indefinite articles

This week: Metal Gear Solid 1, now completed. Time to completion: 12 hours.

There was a time when no special effects could match the carnage my friends and I could create on a sheet of binder paper. The game went like this: draw four or five scribbled horizontal lines from one side of the page to the other - these were to represent hills rolling gently into the distance. Next, populate these lines with all manners of soldiers, tanks, catapults, howitzers, ballistas, helicoptors, motorcycles, spike traps, etc. Use dotted lines for bullet trails and draw the most beautiful explosions you can imagine. Finally, put in some flying body parts to your taste. Voilà, you’ve got a world war raging in your living room.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles playsets employed the most advanced action figure technology in the world.

Frankly, few things bested this - video games were fairly limited at the time, and collecting enough action figures to create such battles was beyond the scope of possibility for most. Only one friend came close. He owned both the Sewer Base and the Technodrome playsets from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line of action figures, and going to his house was always a case of sensory overload.

Of course, as time goes on, one discovers the diverging path of the subtle and the bombastic, and the pursuit of entertainment rarely returns to this raw simplicity of child’s play. And here is the appeal of Metal Gear Solid - within its convoluted story, the subtle, the bombastic, and the simplistic all somehow co-exist.

On the one hand, the game stands as the ultimate 10-year-old’s action fantasy. The hero, Solid Snake, who controls like a fully poseable digital action figure, is on a infiltration mission to scuttle a 100-foot tall walking tank which can fire stealth nukes via a shoulder mounted rail gun. The enemies have the gibberish names you’d expect from a Saturday morning cartoon: Revolver Ocelot, Vulcan Raven, Psycho Mantis. And the plot has all the nuance of Attack of the Clones, even featuring a similarly meaningless and bland clone army.

At the same time, the game doesn’t shy away from taking more literary turns. Much like the hot dog wrapped in bacon that I enjoyed last night, Solid wears a fatty coating of heavy-handed moral philosophizing. While the gameplay glorifies the military and mercenary lifestyle, the plot spends hours condemning them - after each lifebar is extinguished, each boss delivers an overwrought soliloquy on the tragedy of their childhood and the ultimate futility of life on the battlefield. The military life, the game argues, is nothing more than a sanctuary for the broken and the dysfunctional, where redemption only comes through death.

But it’s neither the explosions nor the ruminations that make the game what it is. Rather, the friction between these two elements - the crotch & gut versus the mind & soul - create something wholly unique, transporting the adult back to the sandbox full of toys. And by writing to adults, leaving the condescension behind and welcoming unrestrained complexity in both story and gameplay, it is diabolically easy to buy into this absurd fantasy world.

Last time, I wrote about the many issues I have with hardcore Japanese game design. Having now completed the game, I realize that these pre-condemnations were unfair. Not that my opinion has changed, but rather, because Solid isn’t so much Japanese game design as it is creator Hideo Kojima game design. If any video game can be said to be an examplar of auteur theory, it’s this.

From what I hear, the auteur goes off the deep end a bit in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, which is where, cautiously, we’re headed next.

Next time: The Misadventures of Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty