Uplink 12

The Metal Gear Solid 4 Issue

May 2008

Contents:

• Introduction

• Grand Theft Auto 4

• Special Metal Gear Solid 4 Preview: Meme, Gene, Scene

• MGS4 Preview: Meme

• MGS4 Preview: Gene

• MGS4 Preview: Scene

Introduction

For most of the videogame industry’s three-decade history as a mass media, videogames have followed a seasonal pattern of holiday boom and mid-year bust. Typically, the holiday flood of blockbuster games peaks in December, and then slows to a dessicated gurgle by March. New releases become rarer and rarer, and hardware sales grind to a halt. By May, the lush foliage of seasonal game-play innovation wilts in the pitiless desert of grade Z shovelware. By July, even the most die-hard gamers are holed up on multiplayer servers, surviving on carefully-rationed indie hits and sleeper gems.

June arrives this year with the added burden of a nasty US recession. The 1993-2006 American housing bubble has finally collapsed, sending industries ranging from autos to financial services into the tank in the worst financial crisis since the early 1980s. You might think the combination of seasonal reflux and economic crisis would be disastrous for videogames.

Not so. The economic downturn has been limited mostly to the US, for the time being, while gaming has continued on its path of explosive worldwide growth. Nintendo released the superb Smash Brothers and the cleverly-designed WiiFit, while the PS3 handed the BluRay disc standard an easy victory in its struggle with rival next-generation video format HD-DVD. Most recently, Rockstar’s enormously entertaining Grand Theft Auto 4 hit shelves on April 29 (see our review below).

But the ultimate cure for the summer doldrums (or depths of winter, depending on your latitude) arrives on June 12, the worldwide launch date of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 4.

This is the first time in living memory that a top-tier videogame has been released during the summer. It is a brilliant move, since the install base of the PS3 is large enough to support blockbuster sales, and there will be no other games competing for gamers’ notoriously fickle attention. In fact, the launch of MGS4 is likely to mark the point when the game culture becomes an all-year rather than seasonal enterprise.

More importantly, MGS4 is a true landmark of videogame culture, one of the first great narratives of the post-neoliberal era. Uplink does not throw around words like “world-class”, “world-historical” or “masterpiece” lightly, but MGS4 is one of the few media works to deserve such accolades.

To commemorate this moment, Uplink has prepared the following extended review of the Metal Gear universe. If you are new to the series, don’t worry -- there are no spoilers or untoward plot revelations. If you’re a seasoned hand at all things MGS, you may be surprised to learn just how influential your favorite franchise really is.

But before we dive into Kojima’s masterpiece, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on just how far the game culture has come these days, in the form of Rockstar’s splendid Grand Theft Auto 4.

Grand Theft Auto 4: Did Rockstar Deliver?

For many branches of the culture-industry, franchises are where cultural innovations go to die. Videogames are a rare and welcome exception. The reason is that games are created by powerful studio networks, which rely heavily on highly skilled media labor, as well as the tools and strategies of the open source software revolution. Unlike other branches of the media, where creators must constantly chase after advertising money, videogames depend almost exclusively on final sales to consumers, not the sale of airtime to corporations. For their part, videogame fans have mobilized via the Web to become savvy critics, consumers and occasional co-creators themselves (e.g. Counterstrike, a popular multiplayer version of Half Life, originated as a fan-created custom modification). When studio creators, fans and consumers all act in concert, videogame franchises can become engines of quality and innovation.

That said, those of us who watched the Grand Theft Auto franchise flower in GTA3 (2000), hit its satirical peak in GTA3: Vice City (2002), and then start to go to seed in GTA3: San Andreas (2004), had reason to worry. Would Rockstar rest on its laurels, and deliver the same game-play with a fresh coat of pixels? Or would the fiendish minds who graced our in-game airwaves with Alex Shrub’s political campaign dare to deliver a true next-gen experience? For all of the franchise’s achievements, it also had glaring weaknesses: clunky controls, insufficiently developed protagonists, stereotypical female characters, and storylines which never veered too far from the hallowed path of the American gangster movie.

GTA fans can take heart: Rockstar delivered. Instead of kowtowing to market pressure and releasing a buggy, incomplete game before it was ready, the design team took four years to perfect and polish the game. Most of all, they reflected deeply on the core strengths of the franchise: the seamless integration of multiple forms of game-play; a living, breathing cityscape filled with sound, color and motion; creative and wacky characters; uproarious social and political satire; outrageous slapstick humor; and most of all, the freedom to explore, invent, fail and try again.

