a closer look at your reflection in the helicopter window.
It's the little details like that in service of themes that have persisted over decades worth of Metal Gear games, never mind genuinely new and groundbreaking game mechanics, and just plain bananas storytelling leave me wondering how anyone can claim some kind of objective "badness" to a degree where they're legit questioning the ethics of game journalists.
posted by danny the boy at 10:54 PM on October 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW
That wasn't trolling, at least not for most definitions of trolling. The face you create is narratively important in a way that's not revealed until the very end of the game (the game's "true" ending). So is the ability to send random people from your base who are not Big Boss out on combat missions.
One of the nice touches/hints around this is... well take a closer look at your reflection in the helicopter window.
It's the little details like that in service of themes that have persisted over decades worth of Metal Gear games, never mind genuinely new and groundbreaking game mechanics, and just plain bananas storytelling leave me wondering how anyone can claim some kind of objective "badness" to a degree where they're legit questioning the ethics of game journalists.
posted by danny the boy at 10:54 PM on October 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
This game features a Strong Female Character who literally can't wear much clothing because she has to breathe through her skin. She also does not talk. Her name? Quiet.
I tried to take it as the ha ha joke it could be, but you know what? I can't. The franchise is hilarious and absurd and incredibly creative and self-aware and entirely insulting to me.
posted by Mizu at 11:16 PM on October 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
I tried to take it as the ha ha joke it could be, but you know what? I can't. The franchise is hilarious and absurd and incredibly creative and self-aware and entirely insulting to me.
posted by Mizu at 11:16 PM on October 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
I always wonder what would have happened if someone had sat Kojima down and really explained to him why his fucked up views on women were fucked up. If he ever came to see why his ideas were so flawed he wouldn't have been able to resist exploring them.
A MGS which trolls the majority of players in a way that would truly upset them is glorious to contemplate. The internet would have melted from the impotent rage.
posted by fullerine at 3:21 AM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
A MGS which trolls the majority of players in a way that would truly upset them is glorious to contemplate. The internet would have melted from the impotent rage.
posted by fullerine at 3:21 AM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
If you take the entire series as "Tactical Espionage Soap Opera" influenced heavily by an outsiders view of the US, then suddenly things make more sense story wise. It's hammy and over the top and completely ridiculous. At the same time, there are some very good themes there - often delivered in anvil-icious ways. The anti-nuclear themes come to mind. The handling of basically all female characters outside of "the boss" is incredibly problematic, and it's hard to overlook - and is the one aspect I really had hoped would have changed by now, but nope - not remotely.
Anyways, since at least MGS1, the series has been about screwing with the player while beating them over the head with these themes, as well as with the absurdity. MGS2 took the player trolling up to a ridiculous degree. All of these have followed to some extent - For any given MGS game, you can expect extremely high critical reviews, and an outraged fan base.
Having put a hundred-something hours into 5, I'm still figuring it out in some ways. Unfortunately, the character design of Quiet is inexcusable any way you look at it. I could say much about that (and have elsewhere) - it's completely juvenile, embarrassing, and unneeded, and overtly sexist to a much larger degree than anything else the series has done, which is saying a ton.
There is some wonderful player trolling, though. Some of this is how it sets up expectations and then subverts them, but much of it is how unsatisfying revenge can be - which I think is one of the ultimate themes.
The FOB missions - a form of PvP that blend with the single player game - are an excellent form of trolling, possibly my favorite so far. You are forced into setting up a base that will essentially double your staff, but will then be subject to player invasion. If you don't mess with others too much and actually put resources into defending it, you will generally be left alone. If you are invaded, it can cost you in-game resources and staff. There are two really great ways to be attacked:
- If you attack someone else, if you are anything less than perfect, you will open yourself to retaliation from whoever you attack as well as their supporters. If you are repeatedly successful, then you raise up the ranks and are matched with more skilled invaders, while rewards will be dropped for the easier players to the point that it isn't worth it. The whole thing generally leads to a circle of revenge, where the only reason to attack at a certain level is purely for revenge as you are likely to lose more resources than you gain, and it becomes a bit of "the only way to win is to not play" sort of thing for all outside of the extremely hardcore players, who should be isolated on their own tier at that point.
