Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Us and Them, Over and Over Again
Juan Barquin on Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater & Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Minutes into Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008), actor David Hayter (who played Solid Snake and Naked Snake throughout Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear game series) repeats here in voiceover: “War has changed.” It’s a statement that contextualizes the landscape Snake’s stepping into. It’s not just another war zone—one defined by nations, ideologies, or ethnicities at odds with one another—but “an endless series of proxy battles fought by mercenaries and machines.”

These proxy battles are familiar on a number of levels, virtual and real. In games, there’s the prevalence of first-person shooters that offer players the chance to become virtual soldiers, most notably the 21 installments of the war simulator series Call of Duty since 2003. Two years earlier, Kojima critiqued the notion of soldiers trained by AI in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and there’s something patently depressing about the hard lean into jingoism and military propaganda of games like CoD, which practically serve as recruitment ads disguised as entertainment (nothing new in American history). The real world is plagued by the popularization of drone warfare, complete with remote control designs that resemble games and allow soldiers to haphazardly massacre whomever they please. That this permits the United States to launch unnecessary and cruel conflicts only emphasizes how willing we are to gamify violence and warfare through digital tools that strip away humanity.

This is all a far cry from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004), which takes place in the 1960s as opposed to the series’ usual alt-history 2000s–2010s. A prequel to the Metal Gear games, Snake Eater focuses on a moment when war was more contingent on the humans involved rather than the systems that nations and those who claim to “defend” them rely on, exploit, and abuse. Unlike the distinctly futuristic and high-tech Metal Gear games, Snake Eater emphasizes becoming one with the natural landscape you’re traversing, down to the introduction of new mechanics like CQC (“close quarters combat”) and camouflage. Naked Snake’s journey to stop a nuclear weapon and his defected former boss within a Soviet jungle places him in the perfect situation to explore the material weight of warfare, even incorporating an injury-and-treatment system that emphasizes the physical strain placed on Snake.

Snake Eater is designed to make one question the efficacy of wartime bloodshed. The members of Cobra Unit, the game’s antagonists, are each named after emotions that soldiers experience on the battlefield: Joy, Fury, Fear, Pain, Sorrow, End. Of the boss fights against each Cobra Unit member, The Sorrow is perhaps the most memorable. Rather than The Sorrow being a superpowered human being to face off against directly, he comes in the form of a ghastly figure moving away from the player, requiring Snake to trudge through water to reach him. As Snake advances, he is faced with a barricade of spirits that represent the ghosts of every soldier he has killed throughout the game, creating a force that literally weighs the player down if they’ve chosen violence over stealth. The more you’ve killed, the more you struggle.

Though Guns of the Patriots takes place in 2014, the two games are connected, bookending a series that has narratively spanned half a century, as complementary works designed to question what it means to give your humanity up to warfare. Where Snake Eater follows Naked Snake at the top of the Cold War, Guns of the Patriots shifts gears to be about Old Snake (Kojima has an endless series of Snake signifiers—“Naked,” “Solid,” “Old,” etc.), who is aging and dying due to the nanomachines in his body and trying to stop his nemesis from taking control of an AI system that would allow private military companies to have full command of war and its profits.

Guns of the Patriots emphasizes the insanity of our own world: just as Snake gets speeches from weapons salesman Drebin about the war economy, we’re constantly faced with our own culpability in the financing of conflict (from universities and film festivals getting into business with war profiteers to our tax dollars funding genocide). And, perhaps more unsettling, the same autonomous machines of war (Gekkos) and surveillance (the Metal Gear Mk. II) that you both wield and fight against in Guns of the Patriots mirror our own ability to get a first-person view into state-sanctioned violence and genocide across the world.

For all the violence that surrounds his characters, Kojima encourages the player to hold back on inflicting that same violence on others. His continued preference for a non-lethal approach to combat (prioritizing stealth) is built into both games, with Snake Eater even scaling the difficulty of The Sorrow to be exponentially more challenging if you have killed any opposing soldiers instead of sneaking around them. Yet the natural endpoint of Snake Eater requires Snake to kill his mentor in order to progress. This could be read as ludonarrative dissonance, with the story’s climax deliberately undercutting the designer, but perhaps Kojima means to suggest that even the most peaceful of soldiers still have blood on their hands.

