The Truths of Metal Gear Solid: The Naked Truth

This is an article from the Metal Gear Solid Naked book that deals with the themes and story of Metal Gear series. This article was written by the same author who wrote the Newsweek article about Hideo Kojima.

The brief history of videogames can be distilled to one simple question: what is the relationship between a pair of pixels? Is one pixel striking another pixel? Is one pixel outracing the other pixel? Is the first pixel dodging the second pixel? Until Metal Gear Solid premiered in 1998, these three interactions more or less defined the limits of the videogaming experience. But in Hideo Kojima's imagination, one pixel could hide from another pixel. One pixel could create a noise to lure the other pixel into a trap. And the first pixel could wait until the second pixel's back was turned, render that pixel unconscious and hide that pixel in the shadows before continuing with its mission. Tactical Stealth Action, he called it. Best PlayStation Game Ever, players replied.

That wasn't Kojima's only innovation. In constructing the Metal Gear Solid universe, he created a mythology that didn't rely on tiny plumbers, cuddly chocobos, lurching zombies or helpless princesses. Just nine years after the Berlin wall came tumbling down. Kojima plunged unsuspecting gamers into a near-future world of stolen nuclear weapons, shadowy covert operatives and twisted genetic experiments. Code names like Revolver Ocelot, Liquid Snake and Big Boss invoked post-World War II conflicts from Cuba to Vietnam to Eastern Europe. This wasn't a fantasy world, like most videogames, but a plausibly, slightly sci-fi one that felt like a skewed alternate history of the 20th century, where the lines between heroism and villainy, honesty and deceit, right and wrong, blur repeatedly. Kojima successfully translated the paranoid sensibility of the late Cold War era into a breathtaking interactive experience.

With Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Kojima took his ideas to the proverbial next level, creating a world that responded to the player's actions in a manner that was quite unprecedented. Rain splashed on the characters and the camera. Bullets pierced fire extinguishers and pipes, causing them to spray out foam or steam. Players could now use empty lockers to hide from guards, or to conceal their bodies once they had been knocked unconscious. Outside, seagulls flew overhead; if players looked up too long, the birds would start dropping little presents on them; if players shot the birds, they received a horrified reprimand from their commanding officer. During some of the talking heads sequences where information was being dispensed, players could press a button to hear Snake or Raiden's private thoughts about what was going on. In an industry where some aspect of the gameplay inevitably goes awry, Metal Gear Solid 2 was such a polished, visually astounding work that game developers and gamer players alike were left in awe.

Is this art? That's a difficult question to answer because games often have a deceptive similarity to other media. Like movies, games are an audiovisual, increasingly cinematic medium. Like television, most games are played in the home. Like painting, games feature painstaking detailed graphics. And like literature, many games have a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end. Because of these factors, many of us assume that games should be measured by the same standards as all other art forms. And if they don't measure up, well, that just means that games are incapable of actually becoming an art form.

But what people often forget video games are fundamentally different from all previous art forms in that they are interactive, not contemplative. Put another way, you don't sit back and watch a game, you participate in it. That means that a player simply cannot be equated with 'the audience.' Instead, he or she is the actor to the game designer's playwright-in fact, actors were referred to as 'players' at the time of the world's best known playwright, William Shakespeare - or the musician to the game designer's composer. And just as a play or musical composition does not fully come to life until it is performed, so too does a video game not come to life until it is played. The game cannot exist without the game player.

What Metal Gear Solid allowed, then, was an opportunity for players to "perform" by giving him or her as many choices as possible as to how to carry out their missions. Want to sneak around in the shadows? You can do that. Knock your enemies out with tranquilizer darts? You can do that. Take them down with a series of hand-to-hand moves? You can do that. Shoot your foes dead with lethal weapons? You can do that too. By the time you get to the end of the game, your arsenal will range from katanas to sniper rifles to automatic weapons to grenade launchers to rocket launchers. All of this gives the player the sense that he or she can express themselves through the game, that the choices they make in the game say something about who they are deep down inside, as though the game were a series of interactive Rorshach blots. On earlier, less powerful consoles, the idea of videogame playing as performance was nearly impossible, because the worlds had to be far more constrained. Kojima has been one of the first designers to take advantage of the greater possibilities that today's systems allow. And like Christopher Columbus, he has pointed the way for others to follow in his path.

If Metal Gear Solid can be said to have been the defining game of the PlayStation generation for American audiences, it seems as though Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City will be seen as the defining games for the PlayStation 2, largely because of the unprecedented level of freedom both games offered players. What's interesting to note is that there's arguably just as much freedom in Metal Gear Solid 2. The difference between the two games was the way in which each focused that freedom. Grand Theft Auto features sprawling simulated metropolis where players can walk, run or drive anywhere they choose (though unlike Solid Snake or Raiden, the anti-heroes of Grand Theft Auto cannot swim), and where the populace reacts to the player's every action: drivers scream when you steal their car; pedestrians flee when you try to run them down; ambulances and fire trucks respond to your acts of mayhem, and the police, SWAT and military do their level best to stop your one-man crime wave.

Metal Gear Solid 2, by contrast, offers a similar level of freedom and responsiveness, but it's necessarily more focused because of the context. Snake and Raiden are trying to infiltrate military complexes, not take over the underworld of a major city. The freedom is in selecting the right weapon at your disposal; in choosing between stealth and haste; in deciding whether to kill your enemies or to merely incapacitate them. At nearly every turn, that decision belongs to the player. Kojima's game doesn't tell you what you can or can't do; instead, it lets you make your choices and lets you experience the consequences. The world too, as I said above, is just as responsive. Enemies will become suspicious at the sight of wet footprints or blood. Suspicious enemies will radio for backup. Loud weapons or a prolonged firefight will cause your enemies to bring in reinforcements. And it isn't just the AI that responds to the player, the highly detailed environment does as well: buckets of ice, panes of glass, flocks of birds and potted plants all respond your various actions. Yet it was the massive scale of Grand Theft Auto that American gamers responded to in larger numbers than the more intimate scale of Metal Gear Solid 2.

Is this why Kojima has shifted his focus somewhat with Metal Gear Solid 3, placing the player in large outdoor environments instead of the metallic corridors of his previous games? Even though he threw in a clever reference to Grand Theft Auto in the trailer for Metal Gear Solid 3, the answer is more complex than that. Kojima is actually using the power of today's consoles to burrow more deeply into the possibilities of his world. Why start the player at the entrance to a military complex when you can let him sneak through the jungle to get there? Snake has been shown using animals and fish for food and cover, and Kojima has said that the mechanics of survival will overlaid onto the game's usual tactical stealth aspects. Even camouflage will play a big role; with the right camouflage pattern, gamers will be able to hide virtually in plain sight. As of this writing, not too much is known about the game, but it has been one of the most anticipated games in the United States ever since the trailer was shown at last year's Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

One of the themes of Kojima's Metal Gear Solid games is an examination of what we pass to future generations. By that measure, Kojima's immortality in the game industry is virtually assured, regardless of which game sells the most before the next set of videogame consoles is released. You only have to look at the many imitators that have come along in the wake of Metal Gear Solid, from Ubisoft's hyper-realistic Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell to Rockstar Games' ultra-violent Manhunt. Even action games like Activision's True Crime and Electronic Arts' Freedom Fighters now feature stealth missions whose template is clearly drawn from Kojima's work. So if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery as they say in the West, then Kojima should feel flattered indeed. And all eyes will be upon him as he once again leads the way for game designers and game players to follow.

-- Article by N'gai Croal from Metal Gear Solid Naked, 03.2004