- You can build a nuclear device which makes your FOB supposedly immune to retaliation for anyone who hasn't reached a certain level of heroism. This takes a large amount of resources that can only be obtained in-game, and it takes 24 hours to build one. However, there are also very strong rewards associated with stealing and disposing of someone else nukes, and it's something that can be done near instantly upon completing the invasion. So basically, if you build a nuke, you are painting a big target on yourself that will only attract higher levels of invaders who are more likely than not going to be successful. Lots of people yelling about how pointless building a nuke is, and missing the entire point.
Basically, the entire way that the FOB is set up is in a way where your actions and choices end up directly affecting how much of a target you will be from other players. If you are a jackass to others, or build nukes, it's likely to have some stiff consequences. There was a ton of hype about your choices in MGS5 having consequences - and I think it was referring to this aspect more than anything else.
posted by MysticMCJ at 8:03 AM on October 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
Anyways, since at least MGS1, the series has been about screwing with the player while beating them over the head with these themes, as well as with the absurdity. MGS2 took the player trolling up to a ridiculous degree. All of these have followed to some extent - For any given MGS game, you can expect extremely high critical reviews, and an outraged fan base.
Having put a hundred-something hours into 5, I'm still figuring it out in some ways. Unfortunately, the character design of Quiet is inexcusable any way you look at it. I could say much about that (and have elsewhere) - it's completely juvenile, embarrassing, and unneeded, and overtly sexist to a much larger degree than anything else the series has done, which is saying a ton.
There is some wonderful player trolling, though. Some of this is how it sets up expectations and then subverts them, but much of it is how unsatisfying revenge can be - which I think is one of the ultimate themes.
The FOB missions - a form of PvP that blend with the single player game - are an excellent form of trolling, possibly my favorite so far. You are forced into setting up a base that will essentially double your staff, but will then be subject to player invasion. If you don't mess with others too much and actually put resources into defending it, you will generally be left alone. If you are invaded, it can cost you in-game resources and staff. There are two really great ways to be attacked:
- If you attack someone else, if you are anything less than perfect, you will open yourself to retaliation from whoever you attack as well as their supporters. If you are repeatedly successful, then you raise up the ranks and are matched with more skilled invaders, while rewards will be dropped for the easier players to the point that it isn't worth it. The whole thing generally leads to a circle of revenge, where the only reason to attack at a certain level is purely for revenge as you are likely to lose more resources than you gain, and it becomes a bit of "the only way to win is to not play" sort of thing for all outside of the extremely hardcore players, who should be isolated on their own tier at that point.
- You can build a nuclear device which makes your FOB supposedly immune to retaliation for anyone who hasn't reached a certain level of heroism. This takes a large amount of resources that can only be obtained in-game, and it takes 24 hours to build one. However, there are also very strong rewards associated with stealing and disposing of someone else nukes, and it's something that can be done near instantly upon completing the invasion. So basically, if you build a nuke, you are painting a big target on yourself that will only attract higher levels of invaders who are more likely than not going to be successful. Lots of people yelling about how pointless building a nuke is, and missing the entire point.
Basically, the entire way that the FOB is set up is in a way where your actions and choices end up directly affecting how much of a target you will be from other players. If you are a jackass to others, or build nukes, it's likely to have some stiff consequences. There was a ton of hype about your choices in MGS5 having consequences - and I think it was referring to this aspect more than anything else.
posted by MysticMCJ at 8:03 AM on October 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
I have not read any of Jonathan Franzen before, but I fail to see that Kojima's work is most similar to his writings.
Stop embarrassing us, Apocryphon.
posted by mullacc at 9:09 AM on October 26, 2015 [7 favorites]
Stop embarrassing us, Apocryphon.
posted by mullacc at 9:09 AM on October 26, 2015 [7 favorites]
Can someone explain the appeal of the Metal Gear franchise? I don't get it. I've heard people raving about it for at least 25 years but it looks just like a first-person shooter.
