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Metal Gear Solid 2 is highly illogical.
And I love it. In the end, as many said, it's just plain laughable. And . . . to a certain deeper extent, creepy as hell.
As a fourteen-year-old with an IQ as high as my weight (I was a big kid), I found myself confused by the movie "Patriot Games."
I mean -- what the hell's going on now? There are so many turnarounds -- all of them logical -- and, to a point, it's ridiculous. All these movies about terrorists and nuclear weapons and/or terrorists with nuclear weapons . . . they're so serious they're ridiculous.
As a twenty-two-year-old living in a run-down apartment in northern Tokyo, I was confused beyond belief by the last two-thirds of Metal Gear Solid 2.
To quote Cypher in "The Matrix," what a mind-job.
I wasn't sure I liked the game.
And now, I'm hoping Metal Gear Solid 3 features a battle against the ninja-ghost of Gray Fox atop a bullet train moving toward an alien landing site somewhere in the Yukon.
How did I get from one extreme to the other? Simply, I played the game again, not skipping the plot sequences. I reread some modern Japanese literature. I found a picture of Yoko Ono in an old Rolling Stone magazine, cut it out, and taped it to my wall. I sat down, then, looked at Yoko, and thought.
In several interviews, Kojima said he got the idea for Metal Gear Solid 2's story when he read an article about the lawsuit against Napster. The idea that the US Government could seek to prevent the world from sharing music with one another struck him as one step closer to a science-fiction world of mind-control. At the same time he got this idea, he was playing his son's friend's copy of Pokémon Silver. Hideo Kojima, I hear, has one of every Pokémon on every possible version of Pokémon. Most of them are on level 100.
Metal Gear Solid 2 took so long to develop, Kojima says, because he was playing Pokémon Crystal about six hours a day. He called it his "part-time job." This might or might not have been a joke.
Now, is this the kind of guy we want making our videogames?
I mean, he sits around and . . . plays videogames all day!
. . . Exactly.
Lover of the game that I am, I’ll admit: Metal Gear Solid 2’s story is so full of holes it's like a string of bad jokes.
Yet, I consider it about 100 times more "literary" than the most classy RPG -- more than Final Fantasy X, with its surprisingly mature handling of father-son themes.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is about taking the conventions of videogames and turning them around. It rips open the spy-thriller genre and puts it back together from the inside-out.
For crying out loud, one of the people monitoring our hero on his mission is his fiancée, who won't stop talking to him about movies they watched together. Sappy piano music plays in the background.
Electronic Gaming Monthly printed a picture in their review. I bought that EGM for ten bucks at a foreign bookstore in Tokyo, and read that review.
"Sappy piano music actually plays in the background during this romantic interlude. Ugh," the caption reads.
I paid ten bucks, I was thinking, to read a review from people that didn’t "get" the joke. Sure, they gave it a high enough score. This isn’t about the score, though. This is about the story, or, more specifically, the wrongness of the bashing thereof. So I ask a question:
Am I the only person who got it?
Am I the only person who found the game to be bold and risky? Am I the only person who thought, "If Haruki Murakami wrote a spy-thriller, this is what it would be like?"
Kojima has made the first postmodern videogame.
Okay, so Earthbound was the first postmodern videogame. Well, Mother was, if you want to get all technical.
Nobody argues with Earthbound. They know it's supposed to be wacky and illogical.
People argue about Metal Gear Solid 2. They don’t know that it's right in the same boat as Earthbound.
That's what makes it so damned brilliant.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is not a departure from the first one. The first one was lucky to not be too postmodern for popularity. Kojima is only now letting his more literary tendencies emerge.
Why would I call the first MGS "pleasantly postmodern"? Let’s take a look: it's a semi-realistic military thriller about terrorists with nuclear weapons and hostages -- with the curious additions of the prototype for the world's first robotic tank, the world's most powerful psychic, a giant Eskimo shaman, and a cyborg ninja.
All the sequel does is raise that bar a little higher.
Japanese superstar novelist Haruki Murakami once spoke on the creativity of the Japanese people. As much as I would have liked to, I didn’t hear him speak about it in person. So let me paraphrase his main ideas:
"The Japanese are not, by nature, creative. Those Japanese who are creative are quite creative. Those who want to be creative because they don’t want a job in a company can only imitate the truly creative."
