Metal Gear Solid V and Nuclear Disarmament: Gaming in Reality and Virtual Protest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8kIQ_neK6M&list=LLkoJSFXP6t1j4QOQ52csZFA&index=14&t=0s
Released in 2015, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is the eleventh piece of the epic action-adventure video game series Metal Gear Solid, produced by Hideo Kojima and his crew. Besides the personal aura of Kojima, the series is also well known for its particular emphasis on stealth system. Instead of fighting the enemies face to face, the game encourages its players to sneak and accomplish missions without necessarily killing the enemies.
Set in 1984, The Phantom Pain tells the story of Snake, originally known as “Big Boss”, a military leader who lost everything and was nearly killed during the event of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes that took place nine years ago. After waking up from a coma, Snake became involved in a new force called “Diamond Dogs” and sneaked into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border in order to seek revenge. Partly available as an online game, it also allows each player to establish a virtual home base and develop his or her own nuclear weapons to avoid other players from stealing their resources. The clip being analyzed in this short article is the cut scene of one of the possible endings of the game. Triggering this particular ending requires all of the online players to disarm the nuclear weapons in their home base. This sequence clearly reveals Kojima’s personal political stand on anti-war, in particular, anti-nuclear ideologies. The following paragraphs seek to decode the strategies involved in anti-nuclear propaganda embedded in the clip, both on screen and off screen.
The first half of the clip is a soliloquy of Miller, the founder of Diamond Dogs. It is cut by a sequence of him talking towards his soldiers after the disarmament of the last nuclear force. The camera moves from a high angle perspective, capturing the soldiers underneath, to a low angle perspective that portrays the talking character. The high angle camera offers information on the settings and the narrative of the sequence, while the low angle camera encourages the players and spectators to identify with the soldiers that are standing below the protagonists and paying attention to the talk of Miller. Here, Miller is portrayed as an authoritative figure that functions not only as a single character but also the voice of the game designer. The lines of Miller explicitly suggest that nuclear-free environment is a goal that all human beings should strive to achieve and to protect. Simultaneously, an emotional soundtrack accompanies the voice of Miller, promoting identification and empathy between players and characters in the game. The fact that it is a video game cut scene and that the graphic being shown on the screen is partly directed by the mouse, which represents the shaky viewpoint of the player, offers the players a sense of physical presence and virtual participation. Similar to a hand-held camera, the sensual and bodily experience the shaky image offers, according to the argument of Sobchack, helps to generate psychological identification and ideological meanings.
In the latter half of the clip, where the characters are totally absent, Kojima turned to a more literal approach. Removing the emphasis on graphic stimulations, the overall black screen is occupied by quotes and short sentences that deliver objective historical information and subjective propaganda messages on nuclear forces. Comparing with fictional graphic content, words like these possess much authority outside the world of the game and could be much more effective in persuading the spectators to link the content of the game with the real world that they are living in. Furthermore, names of the prominent contributors of this nuclear disarmament are shown at the very end of the clip, a space where usually the names of the game crew are presented, recognizing the contribution of individual players and distributing part of the authority that films as well as visual art projects in general usually retain for themselves. This act resonates with what McCarthy identifies as a form of ideological governance that ‘presumes individual liberty’. By granting them with ‘citizenship’, the clip cultivates the spectators’ recognition and reception on its imposed ideologies without essentially violating their individual sovereignty on themselves.
In this regard, the design of this sequence is political not only in its content but also in its form. The way in which the sequence is triggered involves in the participation of thousands of players that could adequately reach the amount of people required in an activist movement. The collective act embodies three layers of messages. First of all, undoubtedly, many of the players took part in this act simply out of curiosity of the game’s content. Secondly, it shows a sense of trust, or at least the willingness of trying to trust, between online players, as disarming nuclear weapons necessarily risks being stolen and attacked. Thirdly and most importantly, it is a social and political movement, partly encouraged by Kojima and his crew and partly organized by online players, that calls for attention on the situation of nuclear forces in the contemporary world. Considering the enormous number of people getting involved, the act cannot be a spontaneous one. However, with the disguise of the entertaining nature of the medium, Kojima complicated the motivation of participating and thus, turning the activist movement into a less provoking and more easily accepted form of act.
Although the triggering of the secret cut scene was later clarified by the gaming platform as an accident, the intention of Kojima and the social impact of the act remain unchanged. The anti-nuclear propaganda message in the clip is revealed both through the literal, graphic, and acoustic contents and the process of triggering them. The interactive medium of video game enables the players to become not only the passive receptor of information but also active participants of the act as well as a part of the Phantom Pain itself.
Filmography
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Nuclear disarmament cut scene. Directed by Hideo Kojima. Tokyo: Konami Digital Entertainment, 2015. Video clip last modified February 5, 2018.
Bibliography
Hall, Charlie. “Metal Gear Solid 5 celebrates nuclear disarmament, but it’s a bug.” Polygon. Last modified February 5, 2018.
McCarthy, Anna. “Introduction: Television and Political Culture after World War II” in The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. New York: New Press, 2010. 1-28.
Sobchack, Vivian. “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Images Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. 53-84.
Stanton, Rich. “Whatever happened to Metal Gear Solid games creator Hideo Kojima?” The Guardian. Last modified December 17, 2015.