The Mature Immaturity of Hideo Kojima
If you were to ask my top five video game stories of all time among them would be Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. The funny thing is that I’m not even sure that the writer/director of these games, Hideo Kojima, is even a good writer in the strict sense of the term. Kojima’s dialog relies heavily on drawn-out clunky exposition. He is nearly incapable of writing women. He’s prone to juvenile humor, often in moments that cause whiplash-inducing tonal shifts. Perhaps worst of all is how prone to bloat his storytelling style is, especially near the beginning. You can’t simply boot up any of Kojima’s games and show them to your friends. You’ll have to sit through a half an hour to forty-five minutes of cutscenes and expository dialog providing extremely vital explanations of obscure background concepts such as what “the Soviet Union,” “nuclear weapons,” and “the Cold War” are.
And yet no endgame fight in a video game has captured the emotional resonance of Snake Eater’s final confrontation with The Boss. And yet I’ve never found another game whose storytelling has the ideological weight of Sons of Liberty. And yet even Kojima’s most recent project; Death Stranding, arguably his most bloated and meandering to date, provided me with more entertainment and left me with far more to think about than your average triple-A title.
Even among other mercurial auters in Japan’s game development industry Kojima feels like an aberration, a fringe case. It would be easy to chalk up Kojima’s whole persona and approach to both storytelling and game development to that fringe quality. Just a wacky, weird guy being weird and wacky. But there’s something to his canon beyond just whimsy. There’s loads of style, but there’s also a shocking amount of substance.
First and foremost, Kojima is a film nerd and like many forward thinking game devs he envisions a future where games are more cinematic. This is obvious from his heavy use of pre-rendered cutscenes to tell his stories, notable film actors to portray his characters, plentiful homages and references, and lavish opening credits sequences at the beginning of many of his games. However, unlike some of his triple A development peers who pursue this “cinematic” quality by abandoning so much of what makes games enjoyable in favor of joyless “respectability” and illusory “maturity,” Kojima rejects the notion that games must abandon what they are to evolve. A Kojima game can have a serious discussion of whether human beings are even mentally equipped for the constant information overload of our modern age and a boss fight where you shoot at a fat guy on rollerblades. It can have an industry-standard gruff, stoic white guy as the protagonist and make the whole plot about how he wants his mommy. It can balance the inherent storytelling potential of modern video games with the simple axiom that people play games because they want to have fun.
So many games marked out as “important” or “groundbreaking” by the games press simply don’t interest me just because of how thoroughly miserable they look. Yager Development and 2K games’ Spec Ops: The Line is an old hand in this category. It drew near universal praise on its release in 2012 for effectively skewering the built-in amorality of the modern military shooters that were saturating the market at the time, but its critique was blunted by a lack of player input. No matter what you do you have to commit an atrocity to proceed with playing the game and then the game will make you feel bad for it. The game doesn’t really have any leverage to shame the player for its actions if the player had no other action they could have taken besides putting down their controller and turning off the game.
Compare this to one of Kojima’s greatest hits; the “boss fight” with The Sorrow from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. In this segment you encounter the ghost of a dead psychic in an eerie, fog-shrouded, purgatory-like river as he shows you the tortured souls of every person you’ve killed in the game up to that point. It makes almost everyone play the rest of the game differently and the reason it’s so effective is because you can complete the game without killing anyone, in fact you’re rewarded with some of the best weapons and gear in the game for it! Kojima isn’t just bludgeoning you with the misery stick because there’s no other way those stupid gamers will understand that murder is bad. He’s making you examine your own actions and respecting your intelligence enough to allow you to draw your own conclusions. Kojima uses the existing mechanics of his games in tandem with cinematic devices to elevate their ability to tell stories and communicate emotion, rather than just abandon the tricks of one medium wholesale in favor of another supposedly superior one.
