Play's the Thing
Forrest Cardamenis on Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

As articulated by pioneering video game theorist Jesper Juul in 1999, there are two strands in the medium’s form that exist in constant tension. The narrative of a game, which he describes as “a chain of events that are claimed to necessarily follow each other,” alternates, rather than combines, with the game’s “ludic” elements: “interactive and nonlinear…an interactivity that presupposes a now where the user has influence.” Put simply, what makes a game a game, and what makes a game interesting, is “exactly the qualities that make it a non-story.” Everyone’s favorite part of Doom is running around blowing things up, not the psychology of the protagonist or the political commentary of its humans vs. aliens premise.

But even before Juul, this tension was visible in the reviews of consumer-facing publications. Consider Gamespot’s Metal Gear Solid review, written at the time of the game’s 1998 release by site co-founder and later founder of Giant Bomb Jeff Gerstmann. It ends:

"Five years from now, when we look back upon Metal Gear Solid, what will we see? [...] It breaks new ground in gameplay and truly brings the video game one step closer to the realm of movies. It is, without a doubt, a landmark game. But the extreme ease with which it can be mastered and the game's insultingly short length keep it from perfection. Plus, do we really want games that are more like movies? If Hideo Kojima, the game's producer, was so set on this type of cinematic experience, he should really be making movies instead of games. While Metal Gear Solid currently stands alone, it stands as more of a work of art than as an actual game. It's definitely worth purchasing, but don't be surprised if you suddenly get extremely angry when you finish the game the day after you brought it home."

Here we see, besides the tension between “game” and “narrative”, an attention to innovation and posterity, shades of art-historical arguments about medium specificity, and a rare (for its time) attribution of a game to an individual artist. All of these would become significant elements of the games-as-art discourse that would mature in the next decade. But there is also an intensely consumerist mindset that seems to presage the “content”-based strategies of streamers and games studios alike, and that’s to say nothing of the eye-catching back-handed compliment about the game’s pedigree: “more a work of art than an actual game.” Both Gerstmann and Juul prompt us to ask, “Can it really not be both?”

By the late 1990s, console games were exploding in popularity, cross-pressuring the highest budget, most ambitious games: there was an audience of older teens and young adults receptive to a more sophisticated game narrative, but the growth of the market also depended on accessibility. Ask too much of the player, in gameplay or in narrative, and the game would not sell; ask too little, and it would hardly be worth taking seriously as art. Attempts to reconcile the two looked like Final Fantasy VII, which told a sci-fi, ecoterrorist narrative in a typical fashion of alternating gameplay (turn-based battles and map exploration) with narrative advancement (text boxes with character dialogue). On PC games like Fallout, which combined complex rules inspired by tabletop RPGs with a morally ambiguous look at a post-apocalyptic world, were shrinking the gap between a game’s narrative and ludic components more successfully, but its opacity, lack of direction, and difficulty made it a poor model for console gaming’s growth (it sold 160K copies in six months; Final Fantasy VII sold more than double that in its first weekend). Metal Gear Solid’s distinction, along with that of its sequel, lies in how readily it speaks to these various tensions—artistic/commercial, ludic/narrative, game/film. Its real-world setting, political subject matter, and high production values combine with the game’s exploration of the limits of player agency to first foreground and critique the player and then break down the boundary between gameplay and narrative.

Metal Gear Solid begins with a cutscene of covert operative and player-character Solid Snake sneaking into a remote Alaskan facility, where he has been tasked by the U.S. government with eliminating the terrorists that have seized a facility housing nuclear weapons and a top-secret mecha, Metal Gear, capable of launching them. Against a mission briefing, the opening credits play as in a movie, beginning with “A Hideo Kojima game” and concluding with “directed by Hideo Kojima,” a stamp of authorship virtually unheard of in games at that time. Contemporaneous reviews, unwittingly or otherwise, affirmed that frame, helping to make Kojima the medium’s most famous designer. As the scenario is introduced, the voice cast, led by actor and X-Men and Watchmen screenwriter David Hayter as Solid Snake, quickly establishes its bona fides. Console games had been voiced before, but the quality of the voice acting and the ambition of the script made Metal Gear Solid unique.