Look at any of numerous Gundam(n) clones. Like Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon, and Monster Rancher (the TV shows) compared to Pokémon.
In a way, Sonic the Hedgehog to Mario.
Legend of Dragoon to Final Fantasy VII.
The original Mother to Dragon Quest . . . ?
Mother set the mark for postmodern games. It was obviously postmodern. Mother is a Yoko Ono teacup-cut-in-half. It’s Takako Minekawa's song "Kangaroo Pocket Calculator," in which the only lyrics are: "47 is a magical number. 47 plus 2 equals 49. 47 times 2 equals 94. 49 and 94. 94 and 49. The relationship between 47 and 2: It's . . . magic."
We hear this, and think: "Funny. Cute."
Metal Gear Solid 2 is another level of postmodernity. Metal Gear Solid 2 is Yasuharu Konishi’s seven-minute remix of the one-minute "Son of Godzilla" march. For four minutes, we hear a Brazilian woman narrate a Godzilla movie in Portuguese, with ambient sounds in the background. For three minutes, we hear the Godzilla march, techno beats laid down in the background.
We hear this, and think: "What the hell?"
There’s something . . . wrong with the picture. You don't understand the motives. Maybe you’re not supposed to.
I won’t dare say that Metal Gear Solid 2 was "flawlessly crafted." Its story was not "well-constructed." It wasn’t supposed to be.
That’s the nature of the postmodern: to attack the societal/literary dogma as it has been written since the beginning of time: "All stories must make sense, all love must be true, all endings must be happy and easy to understand."
MGS is not easy to understand. It gets downright bizarre. It’ll make you throw up your hands and scream, "What the hell?"
Metal Gear Solid 2 in the beginning:
A lone vigilante spy jumping off a bridge, boarding an ocean liner, and beginning a mission.
Metal Gear Solid 2 in the end:
A giant robot, a super spy in chains, a guy with a sword, Doctor Octopus, a lady with an enormous gun, all standing on the deck of a ship within viewing distance of the New York City skyline.
In all honesty, it was a little too X-men-like for my tastes.
Still, confusion didn’t make me dislike the game. People who dislike Metal Gear Solid 2 because they don’t understand it remind me of my dad. He can’t stand to watch a subtitled movie.
They remind me of some of the students I taught English to in Japan. Afraid to make mistakes. Afraid of what they don’t understand.
The postmodern attacks people who are afraid of what they don’t understand. It says, "Hey, you! If you hate this game so much, why are you still playing?"
(Okay, so the gameplay is perfect. We’ve already covered that.)
One could say you’re still playing because there are individual elements strewn throughout the mess that intrigue you.
Such individual scenes that got me. Fighting Vamp -- a vampire, for god's sake, a vampire -- sniping, taking down the harrier. Fighting Fatman -- a bomb-happy fat guy on rollerblades, for God’s sake, rollerblades. At those times, I was in the action movie.
The whole scene with the parrot. The scene you hate most. The first time you watched it, you couldn’t turn away, could you? The confession of semi-incest (his stepmother, people -- stepmother). The eerie pixilated flashbacks to the first game. The romantic interludes . . .
TURN THE GAME CONSOLE OFF NOW!!!
This is modern Japanese literature, people.
As Japanese game developers get the power to make games better than movies, you can bet about 25% of them are going to be like this.
I'd suggest you start reading up. Haruki Murakami is a good place to start. Go to Borders, grab A Wild Sheep Chase, and see if it grabs you.
Then again, there’s an all-important question. A negative answer could prove me both wrong and stupid. That question is this: Did Kojima intend to make the game this way?
I'm guessing Kojima is one of those rare "creative" Japanese people. He's a Haruki Murakami, an Akira Toriyama, a Yu Suzuki, a . . . dare I say it . . . a Shigeru Miyamoto.
In case you can’t tell, my position is this:
Kojima intended Metal Gear Solid 2 to be as wacky as it was.
Here’s my evidence:
Haruki Murakami says that his novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, started with one idea: a guy in his kitchen, cooking spaghetti. Where it went in the following 607 pages, well, he didn’t know until he started writing. That’s freeform postmodernity, and it works, when you’re feeling wacky.
I’ve written stories like that, and they turn out just fine. One of them even won me a scholarship to a writer’s conference a while back. So these Wind-up Bird-style setups are fine for a story or a novel, where one person is responsible.