Well first off, Metal Gear is not first person. Second off, it's a stealth game -- the core mechanic is hide and seek. You have guns, but if you're using them, you dun fucked up somewhere. Guard patrols have different levels of alert, and shooting your gun generally puts them on combat alert, while even simple things like loudly running around can catch their interest and set them on caution. There's a radio system the enemy uses, and you can hold a guard hostage and have them call off the search. The onsite procurement gives the player incentive to quietly explore, and the varied equipment and level fixtures give you a huge variety of ways to accomplish your objective.
Story wise, it's basically Escape from New York, with postmodern intentions. Previous games had a huge amount of 'codec' conversations. Sometimes too many. There's huge, huge plot holes explained away in silly fashions, like nanomachines, genetics, or parasites. MGSV did away with the radio conversations and uses tapes; probably because Kiefer Sutherland is too expensive. Most of the postmodernist stuff is spoilers territory, but more or less amounts to 'you're actually just playing a game!'
posted by pwnguin at 9:28 AM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
Well first off, Metal Gear is not first person. Second off, it's a stealth game -- the core mechanic is hide and seek. You have guns, but if you're using them, you dun fucked up somewhere. Guard patrols have different levels of alert, and shooting your gun generally puts them on combat alert, while even simple things like loudly running around can catch their interest and set them on caution. There's a radio system the enemy uses, and you can hold a guard hostage and have them call off the search. The onsite procurement gives the player incentive to quietly explore, and the varied equipment and level fixtures give you a huge variety of ways to accomplish your objective.
Story wise, it's basically Escape from New York, with postmodern intentions. Previous games had a huge amount of 'codec' conversations. Sometimes too many. There's huge, huge plot holes explained away in silly fashions, like nanomachines, genetics, or parasites. MGSV did away with the radio conversations and uses tapes; probably because Kiefer Sutherland is too expensive. Most of the postmodernist stuff is spoilers territory, but more or less amounts to 'you're actually just playing a game!'
posted by pwnguin at 9:28 AM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
They should have stuck with Hayter.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:07 AM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:07 AM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
I never bury my ledes, so that you can be saved from reading the other ten thousand words I write.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:08 AM on October 26, 2015
posted by Apocryphon at 10:08 AM on October 26, 2015
Yeah Quiet is pretty indefensible from almost every angle. I will disagree about her being a non-speaking character, as I think it narratively is consistent with game themes of language as weapon/colonialist force.
She is the most interesting and complex character in the game, which is ironic as she has no lines until the very end. I think it's possible to believe she's underused and underdeveloped while not having a fundamental issue with it being a non-speaking role.
I don't know how to talk about it but there was like the seed of something really interesting/troll-y with the way that a full, regular military outfit is available for Quiet as a unlockable. That there's this inversion of the standard trope of unlockable outfits, that your reward is not less clothing but more. But just a seed, because all the other outfits are typical fan service (though, still, thematically explainable--the goldfinger body paint, the Sniper Wolf outfit, etc).
And then he yanks it all away from you like Lucy with the football.
In conclusion, Kojima is a land of contrasts...
posted by danny the boy at 10:10 AM on October 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
She is the most interesting and complex character in the game, which is ironic as she has no lines until the very end. I think it's possible to believe she's underused and underdeveloped while not having a fundamental issue with it being a non-speaking role.
I don't know how to talk about it but there was like the seed of something really interesting/troll-y with the way that a full, regular military outfit is available for Quiet as a unlockable. That there's this inversion of the standard trope of unlockable outfits, that your reward is not less clothing but more. But just a seed, because all the other outfits are typical fan service (though, still, thematically explainable--the goldfinger body paint, the Sniper Wolf outfit, etc).
And then he yanks it all away from you like Lucy with the football.
In conclusion, Kojima is a land of contrasts...
posted by danny the boy at 10:10 AM on October 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
Oh and there's the other (semi) inversion, where you can dress your male combat team members in a much more revealing outfit (though not equally as skimpy) but again this is not a default choice like Quiet's and more hidden.
posted by danny the boy at 10:14 AM on October 26, 2015
posted by danny the boy at 10:14 AM on October 26, 2015
I always wonder what would have happened if someone had sat Kojima down and really explained to him why his fucked up views on women were fucked up. If he ever came to see why his ideas were so flawed he wouldn't have been able to resist exploring them.
