https://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/metal-gear-solid-v
...Yet while Kojima’s games are berserk in many ways, they are not the standard kind of first-person shooter in which thousands of indistinguishable enemy grunts (always Middle Eastern or Russian) die at the point of the player’s phallic rifle...
In their dynamic procedure as well as their scripted rhetoric, Kojima’s games are stealthily anti-war war games. In contrast to the fairground bullet-shower of the billion-grossing
Call of Duty series (the equivalent in war-themed video games of Michael Bay movies)... The player may thus feel dirty and guilty for doing what is mere routine in other games. As well as in other art forms: MGSV’s emphasis on fanatical caution and planning, as well as the humane neutralizing of enemies, works too as an implicit rebuke to gung-ho war movies—in particular, in this case, the Afghanistan-set
Rambo III (1988), whose hero deals very differently with the Soviet occupation...
MGSV: Ground Zeroes (2013) saw the hero tasked with rescuing prisoners from a CIA “black site” prison in Cuba... visually the camp was obviously Guantánamo: the prisoners were dressed in orange jumpsuits, some with hoods over their heads and the victims of torture... at one moment, the games will clownishly revel in the clichés of the form; the next moment they will deconstruct those very clichés and force the player to confront real suffering... What
Metal Gear Solid is satirizing in particular—almost uniquely for high-budget blockbuster products in this medium, or for that matter in cinema and TV—is
so omnipresent in most modern fiction that it almost escapes notice. It is what I have called national-security ideology. Its key tenets are familiar: the enemy is fanatical and unreasonable, while Western government operatives are empathetic heroes; killing civilians with drones is just regrettable “collateral damage” in a righteous mission against the irrational fanatics (as in season three of the TV series
Homeland); and torture always works to elicit time-critical information, as in
Zero Dark Thirty (2012),
Homeland, and of course
24...
In the newest game the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is explained to the player in ways that make the parallels with the later American adventure there inescapable. Briefings on (virtual) audiocassette explain that the army of the USSR has invaded in order to counteract “the spread of Islamic revivalism,” and that “Afghanistan has become the Soviet Union’s Vietnam.” Knowing nods to the present day are littered subtly everywhere: in the TV-style opening cast list for the game’s “episodes,” there is a credit for “Enemy Combatants”: a phrase familiar from the Bush-Cheney government’s rhetorical creativity in attempting to avoid acknowledging any “prisoners of war” to whom duties of care would be owed under the Geneva Conventions. Here, the “Enemy Combatants” are the Soviet soldiers, but the casting note works to plant a seed of ambivalence in the player’s attitude towards them...
In the past, the series has had as its satirical targets global conspiracy theories, terrorism scares, and modern military Keynesianism, according to which increased defense spending promotes economic growth—
Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008) was all about “private military contractors” and the “war economy,” and had the player buy upgraded weapons from a cynically wisecracking arms dealer named Drebin. The hero of all the games, Snake, is always caught up in the madness of a war-obsessed world. Reluctantly, he must make more war to try to stop it... the film
Zero Dark Thirty, for example, was predicated on the idea—promoted by insider “consultants” to the movie—that U.S. torture of prisoners resulted in actionable intelligence. (A canard that has been repeatedly refuted.) Some media critics considered this objectionable, yet the conversation was conducted respectfully. An art-film blockbuster can get things wrong, but it is still considered a serious contribution to such debates. A video game is not... Hideo Kojima’s games notoriously combine sharp reflections on contemporary political themes (
The Phantom Pain concerns itself at length with issues of nuclear proliferation) with overscripted, didactic longueurs... Yet as a cultural figure Kojima may be... someone who first introduces a player or reader to the iniquities perpetrated in modern history by the “good” guys.
In a still-young medium whose most successful products are deeply conservative, he insists that video games can and should convey critical arguments about international relations and
jus in bello...