In Kojima’s games, any non-lethal response to violence seems destined to fail, or, worse, be reframed by those in power (The Patriots) as more violent than in actuality. Sometimes the games directly acknowledge the choices you’ve made, but the non-lethal approach largelyexists for the sake of rewarding the player with secret items and end-game bonuses. The non-lethal weapons of MGS—solar guns, tranquilizer rounds, stun grenades, and CQC—can be used in the same way as lethal ones, but they apply damage to non-lethal health bars as opposed to actual health bars. There’s a naivety to thinking that non-lethal weaponry is any different or more humane—it is “often used as a prelude to more severe methods” and is still able to “overstep the inherent limitations of flesh and bone,” as Kelsey D. Atherton writes for Scientific American—and the awkwardness of how this is manifested in-game is best understood through the fights in Guns of the Patriots with one of its core antagonists, the Beauty and the Beast Unit.

Composed of a group of female hybrid soldiers suffering severe PTSD, heavily armored and working for the Patriots, the player must choose whether to subdue them through the lethal or non-lethal means available for any other boss fight. The shift with the B&TB unit is that you will get unique cutscenes depending on your choice. Choose to kill these women and you’re faced with yet more dead bodies going up in blue flames. Take the non-lethal route (i.e. putting them to sleep with a tranquilizer), and you’re offered a cutscene of these women laying down to “resolve their trauma”via a peaceful slumber.

There’s something fascinating about the way Kojima tries to portray Snake sparing these women as a heroic act, especially given how they’re represented in-game. No matter what the “happier” cutscenes imply, it’s hard not to wonder whether putting someone into a (supposedly peaceful) seemingly permanent slumber is any more or less humane than just shooting them to death as they sexily slink toward you. Is Kojima’s juxtaposition of the women’s sexiness with Drebin painstakingly explaining the abuses they suffered a way to make the player feel guilty for sexualizing them? That defense gets muddled when you’re faced with more than one close-up of a crotch.

Kojima’s work constantly jostles between the sincere and the ridiculous, even down to something like the climactic battle between Snake and Liquid—a scene meant to close the series with the emotional weight of all the bloodshed that has come before—emphasizing just how fun (and futile!) indulging in violence can be, complete with the game’s UI shifting to look like a traditional fighting game. This friction isn’t uncommon in games, as other notable Japanese game designers address genocide and capitalism while indulging in softcore aesthetics or absurd IP references—Yoko Taro’s upskirt shots of NieR characters as they’re navigating the weight and impact of humanity’s choices on the world, or the inanity of having Disney and Pixar characters pop in to guide the protagonists through life-shattering crises in Tetsuya Nomura’s Kingdom Hearts games. Such juxtapositions make it hard for some critics to credit Kojima (or Taro, or Nomura, or many more) for his smarter choices, but Kojima’s antiwar stance penetrates every aspect of Metal Gear Solid setting the series apart from decades of games that prioritize mowing down one’s enemies for progress.

Tonal incongruities are as much Kojima’s most obvious weakness—from the B&TB’s sexualization to the addition of a drinking, smoking monkey to scenes in which Drebin dryly explains the war economy—as they are one of his greatest strengths. These tendencies challenge what we think of as “serious” or “important” or “cinematic” art. Snake Eater offering you the option of pressing R1 to stare at Eva’s breasts during a cutscene could be seen as a developer just being horny, sure, but it also asks one to consider the way women are forced to deploy their sexuality in espionage. Something as nonsensical as Johnny Sasaki trying not to soil himself from diarrhea in Guns of the Patriots isn’t just a joke, it’s an explicit attempt at getting the player to understand how much war zones can impact people physically and psychologically.

Though Snake notes “war has changed,” it seems to stay largely the same. Even with seemingly limitless access to games, players find themselves most comfortable returning to genres they’ve played before or systems they’re accustomed to (there was even an unnecessary remake of Snake Eater earlier this year while Guns of the Patriots remains unplayable outside of still owning a PS3 and an existing copy). Our ability to engage may continue to increase, but that does not mean our willingness to do so has changed in any meaningful capacity. Just as we play the same games over and over, we find ourselves fighting the same wars over and over.

In spite of their relatively happy endings and often absurd bits of speculative fiction, what draws me to Snake Eater and Guns of the Patriots is their tragic realism. Each posits that mass destruction can be foiled by a passionate group of people, but they both also actively question whether our attention has any meaningful impact. No matter what side you’re on, no matter how much you’ve chosen to engage, Kojima forces you to ask yourself: is any of this enough? Both of these games suggest that maybe we can only do our best and enjoy a cigarette in times of peace, waiting until someone else starts another war.