Kojima's infamous "But once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds" comment makes it sound like someone tried to do exactly that and he completely, utterly failed to get it.
posted by straight at 10:29 AM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
Kojima's infamous "But once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds" comment makes it sound like someone tried to do exactly that and he completely, utterly failed to get it.
posted by straight at 10:29 AM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
OK, not done with the essay yet, but this:
posted by Merzbau at 11:32 AM on October 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
Video games are designed as a series of systems that serve the characters—namely the player.is such a massively flawed statement I kind of don't even know where to start
posted by Merzbau at 11:32 AM on October 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
I'm guessing we're not going to get the author of the piece coming in here to chat.
posted by grobstein at 12:26 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by grobstein at 12:26 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
Darren Franich would be a better conversationalist anyway
posted by Apocryphon at 12:35 PM on October 26, 2015
posted by Apocryphon at 12:35 PM on October 26, 2015
They should have stuck with Hayter.
One benefit of Keef only recording like 17 lines a dialogue is that you can play the last 80% of the game as a (fully clothed and voiced [in her action barks]) woman and she'll be fully integrated into 90% of the cut scenes.
posted by Reyturner at 12:52 PM on October 26, 2015
One benefit of Keef only recording like 17 lines a dialogue is that you can play the last 80% of the game as a (fully clothed and voiced [in her action barks]) woman and she'll be fully integrated into 90% of the cut scenes.
posted by Reyturner at 12:52 PM on October 26, 2015
> Oh and there's the other (semi) inversion, where you can dress your male combat team members in a much more revealing outfit (though not equally as skimpy) but again this is not a default choice like Quiet's and more hidden.
God, this is the excuse I see on reddit / gamefaqs / anywhere else it comes up. You said semi, so you are aware that it's absurd to equate a power fantasy of a shirtless man in fatigue pants and combat boots with a woman in a bikini and ripped nylons, and that there are more implications and history behind those that they aren't remotely the same thing.
Here's the thing about Quiet. If you are willing to buy the whole excuse for her being basically naked to begin with (which me and my mesh armored motorcycle suit disagree with), there's the ripped nylons which are there purely to sexualize her. No other reason for that.
But beyond that, the entire situation with her is horrible - You capture her, decide to not kill her, and you entire interaction with her is based on making her do you exact bidding. The more you order her around, the higher her "bond" gets until she loves you. There's so much wrong with that I don't even know where to begin.
Moderate spoilers ahead, read at your own risk:
It's perfectly fine that she doesn't talk - It's not OK that the interaction with her is so limited outside of that. There are some actual legitimately good things done with her character - The reason why she is quiet is, unlike the outfit, fairly well justified, it's cool that she and code-talker can actually converse (although I wish they did more with that) and she can be a seriously bad-ass character in mission 45 (which is overall a very strong story line, if you are willing to overlook the rape as drama part of that mission). But they've basically taken every single bad stereotype of women in video games and put them in a single character:
- She is "rescued" by the player (granted, after trying to kill them)
- Her "outfit" is overly sexualized
- You have the typical Kojima treatment of women characters - i.e. they will make sexy poses for you if you ogle them
- She has "bonus" scenes involving her showering or playing in the rain (the latter could have been quite sweet if there was anything that actually lead up to it)
- She adds nothing of value to the story outside of a bullshit stockholm syndrome "love interest"- The game does not fundamentally change with her in it or not.
On top of that, she fills the same functional "role" as a horse, a robot, and a dog.... That is, she is there solely to be commanded by you, and to benefit you. She exists by your good will.
Not everything was done badly, I feel like they actually did do some good things with her character near the end, but the implications of everything leading up to that are uncomfortable at best. Sure, it's also implied that she is there by her will alone and can escape at any time, but she's functionally your slave. There are so many issues with her character outside of the outfit that go well beyond the franchises typical issues with women...
posted by MysticMCJ at 1:05 PM on October 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
God, this is the excuse I see on reddit / gamefaqs / anywhere else it comes up. You said semi, so you are aware that it's absurd to equate a power fantasy of a shirtless man in fatigue pants and combat boots with a woman in a bikini and ripped nylons, and that there are more implications and history behind those that they aren't remotely the same thing.
