Literature and Media Series Entry #5



    In our eighth week we studied video game narratives and the unique ways they tell stories through interactivity and non-linearity. Most of the discourse surrounding game stories concerns how player choice can influence the content and/or pace. My prime example, however, lacks those qualities. It is a linear story with set events in a set order that always ends the same way. It seems dispraisingly simple on the surface, but through the power of ludonarrative harmony (when the gameplay compliments the story) its warning about today’s information polarity is more frightening than any book or film could make it. That game was Metal Gear Solid 2.

    This game, released in 2001, has become a commentary darling of many online hipsters and edgemasters such as myself for having what has been frequently dubbed one of the most profound conversations in gaming. Before the game’s final battle, Raiden, the protagonist, is called by the Colonel, who is an AI. This AI explains its plan as an illuminati-esque entity to filter all the fake news and spurious misinformation that the game’s writer, Hideo Kojima, foresaw the internet fertilising: “Rumours about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander. All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress." The problems with an AI controlling the global flow of information are, I would hope, obvious: an AI has a creator, and so therefore can never be completely impartial (in this case it was born from America’s White House), and why would an AI truly care about human progression?

    The ludonarrative is thus: Raiden and the player believed that they achieved success under their own merit, but the entire mission was structured in a way that they would succeed as long as they obeyed orders. Both were allowed to play out a fantasy as a legendary mercenary - a power-trip that over-wrote rational emotions and allowed not only both of them to kill, but this AI to prove its test – its “Selection for Societal Sanity” – that humans could be memetically controlled.



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