All are on prominent display in GTA4. The slapstick comedy and tongue-in-cheek humor is back, better than ever, with the added realism of 1080p resolution and ragdoll physics. Strange as it sounds, one of the true delights of GTA4 is inertia -- bodies and vehicles now have momentum and mass. This added realism is nicely balanced by a heightened police presence and more complex character design, which means players must be more careful about where they run, and who they run into (or over). The subway and taxi system are vast improvements over GTA3, and the chance to take in the scenery during a taxi drive is worth the price of admission alone.

The satirical radio skits and fake advertisements are back, complemented by equally uproarious parodies of televised and webcast media. Liberty City is a thinly-disguised satire of neoliberal-era New York City, and Rockstar’s real life New York City staffers deserve kudos for giving the game authentic layers of East Coast grittiness, Wall Street flash, and Terror War paranoia. (One of the high points of the TV programming is a putative history of Liberty City, a side-splitting send-up of a real life PBS documentary on New York City.)

Rockstar also added some clever new touches, such as the joy of ramming a hotwired truck across the fence of St. Francis airport and triggering a six-star full-scale police alert. Readers of Uplink who live outside the US may find it difficult to appreciate the humor in this, but for those of us who endured eight grinding years of the US oiligarchy’s orgy of greed, slaughter, and airport terror alerts inside the belly of the beast, the sequence is gut-bustingly funny.

Then there is the improbable joy of running your car into an impassable barrier and watching your protagonist fly face-first through the windshield, to land on the street. Unlike real life, you survive, in exactly the sort of cartoonish improbability which has always been the key to the franchise’s success.

The biggest single improvement in the series is unquestionably the scriptwriting. The protagonist, Niko Bellic, is a complex, contradictory and surprisingly thoughtful character. His background as an immigrant from somewhere in Southeastern Europe (Niko speaks Serbian, which is a useful plot device, because the Serbian language is very close to Russian) enabled the scriptwriters to smuggle in copious amounts of Eastern bloc theater, cinema and media into the storyline. For example, the opening scene shows Niko getting into a car with his cousin Roman. Roman never actually made it in America, but he continues to cling to the shards of his shattered American dream with the force of a middle-aged convert. On Roman’s car radio, Russian pop superstar Glukoza’s hit song Schweine [“Pigs”] is playing -- a wonderfully deft reference to the geopolitical fate of Eastern Europe and Russia. These regions of the world-system were devastated by neoliberalism in the 1990s, losing anywhere from 15% to 40% of their total economic output.

In the late 1990s, however, these same regions tossed neoliberalism on the junk-heap and came roaring back. Eastern Europe joined that continental-sized developmental state otherwise known as the European Union, while Putin’s Russia created a mighty petro-developmental state all its own -- a Bearzilla to complement China’s Chinazilla, Vietnam’s Vietzilla, and Venezuela’s Bolivarzilla. The surplus created by these developmental states sparked a media boom, visible everywhere from Croatia’s Croteam, creators of the wildly entertaining Serious Sam videogame franchise, to Timur Bekmambetov’s crackerjack Russian vampire thriller Nightwatch (2004).

Niko Bellic’s tale of political trauma and overseas redemption in Liberty City illuminates this momentous geopolitical transition with striking clarity, giving the game a depth and subtlety which eluded all previous episodes of the series. While GTA4 still has lingering issues with the intersection of gender and race -- female characters of color are prominent in the storyline, but are not as developed as they could be -- it does accurately identify the end of the US Empire. Liberty City is no longer the New York City of unbridled corporate power and Wall Street greed famously depicted by Remedy’s Max Payne. It is where, as the game’s most magnificent line puts it, the American dream comes to die. Tourists come to Liberty City not to gape at the future, but to collect pieces of the past.

For all the fine things GTA4 achieves, it is not above criticism.[1] The control scheme is much improved over GTA3, but is still occasionally erratic. The player’s point of view sometimes makes it difficult to judge perspective, resulting in frantic button-presses which have no effect (say, when trying to open a car door), simply because you are too far away from an object. The perspective issue is especially problematic when battling opponents inside buildings, which results in headache-inducing camera swings.