They don’t work in group situations. They don’t work in journalism projects where you want to do a breakdown of the morality models of reality TV shows and your partners are three sorority girls who want to do an "exposé" of lingerie ads -- "They're made for men! Look at them! They show girls wearing lingerie!'
{ . . . My partners were named Holly, Chrissy, and Angie.}
Something tells me, seeing as more than a dozen people were behind Metal Gear Solid 2, that the postmodernity was actually quite thought-out.
Then again, Kojima, being the big cheese around his team, can do more of what he wants than I could in a room of sorority girls with big water bottles.
They love water bottles. They love taking big sips, making that cracking plastic sound, whenever I try to say something.
That's another thing altogether, though.
Ahem. Postmodernity.
Look at Shigesato Itoi, the producer of Mother and Mother 2.
The postmodernity in his case came from satire. "Satire? In a videogame?" people were thinking.
Metal Gear Solid 2's postmodernity is in its structure.
See, Snake is a loner until the end of MGS1. Whether Meryl lives or Otacon lives, he's not alone at the end.
In Metal Gear Solid 2, we see a guy who's a loner in a different way. Yes, Snake is always there -- and maybe it was Kojima’s intention to make Snake even more beloved by not letting us control him. Maybe it was Kojima’s intention to make us feel the great difference between the two characters. Snake is a hardened military stereotype. Raiden is just a guy.
Raiden reminds me of the two main characters of the film "Chungking Express," by Wong Kar-wai.
Remember when Rose says to Raiden (paraphrase): "I've been to your apartment. Your room is empty. No pictures, no posters -- just a bed."
And Raiden defends himself, "I only use that room for sleeping."
Kojima is saying something about something with Metal Gear Solid 2, and saying it with such boldness that maybe you don’t notice it.
And what is he saying this "something" about?
The US military?
Sure, I'll buy that. Hideo Kojima's done his share of reading. And I'm not just talking Tom Clancy.
Is he saying this "something" about US Special Forces agents? Navy SEALS? That they’re the kind of people to have empty rooms used "just for sleeping"?
Sure, I'll buy that, too.
However, seeing as Metal Gear Solid 2 is just a recreation of Metal Gear Solid, which is, essentially, just a videogame, it's safer to say this:
Snake is a person.
In Metal Gear Solid, we played as this person called Snake.
In Metal Gear Solid 2, we play as Raiden, a newcomer, a loner with an empty bedroom back home, who's currently going through a training mission based on the events of another game.
Raiden -- Jack -- is a videogame character.
Does the description of a "videogame character" fit Jack?
If Jack is a videogame character, who are the "Patriots"? The players? What does this all have to do with Napster?
More importantly, if a videogame character had a bedroom, what would it look like?
What does Mario's bedroom look like?
What does Sonic the Hedgehog's bedroom look like?
For that matter, what does a real person’s bedroom need to look like?
Why have posters on your wall at all?
I found this train of thought especially profound. At the time I played Metal Gear Solid 2, I was living in a Tokyo apartment the size of my closet back in Indianapolis; my one room was big enough for a futon and a nine-inch television on the floor.
I had nothing on the walls except for the Muji price sticker that was came on my pillow, which I saved because . . . I don’t know why I saved it. I do things like that sometimes. I lead a postmodern life. Playing Metal Gear Solid 2, to me, mirrors sleeping -- dreaming -- in an empty room. "Dreaming in an empty room," then, is what I’ll call my model.
There are two aspects to dreaming in an empty room:
1. The dream
2. The empty room you see immediately after waking up
Neither the dream nor the empty room is fully "real." The "dream" isn’t real because we’re in control, and it feels like we’re not. The "empty room" isn’t real because we can put whatever we want in it. Something just doesn’t feel real without personal touches. That’s Rose’s complaint in Metal Gear Solid 2. She thinks posters or personal effects will make Jack more "real."
In this way, we can compare Metal Gear Solid 2 to Ico. We can say that the nature of reality is established in neither Metal Gear Solid 2 nor Ico. Ico reminds me of the "End of the World" section of Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
The "nature of reality" is not established in Murakami's "End of the World" -- a man in a village into which unicorns are being herded every night, where he and a girl have to "read old dreams" out of skulls to discover his lost "self," his lost "dreams," and his lost shadow, literally cut off his body when he first enters.