Here's the thing about Quiet. If you are willing to buy the whole excuse for her being basically naked to begin with (which me and my mesh armored motorcycle suit disagree with), there's the ripped nylons which are there purely to sexualize her. No other reason for that.
But beyond that, the entire situation with her is horrible - You capture her, decide to not kill her, and you entire interaction with her is based on making her do you exact bidding. The more you order her around, the higher her "bond" gets until she loves you. There's so much wrong with that I don't even know where to begin.
Moderate spoilers ahead, read at your own risk:
It's perfectly fine that she doesn't talk - It's not OK that the interaction with her is so limited outside of that. There are some actual legitimately good things done with her character - The reason why she is quiet is, unlike the outfit, fairly well justified, it's cool that she and code-talker can actually converse (although I wish they did more with that) and she can be a seriously bad-ass character in mission 45 (which is overall a very strong story line, if you are willing to overlook the rape as drama part of that mission). But they've basically taken every single bad stereotype of women in video games and put them in a single character:
- She is "rescued" by the player (granted, after trying to kill them)
- Her "outfit" is overly sexualized
- You have the typical Kojima treatment of women characters - i.e. they will make sexy poses for you if you ogle them
- She has "bonus" scenes involving her showering or playing in the rain (the latter could have been quite sweet if there was anything that actually lead up to it)
- She adds nothing of value to the story outside of a bullshit stockholm syndrome "love interest"- The game does not fundamentally change with her in it or not.
On top of that, she fills the same functional "role" as a horse, a robot, and a dog.... That is, she is there solely to be commanded by you, and to benefit you. She exists by your good will.
Not everything was done badly, I feel like they actually did do some good things with her character near the end, but the implications of everything leading up to that are uncomfortable at best. Sure, it's also implied that she is there by her will alone and can escape at any time, but she's functionally your slave. There are so many issues with her character outside of the outfit that go well beyond the franchises typical issues with women...
posted by MysticMCJ at 1:05 PM on October 26, 2015 [5 favorites]
It's perfectly fine that she doesn't talk - It's not OK that the interaction with her is so limited outside of that. There are some actual legitimately good things done with her character - The reason why she is quiet is, unlike the outfit, fairly well justified
You can maybe come up with an interesting, non-sexist justification for having a woman character who can't/doesn't talk, but in the context a video game series (and too much of the rest of the video game industry) where women are mostly there to be ogled rather than heard, I'd rather you just tell a different story.
posted by straight at 1:17 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
You can maybe come up with an interesting, non-sexist justification for having a woman character who can't/doesn't talk, but in the context a video game series (and too much of the rest of the video game industry) where women are mostly there to be ogled rather than heard, I'd rather you just tell a different story.
posted by straight at 1:17 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
And just to be clear that the problems with sexualization aren't limited to Quiet, despite the game otherwise being decent about letting you play as a totally non-fucked-with female operative in the field:
It figures far less into the game since it's just one cutscene from one mission and these characters aren't ever seen again, but at one point you confront some borged-up snipers and they're the Lady Versions of the somewhat more prominent borged-up dude soldiers you fight several times. Grey skin, twitchy and weird, former-human sort of schtick with these guys.
But the snipers get introduced through a slow-mo hero walk that painstakingly sweeps across their breasts and then around the backside to scope out their asses. Sure, they're weird zombies that you're about to have a rifle fight with, but let's make sure we get a real good look at them first, because...Kojima.
The more you order her around, the higher her "bond" gets until she loves you.
The one (thin as hell) upside there is you don't actually have to tell her to do stuff; you can just passively bring her a long, let her do her scouting-and-sniping thing however she likes, and that'll kick up the bond level over time. Everything they prefigure on that bond level is sort of gross (notably increasingly attentive/coquettish/pinup-ish poses and gestures when you're both flying around in the helicopter, which you do a lot of) and they do next to nothing with the idea of you two developing an actual relationship or even meaningful non-verbal communication about your feelings for each other, which is just super fucking disappointing.