Second, player movement is limited. Niko can now run, swim and jump more easily than previously GTA characters, but his free-running abilities do not compare to games such as Assassin’s Creed. Disappointingly, the designers did not include “failsafe” moves in Niko’s repertoire -- i.e. Niko seems to have no problem running off roofs to his death. Other games give players the option of last-minute rescues (in God of War, the hero, Kratos, will fall but cling to a ledge, allowing players to recover). This is especially annoying given the perspective issues mentioned previously, which makes judging leaps problematic.

Third, GTA4 lacks character interactions. Despite the epic size and gorgeous scenery of Liberty City, there are surprisingly few ways to interact with its inhabitants, aside from literally running into them. It would be the simplest thing in the world to give Niko an “interact” button, similar to any garden-variety role-playing game. Likewise, most of the shops and businesses are closed. Their neon facades are beautiful at night, but all the glorious eye candy cannot hide a desperate lack of narrative content.

Not all of these weaknesses are Rockstar’s fault. One of the reasons for the lack of character interactions and the perspective issues is that GTA4 had to be designed to compensate for the limited hardware of the Xbox360, which relies on DVDs and has no standard hard-drive. The PS3’s BluRay format and capacious hard-drive could easily store the additional models and interiors needed to flesh out Liberty City, as well as the data stream required for additional viewing modes to compensate for the perspective issues, but Rockstar chose to hedge its bets and provide an identical experience for both platforms.[2] This is fine for now, but will become a problem by the end of this year, when programmers begin to tap into the behemoth capacity of the PS3 and leave the 360 in the dust.

In conclusion, Uplink’s reviewers highly recommend GTA4, with the sole reservation that this episode isn’t an earth-shattering advance for the series, or for videogames as a whole. At its best, GTA4 delivers crackerjack entertainment wrapped in a stinging anti-neoliberal satire, but the game feels more like the well-designed conclusion of the entire GTA3 saga, rather than a genuinely new beginning. Ultimately, Niko’s epic rampage through Liberty City manages to kick up the dying embers of the US Empire enough to shed light on the Empire’s descent into the abyss, but does not tell us what will come after.

-- DRR

Endnotes

1. GTA4 is a wonderful game, but the ridiculously over-hyped reviews it received from the mainstream videogame press show just how far we are from serious game journalism. Reviewer after reviewer allowed their inner fanboy/fangirl to run amok, handing out “10 out of 10” scores like confetti. There’s no question GTA4 deserves a 9.5 or 9.6, but it does have obvious flaws -- several are listed in this article. The videogame industry needs informed, honest criticism, not reviews indistinguishable from company PR.

2. In fairness to Rockstar, its parent company, Take Two, has been under financial pressure for some time and is currently the target of a hostile corporate takeover by Electronic Arts, so maximizing sales was a priority. In the future, however, there will be no getting around the PS3’s superiority as a platform.

Special Metal Gear Solid 4 Preview: Meme, Gene, Scene

In a publicity campaign for one of the Metal Gear Solid games, Kojima stated that the English letters for the franchise, “MGS”, referred to three basic themes: Meme, Gene and Scene. “Memes” are cultural tropes or narratives which perpetuate themselves over time, often in the unlikeliest of terrain. In Kojima’s case, the meme in question is the stealth espionage genre, which has significant lateral connections to the Bond blockbuster, the secret agent thriller, Cold War science fiction and the war movie. “Genes” are the building-blocks of almost all Earth-based lifeforms, and Kojima’s narratives have always delved into the intricacies of corporeality, the violence inflicted by politics on that corporeality, and the politics of bodily reproduction staged by the mass media. The idea of “Scene” was meant to highlight the shift away from the underground bunkers and sterile corridors of MGS and MGS2, and towards the forests, swamps and jungles of MGS3. In fact, some of the most compelling sequences in MGS3 involved the use of camouflage.

What Kojima did not say, but allowed players to discover for themselves, was that each category also referred to a key aspect of game-play. Each mass-cultural trope, mass-cultural body and mass-cultural environment converged in an epic boss battle. Players had to do more than simply adjust to a new environment or a new opponent, they had to read the entire situation in all its complexity, and develop appropriate strategies.

In MGS4, however, Kojima is aiming even higher. This constellation of tropes, bodies and environments is no longer limited to boss battles, but has been transformed into a key aspect of game design. To understand why this is so, read on!

