3/10 (MGS5 and Killscreen)

§METAL GEAR SOLID
Metal Gear Solid V: Dissociative Disorder (Story analysis + Review)

§

Metal Gear Solid V is a stellar game, with top-notch stealth action and a malleable world that leads to all sorts of memorable moments. Too bad the ending is such a mess.

§

Rumors have suggested that Konami was unhappy with how much money Hideo Kojima spent on his most recent epic, which might explain why one of Metal Gear Solid V’s most pivotal story missions isn’t actually in the game.

§

The Thing with Metal Gear Solid V

§

The big secret that we’d all feel embarrassed for doubting was that Quiet’s in a bikini because if she covers her skin she’ll die. Because of … some cruel … nano-science. Skin parasites! “Let’s design a babe who literally CAN NOT wear the usually expected amount of clothing involved in desert warfare!” Okay! Let’s make her really normally pretty! The verbalised narrative will be like “she’s hurt” and the visual narrative will be like “she’s coming to fuck you” and the combined narrative will be philosophy of violence? Remember when we did this with the supermodel war orphans and it was totally deep?? Fuckin’, brilliant, like I will drink to THAT my man.

§

I didn’t expect to voluntarily bleed so much for my enemies in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Nor did I expect the game to encourage a self-sacrificial approach when so much of the promotional trailers talked about Snake’s descent into villainy.
/.../
I’ve always wanted to play a game that let me love my enemies as Jesus might. MGSV becomes this enemy-converting power fantasy where I get to preserve the lives of my enemies, offer them a job, and promise to fight for them when they come under attack.

§

The Phantom Pain and the Best Tutorial Ever Made
It knows tutorials are often drab affairs, so it takes you by the hand while leading you into one of the craziest introductions that I have ever seen.




§FROM KILLSCREEN
But to talk about Kafka is to talk about fables. The Trial is an allegory for the impersonal and arcane law; The Metamorphosis is an almost unaccountable fable for, perhaps, the life of the writer or the way in which our family lives fall apart. Corpse of Discovery works as a fable for a life spent at work, for the way in which the alien and unfamiliar fall into tedium, or for our own lonely approach to death.

§

Yet very few games are about memory in any meaningful sense and, from this perspective. Rememoried is a welcome attempt at filling this curious lacuna.

§

In fact, as Offworld points out, the gallery show that Anna gave in New York, before being hit by the car, included an installation called "empathy game." It consisted of a pedometer and a pair of Anna's old boots. The challenge was to walk a literal mile in Anna's boots in order to score a point. Writing about it, Anna described it as a reaction to empathy games, "especially how privileged folks will use them as a kind of shortcut to allyship, using a game like dys4ia as a substitute for truly educating themselves on issues surrounding trans women's lives and how to support them."

The point of the installation was that you could walk a mile in Anna's shoes and not learn anything about her experiences or how to actually help her or other trans women. The same goes for other personal games. And, as you learn by the end of Ohmygod Are You Alright?, despite the widespread championing dys4ia has received, it hasn't helped much with Anna's financial problems, nor her sense of loneliness and failure. She has reached many with her games but it seems not many have reached back.

§

For a game about the way a computer approaches chess, Best Chess really is all about pandering to and toying with the irrational needs of humans.

§

This idea of games avoiding familiar narrative structures has been a central focus of Erin’s work as a game developer.

§

Stasis is full of trembling ghosts, people who struggled to connect with others in life and ultimately embraced the solitude of death. John’s story is just an instantiation of this motif, and by no means the most compelling one in the game. If you were to play through Stasis without stopping to take in all the optional content, you would experience an aesthetically appealing, linear, cliche-ridden adventure -- you would feel cold and alone. But by placing your adventure in the context of all the other tragedies aboard the Groomlake, a kind of familial intimacy develops. It speaks to why we subject ourselves to known horror in the first place: confronting death has the ability to bind us together. It is the thing we all have in common.