Patreon Letter - 10th March, 2018 (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Jackson here! It's the Patreon Letter! Welcome to the Patreon Letter, take a seat, have a drink, settle down, oh god I'm so busy today that I might collapse. Let's get on with it.

Last time we spoke I was playing Metal Gear Survive, and I talked a little about how fuckin' weird the Kojima auteur worship has become in 2018. Plan was that this time I would actually talk about the game. And now it has been two weeks, which is basically seven eternities in video game years, and nobody even remembers that the game came out. But I haven't done anything else than panic about school and play Bloodborne, so we're talking about Metal Gear one final time. Once more into the breach, then we can be free.

Okay, so , I was playing through Metal Gear Survive, I talked a lot with Heather Alexandra, who was playing it at the same time. We were both fascinated by it, a weird half-finished survival hack of an entirely different game, and yet a work which was as self aware and pointed in its as the games that Kojima had worked on. You should read Heather’s review. It’s extremely good and gets across the core of what that game is about, and linking to it is much quicker than writing out all the core points again!

Okay, everybody read that? Good good. I want to specifically talk about Metal Gear and Labour for a moment, and then we can all get on with our day.

Alright. So with Metal Gear Solid 4, the series all but entirely abandoned its core conceit of the infiltration mission. In the nineteen years before Guns of the Patriots, every Metal Gear game was defined by its space. Outer Heaven. Zanzibar Land. Shadow Moses. The Big Shell. Groznyj Grad. And these spaces were memorable not just because they are all extremely fun to say (specifically Zanzibar Land, shout out to Zanzibar Land. Zanzibar Land.), but because exploring — infiltrating — them was the whole point of the game. You have your main objective, which is say, “find Otacon;” but in order to do so you need to go through a bunch of rooms with guards, another room with invisible lasers and then finally a snow covered minefield. And to get past all these obstacles, you need specific items. You need a silencer to shoot dudes without the whole room going on alert. You need Thermal Goggles to see the lasers. You need the Mine Detector to see the mines on the minimap. All of these are specific items placed within the base, and because of this, I know where they are, I know it deep within my soul.

In Metal Gear Solid 4, I don’t know where the fuck anything is. Nor do I in Peace Walker, and nor do I in The Phantom Pain. Because in these games, you don’t get new items by finding them, you buy them in a shop. And this — if you ask me — is where Metal Gear breaks, fundamentally and irrevocably. Not with Kojima’s exit, not with Hayter’s exit (though the recasting is the single worst creative decision anyone has ever made in the history of time), and not even with the dumbass reveal of who the Patriots are in 4. Metal Gear broke when Metal Gear ceased to be about spaces, and started to be about numbers. 

Now, because modern Metal Gear believes that subtext is for cowards, text is subtext and metatext is text, this change did not go unnoticed by the franchise. The themes of the final(?) decade of Metal Gear, up to and including Survive, are “oh god, this is all a mistake, what a mess we made when it all went wrong.” Metal Gear Solid 2 uses its metatext in order to communicate something to the player about society at large and their place within it. Metal Gear Solid V uses its geopolitical themes and examination of imperialism to say something about metal gear. You spend the entire game managing spreadsheets and walking around an empty open world, the main villain monologues at length about how 'language' defines what is acceptable, it's the world's least subtle metaphor about how much it sucks to manage a game studio in Japan.

In V, and to a lesser extent 4 and Peace Walker, this metaphor is approached from the position of Kojima, of the boss. You look at numbers go up and down, you scan soldiers and decide who to kill and who to save based on how much profit they generate you. You are at no personal risk, and while your GMP dictates your capabilities, you don't feel it. You get a notice saying that you can't use your gun anymore because your number isn't high enough, and you think "oh, that's annoying. I guess I need my number to be higher." It presents a systemic critique of capitalism that is sympathetic towards those who perpetuate and maintain its dominance. Big Boss, and the player, are trapped within a system that puts a value on human life. When the player kills an enemy because they're only a D rank and it's not worth taking them back to Mother Base, the blame is not on them, but on the system itself. Big Boss is a villain, but he is also a tragic figure, trapped within a system and an ideology that allows no alternative.

Survive, on the other hand, is a game about labour from the perspective of the grunts. The bosses are faceless, trapped in another dimension entirely, sitting in comfort and forcing you to work in hell in order to generate profit. While the game is textually deeply reverent of Big Boss and by extension Kojima, systemically it can easily be read as an angry, bitter response to MGSV. Everything is tangible, if you don't find enough materials, you can't use your items. You need to hunt for food. You need to find fresh water. Instead of clinical and detached, Survive presents its labour as overbearing and all consuming. There is no time to sadly sit on your throne and wistfully reflect on how the amorality of capitalism has turned you into a monster, if you don't do your awful job then you will die forgotten and alone. Fuck Big Boss and fuck his tragedy. He's already a demon.

It is so much more pointed and angry of a game, and reveals the thematic shortcomings of latter day Metal Gear's critiques. Does this make it a good game? Who cares. The last decade of Metal Gear has been games that have been kinda bad on purpose in order to comment on how they need to stop making them. Everything needs to go back to Zero. Kojima has been making the equivalent of first year creative writing project about not having an idea for your first year creative writing project. The people left behind in their awful jobs for an awful company continued on that legacy exactly, and now everyone hates them for it. What could be more Metal Gear. Hopefully this is the last ride. This is good, isn't it?

-Jackson