Quiet has a lot of promise as a character and as a foil to your Big Boss and your organization, but there's a magical dumbness (which is a special kind of magical realism, I guess) on the part of every involved party that prevents that from happening, and so the interactions remain inexplicably vapid and exploitative.
posted by cortex at 1:18 PM on October 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
It figures far less into the game since it's just one cutscene from one mission and these characters aren't ever seen again, but at one point you confront some borged-up snipers and they're the Lady Versions of the somewhat more prominent borged-up dude soldiers you fight several times. Grey skin, twitchy and weird, former-human sort of schtick with these guys.
But the snipers get introduced through a slow-mo hero walk that painstakingly sweeps across their breasts and then around the backside to scope out their asses. Sure, they're weird zombies that you're about to have a rifle fight with, but let's make sure we get a real good look at them first, because...Kojima.
The more you order her around, the higher her "bond" gets until she loves you.
The one (thin as hell) upside there is you don't actually have to tell her to do stuff; you can just passively bring her a long, let her do her scouting-and-sniping thing however she likes, and that'll kick up the bond level over time. Everything they prefigure on that bond level is sort of gross (notably increasingly attentive/coquettish/pinup-ish poses and gestures when you're both flying around in the helicopter, which you do a lot of) and they do next to nothing with the idea of you two developing an actual relationship or even meaningful non-verbal communication about your feelings for each other, which is just super fucking disappointing.
Quiet has a lot of promise as a character and as a foil to your Big Boss and your organization, but there's a magical dumbness (which is a special kind of magical realism, I guess) on the part of every involved party that prevents that from happening, and so the interactions remain inexplicably vapid and exploitative.
posted by cortex at 1:18 PM on October 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
> You can maybe come up with an interesting, non-sexist justification for having a woman character who can't/doesn't talk, but in the context a video game series (and too much of the rest of the video game industry) where women are mostly there to be ogled rather than heard, I'd rather you just tell a different story.
I hope you know that I agree from what I posted - When I said it's fine that she doesn't talk, I am saying that because think it's also possible to have a character who can't talk but who can still communicate via other means, and add to the world and story. Just because you can't speak doesn't mean that you can't tell a good story - I feel like they actually squandered a great opportunity to do just this.
posted by MysticMCJ at 1:22 PM on October 26, 2015
I hope you know that I agree from what I posted - When I said it's fine that she doesn't talk, I am saying that because think it's also possible to have a character who can't talk but who can still communicate via other means, and add to the world and story. Just because you can't speak doesn't mean that you can't tell a good story - I feel like they actually squandered a great opportunity to do just this.
posted by MysticMCJ at 1:22 PM on October 26, 2015
> But the snipers get introduced through a slow-mo hero walk that painstakingly sweeps across their breasts and then around the backside to scope out their asses. Sure, they're weird zombies that you're about to have a rifle fight with, but let's make sure we get a real good look at them first, because...Kojima.
oh god, this. I had forgotten about that. And the leering cleavage shots at the beginning.
Another thing - Apparently it's possible to overhear conversations between female soldiers on Mother Base. They (and I suppose the entire game, since there aren't any other conversations between women hat I'm aware of) all fail the Bechtel test from what I can see.
posted by MysticMCJ at 1:25 PM on October 26, 2015
oh god, this. I had forgotten about that. And the leering cleavage shots at the beginning.
Another thing - Apparently it's possible to overhear conversations between female soldiers on Mother Base. They (and I suppose the entire game, since there aren't any other conversations between women hat I'm aware of) all fail the Bechtel test from what I can see.
posted by MysticMCJ at 1:25 PM on October 26, 2015
I really think if they hadn't gone with the bone-headed naked / photosynthesis / sex-kitten thing she would have been awesome.
She certainly doesn't have a healthy relationship with Snake, but it's unhealthy in an interesting way. Down to the end she both wants to serve Snake and resents him / wants to kill him. And that makes sense, I think, in terms of the character and for the overall story of the game.
One of the themes of the game is the abusive relationships between soldiers and their commanders, I think. When you walk around Mother Base and your troops say "Train with me" and thank you when you crunch their bones? That is chilling to me, actually. Your whole outfit is based on Stockholm syndrome, built from people you've hurt and kidnapped and imprisoned and -- it is sometimes implied -- tortured.