This story is weaved into the story of the "Hard-boiled Wonderland," in which a futuristic accountant evades gangsters and kappa demons beneath the Tokyo subway system, checks out books from a pretty librarian, and spends his last day on earth watching laundry that isn't his in a Laundromat.
"Hard-boiled Wonderland" is rife with little details -- gorilla-sized gangsters, kappas, a fat girl's overly pink laundry, the narrator's shattered whisky collection.
"The End of the World" is very spare, with a narrator who speaks in short sentences without contractions.
In Japanese literature, there are generally two types of postmodernity: "Hard-boiled Wonderlands," and "The Ends of the World."
I'll call them, respectively, "dreams" and "empty rooms." Which may or may not be ironic -- the "End of the World" segment of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is actually the narrator’s dream-world. In my model, it’s an "empty room." "Hard-boiled Wonderland," the novel’s reality, is what I’ll call a "dream."
By this model:
Metal Gear Solid 2 is a "dream."
Ico is an "empty room."
They are both postmodern masterpieces in their own right.
Now, if your dreams are more like Ico than Metal Gear Solid 2, well, more power to you. The term "dream" doesn't apply to your dreams, or anyone's dreams, in particular. When using a term to describe something postmodern, expect the term to be used postmodernly.
The empty room is a clean slate. You can put anything in the empty room.
Even a horned boy leading a princess through a castle. Even a language that doesn’t exist.
A dream, however, is always grounded in reality. Dreams have . . . well, not rules. Not constructs. Not even "logic." All they need to keep us from waking up is a sense of the real.
Dreams have terrorists. Dreams have presidents, hostage situations.
Ever dreamed you witnessed a bank robbery? I have.
Dreams, sometimes, even have terrorist/hostage situations involving vampires.
Dreams mix the real, and the unreal. Dreams mix whatever is in our minds. We can drift off to sleep in a recliner while half-reading the Lord of the Rings and half-listening to the NBC nightly news. Tom Brokaw can be talking about a hostage situation in Israel one second, and a breakthrough in health care the next. We can fall asleep, and hear his voice say: "Ninjas officially kidnapped the president at six o'clock this morning." That happened to me, once. (Except I wasn't actually reading Lord of the Rings.)
Do your dreams resolve, without fail, before you wake up?
Mine don’t.
Ico is a boy placed in an empty room. He is a videogame character that doesn’t know he's a videogame character. We're not supposed to think of him as a videogame character. He's Ico.
The game absorbs us. I've heard lots of people say, "I forgot I was playing a game."
Well!
Metal Gear Solid 2 reflects on itself so much we start thinking, "This is f***ing ridiculous!"
Ever had a weird dream? Like, a really weird dream?
Ever dream you're on an elevator creeping up the side of a skyscraper, and wake up when a helicopter shoots out the glass, and you jump, and plummet toward the street?
I say you always wake up before you fall because your mind has no memories of death, so you can't recreate it. Our dreams use pieces of cognition we don't know they're using.
Just Metal Gear Solid 2 uses spy-thriller clichés, action-movie scenes, and ripped-from-the-headlines terrorist activities to tell you a story.
"Well, it’s not a story I want to hear!" you may exclaim.
Okay. How interesting do you want your spy-thriller to be?
"Metal Gear Solid 2 is an abomination!" some people said.
What did you want, "surprising twists"? You wanted "secrets"?
Well, you got a whole hell of a lot of secrets, didn’t you?
Recall Otacon’s "confession" scene. Recall the parrot. And then think:
Do you ever dream you’re a cowboy/gas station attendant in a futuristic desert, who ends up getting sexually harassed in a job interview and forced to have sex with the female CEO, who luckily happens to be Michelle Yeoh?
Do you ever dream that you cry, and run away from Michelle Yeoh when she asks you to have sex with her?
Well, sometimes the postmodern shows us stuff we don’t want -- or aren't ready -- to see.
Like Otacon crying over his little step-sister's dead body because he had sex with her mom. Right in the middle of a terrorist-hostage-nuclear weapon-situation.
Art imitates life, they say? Maybe it does.
Someone tell me "Sleepless in Seattle" imitates their life.
Someone else tell me "Sleepless in Seattle" is art.
The postmodern is concerned with something different. It's not logic. Leave logic to Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Cross [that was a joke]. Postmodernity doesn’t care for logic. It cares for something else.