Kojima may not be a great writer, or even a great storyteller, but he’s a great communicator. He uses his games to deliver messages comprehensively, clearly, and entertainingly, and he’s better at it than just about any writer in any medium today. Though even here there is an asterisk; Kojima doesn’t deal in arguments, his messages are never the kind you can really respond to or infer something from. At the end of the day, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker comes to the brave and revolutionary conclusion that “nuclear deterrence theory is dumb.” That’s not even the simplest one. Death Stranding’s message can be shortened to “human connections are good.” However, one of the most intriguing features of Kojima’s work no matter how fanciful or goofy, is how often he’s right. Whether that means being actively prescient or simply just making smart work with good insights, he don’t miss.
Sons of Liberty predicted a conspiracy to weaponize memetics (that is to say “memes” in the style of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene) via the internet. A shadowy cabal of the rich and powerful seeking global dominance through information control to steer the course of history as they see fit. Nearly 19 years after the release of Metal Gear Solid 2, we see this in action every day. The inscrutable algorithms and dubious human beings that govern our all-encompassing social media shape narratives and manufacture consent in real time. Uncomfortable facts slide off the average observer like water off a duck’s back as they cling to a chosen narrative. It didn’t take a supercomputer to accomplish this, but what are your Mark Zuckerberg’s, Jack Dorsey’s, and all the rest of the Silicon Valley Ivy League mutants if not rich and powerful?
Sons of Liberty is also a game where your character gets captured and stripped naked, forcing you to run around in the nude, covering your junk and cartwheeling away from enemies.
Snake Eater is less ambitious than its older sibling but still has plenty to say. It’s a heavily stylized Connery-era Bond Cold War espionage story with a fittingly bombastic theme song. It’s notable for its unflinching acknowledgement of the morally grey nature of the conflict, its scathing indictment of the supposed nobility of patriotism, and its examination of the new, postmodern world order erected behind the veil of the simple black and white nationalist version of the world that so many are taught as children and accept as fact. At its core though, Snake Eater is about motherhood and sacrifice. It’s about a woman who over the course of her life gave up everything for her country and was ultimately rewarded with a bullet in the head from one of the people she loved most and a legacy of being remembered as a traitor. Dying a pariah to give birth to a new hero.
Snake Eater is also a game where the main villain determines you’re not actually the person you’re impersonating by squeezing your balls.
Snake Eater is also-also a game where you climb a really long ladder and it owns. It owns so hard. It takes like two whole minutes and it’s easily the best part of the game.
Death Stranding felt fanciful upon release as players took the role of a post-apocalyptic deliveryman tasked with forging a long-distance community from isolated segments of humanity. Though with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of delivery people being your only link out of isolation to the rest of humankind hit very close to home. Suddenly the idea of maintaining a community in isolation while facing global catastrophe and an invisible, unknowable enemy is very timely. Stressing connections and community, even between dissimilar people over extended distances didn’t seem so schmaltzy anymore. Strangely enough; Death Stranding’s all-star cast of famous friends of Hideo Kojima (Norman Reedus! Mads Mikkelson! Guillermo Del Toro! Nicolas Winding Refn!) communicating a message about how people need to stick together in the face of a globe-spanning crisis was exponentially less grating than that video of celebrities singing Imagine from their mansions. Death Stranding, bankrolled by Sony, may be a corporate product through and through but Kojima’s earnestness shows. As a result; the message of the game comes off far more genuine than the myriad corporations coming out of the woodwork to let you know how much they appreciate you buying their product in these “uncertain times™” and how “we’re all in this together™.”
Death Stranding is also a game where you detect interdimensional horrors with a baby in a tank on your chest and then throw Norman Reedus’ pee, poop, and shower water at them.
Oh Kojima you’re so wacky!
Hideo Kojima makes his medium work for him rather than trying to sculpt it into something it isn’t, and like many great game developers he manages to make serious, genuine, intelligent, and deeply human art without abandoning the idea that games should still be fun. He’s overly verbose, he’s at times incomprehensible, he loves to waste your time, and he’s one of my favorite creatives ever.