By the time the player takes control of Snake in the snowy exteriors of the locale codenamed “Shadow Moses,” Metal Gear Solid already feels like a James Bond pastiche, complete with a legendary and flirtatious lead, a pair of possible “Bond Girls” (with another to be introduced shortly), and a Cold War conflict featuring the Russians. It’s James Bond, but it’s also Full Metal Jacket: in an echo of the climax of Kubrick’s film, an unseen female sniper shoots Snake’s companion in the limbs but leaves her alive out in the open as bait. In the second battle, the sniper seems to paraphrase Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth: “I’m going to send you a love letter, my dear,” she says. “Do you know what that is? It’s a bullet straight from my gun to your heart.” (The references are not all contemporary pop culture: when you save your game, you’re treated to proverbs by the likes of Shakespeare, Lao Tzu, and De Gaulle.) The cutscenes employ cinematic language—zooms, pans, and tracking shots, plus some cross-cutting—more purposefully than most games had managed. Yes, this is a game in which “nanomachines” injected into your body allow you to communicate silently with people across the country and ninjas with invisible technology give grand speeches as they sacrifice themselves to help you defeat a mecha piloted by your evil test-tube twin, but it’s also a story tastefully and earnestly concerned with the horrors of nuclear weapons and Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene theory. It even interrupts its puzzle-like depiction of covert ops warfare to remind the player of the plight of the Kurds and Gulf War syndrome. Kojima’s web of historical, scientific and artistic allusions obscures the border between “high” and “low” art, or “art” and “entertainment,” that remains common in discussions of games’ artistic legitimacy.

At first glance, Metal Gear Solid’s commentary on destiny, nuclear proliferation, state corruption, and the dangers of misusing new technology are undercut by its ludic obligations. A game won’t play and a narrative won’t advance if the player does not know what to do: Countless times, Snake repeats information in a way that is meant to clarify what the player is supposed to do next or how to interpret the latest narrative revelation. Such moments are, by the standards of novels or films, bad writing. Here, however, they have a unique side effect: they explicitly call your attention to the fact that you are playing a game. In-game conversations about what buttons to press on the controller, although addressed to Snake, are for the player. Does that make Snake a stand-in for the player, a character we are meant to identify with and embody? Or is he merely the protagonist of a drama that we control? Even if we “control” Snake, do we ever really have a meaningful choice in what he does or does not do? Does our decision to sneak or shoot our way through the scenario, to rely or not rely on his/our aides, change anything? Conversations about the nature of the player contract would go on to dominate discourse around games like Bioshock and The Last of Us, but it was an implicit concern of Metal Gear Solid, one of the ’90s biggest games, and was even more prominent in its sequel.

The instability of the player-character relationship would become the primary theme of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, among the most extensively analyzed video games ever made (those in need of a primer should read Heather Alexandra or James Howell). In brief, MGS2, while not discarding the first game’s focus on nukes, zoomed in on that game’s more latent concern with how information is managed. MGS2 reprises the pattern of a mission control that knows more than it tells the player-character, but its unseen villain is a shadowy organization called The Patriots that—besides standing in for the game’s designers as the all-powerful, invisible hand pulling the strings—aims to control the flow of information in cyberspace, crushing the then-burgeoning idea of the open and democratic internet in favor of a closed one. Just as crucial, it winks constantly at the player’s (over)-identification with the first game’s womanizing super soldier and presumed resemblance to the dorkier protagonist of this game, “Raiden,” whose real name “Jack,” comes not from an action hero but from James Cameron’s Titanic (his girlfriend, accordingly, is named Rose); Snake, meanwhile, goes by “Plissken,” for much of the game, an homage to Kurt Russell’s character in Escape From New York. Gameplay moments seek sometimes to rupture, other times to reinforce the centrality of the player in the telling of a game narrative. Often, the player-character arrives at a scene too late; other times, the moment of heroism, as when you/Raiden defuse bombs placed around the enormous oil rig where much of the game takes place, is revealed to be counterproductive. No longer can you save the day and feel good about it; this narrative is controlled not by you but by unseen forces, both diegetic (The Patriots) and non-diegetic (Kojima).