Meme: the Developmental State

One of the fundamental realities of the early 21st century is hegemonic shift. The new metropoles -- continental Europe and industrialized East Asia -- are the collective creditors of the world economy, own most of the world’s financial assets, run hefty current account and trade surpluses, and lend vast amounts of money to the US (the former hegemon, now reduced to the world’s biggest debtor). More importantly, the new metropoles are also co-financing the rise of a slew of fast-growing semi-peripheries -- China, Russia and Turkey, as well as various Eastern European, Central Asian and Latin American countries -- through a variety of economic and political arrangements. These range from formal integration into the European Union, as with Eastern Europe and Turkey, to various forms of trade and technological cooperation, as with Russia and China.

The greatness of the MGS franchise is that it was the first stealth espionage narrative to take this hegemonic shift seriously. This is true not just in terms of the labyrinthine conspiracies and power-struggles of its game-world, but in terms of its most basic thematic material. The “Metal Gears” or robotic super-weapons which Solid Snake is always trying to ferret out and destroy are not simply variations of the Japanese anime robot. They are symbols of multinational media and electronics technologies. When monopolized by corporate power-elites, they can inflict the most appalling violence to human beings. Yet they can also be refunctioned and turned against their corporate masters.

It should be emphasized that the tremendous dynamism of the videogame culture has almost nothing to do with sleek silicon rentiers or Wall Street speculators, and everything to do with the institutional infrastructures of the new metropoles. Powerful developmental states in Japan, Russia, South Korea, China (including Taiwan) and the EU showered their electronics and videogame industries with carefully targeted tax breaks, government subsidies, and other forms of public support.

The result has been the creation of globally competitive gaming industries in these countries and regions. Japan continues to field one of the most productive gaming cultures on the planet, while Russian exhibition firm Gamex estimated the Russian market hit $500 million in 2007, or roughly the size of the entire Latin American game market. The South Korean market is estimated to be worth well over $2 billion, while the Chinese game market expanded 60% last year to hit roughly $1.6 billion, according to Pearl Research. At the same time, EU nations such as Finland and France have broadened their programs of investment in public media to include videogames, with equally impressive results.

The developmental state is everywhere and yet nowhere in Kojima’s work. Its local expression is Snake’s comrades -- his friend, Otacon, as well as Colonel Campbell, Raiden, and the various allies Snake meets in MGS4. Uplink won’t spoil any surprises for readers new to the series, but suffice to say that each and every one of these characters is marked by national and multinational space in quite specific ways. These spaces are not simply geopolitical, they are also geocultural. Each character is marked by specific culture-industries -- including elements of the videogame culture itself. One of the hallmarks of MGS is its subtle, reflexive critique of the videogame industry, a critique which accesses the complex social realities of the developmental states, by invoking their attendant culture-industries.

Gene: the Body Informatic

Push every First World action thriller to its limit, and it turns into a Third World body. This is as true of the earliest Bond blockbusters -- just think of the Jamaican scenery and bit characters of color in Dr. No (1960) -- as the latest superhero narratives, e.g. Tony Stark’s derring-do in the caves of Afghanistan in Iron Man, symbolic compensation for the Empire’s real-life inability to quell Pashtun guerillas. What such thrillers do not depict, of course, is the subjectivity of that Third World body. It is no accident that the handful of videogames which deserve the accolade of world-class works of art -- Valve’s Half Life, Neil Manke’s They Hunger, Remedy’s Max Payne, Kojima’s very own Metal Gear Solid 3 and Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 12 -- invoke this subjectivity in the framework of an anti-neoliberal micropolitics. (In the case of Final Fantasy 12, this extends to an anti-imperial geopolitics.)

What all these great games have in common is an emphasis on corporeal trauma. In the case of Half Life, this is the violent disruption of the US national security state, and the interstellar neocolonialism the player-character unearths in the course of the storyline. Max Payne communicates this trauma by means of a triple disruption of national space -- the New York City police, Max Payne’s family, and Max Payne’s own scarified body.

Traumatized bodies lie at the heart of the MGS universe, both in the sense of personal injuries experienced on the battlefield, as well as the geopolitical scars of war and political turmoil. Early in the franchise’s history, the main symbol of this trauma was genetics, i.e. the nuclear radiation and genetic experimentation which produced Solid and Liquid Snake. Typically, this took the form of the discourse of cloning. The first Metal Gear Solid (1998) explicitly critiqued the ideology that genes are a master index or code which controls all aspects of life.