Remembering that when you build your army, you are setting up the antagonists for most of the rest of the series -- I don't think this reading is strained at all. Ocelot is very charming in this game, but he already has a reputation as a brutal prison-camp interrogator, and it's easy to see the hard-on for torture that he has exhibited since the first Metal Gear Solid, where he electrified a spread-eagled (Solid) Snake and taunted him with threats to kill Meryl.
posted by grobstein at 1:33 PM on October 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
She certainly doesn't have a healthy relationship with Snake, but it's unhealthy in an interesting way. Down to the end she both wants to serve Snake and resents him / wants to kill him. And that makes sense, I think, in terms of the character and for the overall story of the game.
One of the themes of the game is the abusive relationships between soldiers and their commanders, I think. When you walk around Mother Base and your troops say "Train with me" and thank you when you crunch their bones? That is chilling to me, actually. Your whole outfit is based on Stockholm syndrome, built from people you've hurt and kidnapped and imprisoned and -- it is sometimes implied -- tortured.
Remembering that when you build your army, you are setting up the antagonists for most of the rest of the series -- I don't think this reading is strained at all. Ocelot is very charming in this game, but he already has a reputation as a brutal prison-camp interrogator, and it's easy to see the hard-on for torture that he has exhibited since the first Metal Gear Solid, where he electrified a spread-eagled (Solid) Snake and taunted him with threats to kill Meryl.
posted by grobstein at 1:33 PM on October 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
The Women of Metal Gear Solid series by Kris at the Hathor Legacy: 1, 2, 3, 4
posted by Apocryphon at 1:44 PM on October 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Apocryphon at 1:44 PM on October 26, 2015 [2 favorites]
The Women of Metal Gear Solid series by Kris at the Hathor Legacy: 1, 2, 3, 4
Good series, thanks.
posted by grobstein at 2:08 PM on October 26, 2015
Good series, thanks.
posted by grobstein at 2:08 PM on October 26, 2015
> She certainly doesn't have a healthy relationship with Snake, but it's unhealthy in an interesting way. Down to the end she both wants to serve Snake and resents him / wants to kill him. And that makes sense, I think, in terms of the character and for the overall story of the game.
And if they actually built more on that narrative throughout the game, I'd be much more OK with that. As it is -- they do very little to establish this outside of maybe the scene when you bring her back to mother base, and then mission 45. I can't think of any scene in-between those two that help establish this. Maybe they were there, but if they were, they were certainly lost in the rest of it.
> Your whole outfit is based on Stockholm syndrome, built from people you've hurt and kidnapped and imprisoned and -- it is sometimes implied -- tortured.
Not implied but shown with Quiet, notably. If it went anything for you like it did for me, you are using her as your "buddy" in battle, then she's randomly being tortured - which you, as the boss of everyone, and also the one person who doesn't hate her, stand by and watch until finally putting a stop to it as passively as possible, which is ALSO the point in the game that they reveal that quiet is in love with you - SO very many problems with this - then you bring her back out yet again.
I really do get what you are saying, but the way this is handled with everyone else and the way it is handled with quiet are drastically different.
posted by MysticMCJ at 2:08 PM on October 26, 2015
And if they actually built more on that narrative throughout the game, I'd be much more OK with that. As it is -- they do very little to establish this outside of maybe the scene when you bring her back to mother base, and then mission 45. I can't think of any scene in-between those two that help establish this. Maybe they were there, but if they were, they were certainly lost in the rest of it.
> Your whole outfit is based on Stockholm syndrome, built from people you've hurt and kidnapped and imprisoned and -- it is sometimes implied -- tortured.
Not implied but shown with Quiet, notably. If it went anything for you like it did for me, you are using her as your "buddy" in battle, then she's randomly being tortured - which you, as the boss of everyone, and also the one person who doesn't hate her, stand by and watch until finally putting a stop to it as passively as possible, which is ALSO the point in the game that they reveal that quiet is in love with you - SO very many problems with this - then you bring her back out yet again.
I really do get what you are saying, but the way this is handled with everyone else and the way it is handled with quiet are drastically different.
posted by MysticMCJ at 2:08 PM on October 26, 2015
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posted by jonmc at 2:32 PM on October 25, 2015 [8 favorites]