It is no surprise that this mix of ambitious ideas, self-reflexivity, and high production values has led MGS’s biggest admirers and many games-as-art advocates to cite the series, and MGS2 in particular, as proof positive of the medium’s artistic validity. Few games elicited more mentions in the nearly 5,000 comments Roger Ebert received in his infamous “Video Games Can Never Be Art” blog post. Perhaps more surprising is that the games may have struck a chord with Thomas Pynchon, whose Bleeding Edge references them twice and who shares Kojima’s affinity for conspiracy as well as his interest in digital proliferation and the circulation of misinformation (Kojima, for his part, recently acknowledged the nod and professed his own admiration for Pynchon). Both Kojima and Pynchon are wary of powerful, unseen forces that threaten to co-opt or dictate our actions. Neither can imagine many things worse than being a pawn in someone else’s chess game, an anxiety that manifests in the paranoia that permeates Pynchon’s novels and the repeated betrayals that dot the MGS saga. For Pynchon, however, media is a contributor to the deception that increasingly characterizes our interactions with one another and our relationship to our society and institutions; Kojima, by contrast, believes earnestly in the iconography of American media. An homage to Escape from New York is not merely for show but reflective of an unyielding belief in free will and individual heroism that unites his work. Even villains, with their dying breaths, get to break the chains and choose good.

But Kojima’s belief in freedom and self-empowerment are not as naive as they appear at first glance. These traits are central to gaming itself—the player is in control, the player can improve—yet no matter how many routes a designer gives you to reach the end, they are all written by someone else. Even an immersive sim cannot adapt to player actions the creators did not account for. For all the talk of player freedom and agency in games criticism, both are, ultimately, illusory—especially in Kojima’s games, which follow a tight script and allow minimal player influence on any outcomes. In the first two MGS games, characters learn to author their own fates—something that can be done after the credits roll, when they have broken free from the grip of the authorial hand—but the closest the player gets to that opportunity is at the climax of MGS2, when mission control prompts Raiden and the player to “turn the power off right now.” Is this optimistic? Is it even vulgar? If it is less cynical about the world than Pynchon, it certainly reveals a deep skepticism about Kojima’s chosen medium. MGS reveals that, despite proclamations of agency and control, a video game player is more akin to a reader or viewer than a director or author.

Like film criticism before it, games criticism has been marked by Clement Greenberg’s concept of medium specificity, the idea that each medium has a “unique and proper area of competence.” Perhaps the most notable application in film criticism is in the work of André Bazin, who posited in “On the Ontology of the Photographic Image” that cinema holds an indexical relationship to reality—what is on the screen really happened in front of the camera—and is accordingly best able to capture reality. Given that narrative is still (or at least again) the dominant force in popular thinking about video games—evident in the success of such adaptations as HBO’s The Last of Us and Amazon’s Fallout—it’s understandable that critics want to highlight games’ unique qualities, and that often means lionizing individualized experience and limitless player freedom, on display in laudatory reviews of everything from Baldur’s Gate 3 to Donkey Kong Bananza to Blue Prince. Yet games, like movies, are concoctions made not just of their own unique characteristics but also those of other arts, and games, like movies, can add more of some ingredients and less of others to cook up entirely different meals. Kojima’s reliance on filmic and novelistic sequences—long conversations and cutscenes, a complex narrative, a lack of player agency—is not a failure to foreground games’ “proper area of competence,” but, taken in conjunction with his postmodern reflexivity, a provocation to reflect on the role of the player and the limitations—not simply the possibilities—of the medium. When it comes time to take control again, maybe the player does not feel the freedom the medium allegedly promises, but they might feel something more valuable: that, suddenly, being “more a work of art than an actual game,” is not so bad.