I could explain it. However, that would involve my letting out the big secret.
Okay, so I don’t really know what postmodernity cares for. That’s not the point, though. The point is that this entire theory of "Dreaming in an Empty Room" might seem like pure conjecture to a lot of people. Most people, I gather, will brush this theory off. They’ll say, "I still think it was an abomination. The story sucked. It could have been so much better. 'Literary'? It wasn’t supposed to be literary; it was supposed to be a game."
I've come across these people in person, and I've tried to explain things to them. These are the people who say the "story" was "an abomination," and then say that it wasn't "supposed to be literary." These are also the people who are still talking today about Zack and Cloud’s relationship in Final Fantasy VII. These are the people who work long and hard to try to get their loved ones or friends to understand that gaming is a legitimate form of entertainment.
I'm confused, fellow gamers, that you want games to get recognition as legitimate entertainment, yet can't accept that they can also have artistic aspirations. Doesn't this run counter to man's tendency to hail as art what he doesn't understand? What would Mark Twain have to say about all this? Anyone remember "The King's Camelopard" from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
Hell, if Mark Twain were around today, he’d probably be making games that make money. That people flame other people about on message boards. That everyone plays, and no one really, truly understands.
With the current wave of consoles, we're going to see a lot more games made by a lot more people, many of them in Japan, many of them elsewhere. We haven’t yet seen the first Mark Twain of videogames -- though Mother 2 and Metal Gear Solid 2 come close. Sadly, a lot of people are not particularly waiting for this genius designer's arrival.
Do you think people in Murasaki Shikibu's time complained to her about the world’s "first novel," The Tale of Genji, saying "Books are supposed to be fun, not making all these subtle comments about the politics of the Heian court!"
Games are a young form of entertainment. The children who grew up with games are now adults. Many of them are as blind to the idea of the artistic videogame as our parents are to Eminem, as our parents' parents were to The Beatles, as The Beatles' fans were blind to the conceptuality of Yoko Ono. God bless the children of today, for seeing the genius of Pokémon. One of them is the first Tolstoy of videogames.
That, however, is for another day's installment.
Here, at the end of this ridiculous, postmodern "editorial," I’d like to take a stance: I am a strong advocate of New School Gaming. Yes, I can beat Gradius III in one life. Yes, my favorite game is Super Mario Bros. 3. Yes, I do play Street Fighter II Turbo Hyperfighting and Gunstar Heroes at least twice a week. Yes, I like Landstalker more than Final Fantasy X. That doesn’t matter. I have hope for the future. Maybe more hope than you have.
Or maybe I just have a thing for the Colonel.
TURN THE GAME CONSOLE OFF NOW!
Postscript:
Since writing this article, I have endured many long adventures, played a demo of Metal Gear Solid 3, and met Hideo Kojima. I interviewed him for an article in Wired, a fine and noble magazine. The interview will be published within a few months of your reading or rereading this. Around the time of my interview with Mr. Kojima, I took this article down, fearing that he might read it. Maybe I was fearing having made a mistake of some sort. Well, I was able to present my ideas to Kojima, who confirmed that I am pretty much right about why he made Metal Gear Solid 2. His goal was, as he explained to me, "To make a videogame that told a story that could only be told in a videogame." His first and foremost goal, he claims, was to "Use the medium," which is, as he put it, "inherently postmodern." The goal of the story the game sought to tell was to tell that story to the people of today, with no illusions of its surviving decades or centuries to leave an impact on a distant society. Even so, the gameplay, as he explains, becomes increasingly more challenging in such a way as to make the experience something round and fulfilling even to the player who skips all of the long, drawn-out dialogue sequences. The gameplay, says the man, was engaging merely because it could not be not engaging under his supervision. Kojima shared a few philosophies with me on what kinds of people make good game developers, and under his rubric, I am one of those people, which made me feel kind of nice.
Hideo Kojima claims to have never read Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, though Japanese filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura has been suggesting the book to Kojima since Metal Gear Solid 2 went on sale. Kojima himself likes to think that the game's was more inspired by Kobo Abe's Kangaroo Notebook than anything else. Which is funny, because I also mentioned a Japanese work of postmodern . . . artistic integrity with the word "Kangaroo" in its title in my original writing.
Thanks again.