For their part, the molecular biologists have made it clear that genetics explains only a tiny fraction of the complexity any living organism; far from being a master key, genes constantly interact with a wide range of complex and poorly-understood biological systems. On the other hand, the fiction of a master key or controlling code is significant for what it says about the ideology of information in late capitalism. It expresses the social reality that a single corporate boardroom attempts, every single day, to control the labor of hundreds of thousands of human beings employed by multinational corporations.

As the series evolved, Kojima’s critique evolved along with it. MGS2 expanded the notion of codes to include the themes of information and media control, and MGS3 extended it to the deepest recesses of Cold War geopolitics. Since MGS4 is set a few years in the future, it moves away from the trope of genetic technology and towards nanotechnology. Nanotech is much more than a plot device to explain the superhuman abilities of in-game characters. It represents the contradictions of corporeality in the epoch of multinational capitalism -- the fact that even the least marketized bodies are enmeshed in webs of mediatic, telecommunicatory, biomedical, nutritional and chemical commodity production and exchange.

The linchpin of this corporeality is Solid Snake’s body, which is slowly disintegrating, for reasons MGS4 will undoubtedly reveal to us. Given that Snake’s character is modeled on Kurt Russell, i.e. an explicitly American action-adventure hero, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that some level of post-American allegory is at work here.

Scene: Game Design Evolved

Perhaps the most intriguing -- if least understood -- contribution of the MGS series has been its influence on game design. This extends far beyond the realm of the stealth espionage genre, to include the role-playing game, the occult action thriller, and the first-person shooter. In retrospect, there is a long-standing tendency in videogame culture to blur the boundaries between different aesthetic forms. For example, role-playing games increasingly borrow from action genres (in the form of real-time combat sequences) and fighting games (in the form of boss battles). Conversely, topnotch action games such as Devil May Cry 3 feature character development and plot twists worthy of a top-tier role-playing game, as well as systems of item acquisition and skills mastery borrowed from fighting games.

While the very first Metal Gear Solid limited itself to overturning some of the more egregious imperial conventions of the espionage thriller, MGS2 extended Kojima’s reach to the hacker narrative, the hijack narrative, and a number of other forms. To be sure, the weakest moment of MGS2 was its belated attempt at reappropriating the family melodrama. Put another way, MGS2 had a rich storehouse of narrative materials, but could not quite integrate them all into its game-play. That said, MGS2’s commercial success did pave the way for other videogame artists to employ extended cut-scenes, to take narrative risks, and to dare to present complex and thought-provoking storylines. It is almost impossible to imagine hits such as Deus Ex and Devil May Cry 3, let alone classics such as Final Fantasy 12, without Kojima’s sense of exquisite visual detail, refined game-play, and sustained character development.

The definitive version of Metal Gear Solid 3 (subtitled Subsistence, and retrofitted with a cut-scene gallery and true 3D camera controls) went still further, by setting the First World stealth espionage genre in motion towards the shadowy realm of Third World media. Along the way, Kojima pays homage to a number of 1960s media forms, ranging from the spaghetti Western to the Eastern bloc documentary film. The key subtext of MGS3 was the mysterious connection between a US Special Forces operative called the Boss (who also happens to be Snake’s former mentor) and a vanished super-soldier called The Sorrow. For these and many other reasons, the cut-scenes and boss battles in MGS3 rank among the greatest documents of the contemporary media culture.

Judging by the trailers and real-time demonstrations Kojima has unveiled to audiences at trade conventions and press conferences, the game-play of MGS4 has drunk deeply from the well of first-person shooters such as Max Payne, as well as urban action thrillers such as Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed. Not only that, but MGS4’s cut-scenes promise to rival Final Fantasy 12’s memorable cut-scenes in both scale and scope (these latter totaled well over six chronological hours of footage).

Perhaps the most intriguing sign of what MGS4 might deliver is contained in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, one of the finest handheld titles for the Sony PSP. The collectible items, compressed maps, and multiplayer elements of Portable Ops have carried over to Metal Gear Online, the free multiplayer game which will ship with MGS4’s single-player campaign. Metal Gear Online will offer something unique to a world of multiplayer gaming dominated by straightforward action games, namely modes of game-play which employ stealth and camouflage tactics, along with heaping doses of Kojima’s trademark tongue-in-cheek humor. This is an ingenious diffusion of multiplayer forms within the largely single-player espionage genre, and hints that similar surprises may be in store for us in MGS4.

Stay tuned for Issue 13: The Summer Olympics Issue, August 2008!