YOU ARE NOT READING THISA critical analysis about meta-media using the video game

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty®

Bachelor Thesis

supervised by the

Department of Media and Communication Science

at the University of Zurich

Prof. Dr. Heinz Bonfadelli

to obtain the degree “Bachelor of Arts in Sozialwissenschaften”

Author: Fangqun Qu

Course of Studies: Media and Communication Science

Student ID: 11-614-138

Address: Schwalbenstrasse 8, 9000 St.Gallen

E-Mail: qu.fani@gmail.com

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Heinz Bonfadelli

Introducing a little confusion

Think about everything you know. And think about why you know it. Are our thoughts simply

hardwired from previous experiences or do we have actual real control over them? And if do

have that much control over our thoughts, then how do we filter out the objective reality

from what we just want to be reality?

Now you’re probably asking yourself, what all these questions have to do with the title of

this essay. This rabbit hole runs deep. But if you stay with me on this trip, you might be able

to understand one of the most convoluted games of all time. It actually took fans years to

figure out what is exactly going on here and – more importantly – what it all means. Trying

to clarify what is going on here, is a complicated task from any angle. Hence, in order to

properly explain, what happens in this game, I will also have to go into details about: the

psychology behind marketing and hype, nightmares grounded in personal realities, the

illusion of choice, the subjectivity of truth and the architecture of buildings.

What do all these things have in common with Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty? A lot,

actually! Because at the end of the day, Metal Gear Solid 2 is a postmodern deconstruction

of the deceitful and manipulative qualities of its medium.

Deciphering the roman word

When people refer to MGS2 as being a postmodern game, it is important to know exactly

why that is the word they chose. It is important to understand the world in which it was

created and what that claim says about that word and that says about modernism as well.

Many people, including director and creator Hideo Kojima himself, make the claim that it is

postmodern without properly defining the concept. But in order to define the postmodern

you also have to know what it means to “come after the modern”. For arts and

entertainment, things do not become postmodern just by confusing readers with fourth wall

breaks and self-awareness. MGS2 is not postmodern just because Raiden flips through in-

game options on this way through a life-sized simulation of the first game. Nor is it because

he throws away dog tags with your name on them, or the lines of code that come crashing

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through the walls in the end. It evokes the collective underlying social thoughts of the entire

postmodern era. And that is what postmodernism essentially is. Just a word that references

a certain period of time that came after the time people called ‘modern’.

The word postmodernism first got tossed around in the early seventies to reference a new

wave of architectural designs that were the response of the unnatural-looking glass blocks of

earlier decades. By comparison to the modern, postmodern buildings look like similarly

unnatural glass blocks, but with only a few superficial decorations. And that’s an important

observation.

Postmodernity is very much a response to modernity, but it’s still working under its same

assumptions and limitations. It’s very much an extension of a wider cultural shift that started

about 150 years ago when the industrial revolution triggered a chain of events that shifted

economic conditions towards a new kind of collective cultural thinking. Basically, at some

moment a hundred years ago, time and space compressed, and everyone went crazy. The

spread of global capitalism and industrialisation let to imperial competition, which resulted

in World War I. And during that conflict, common sense as we knew it changed. The brutal

efficiency of the factory and the railroad meant that time was money and travel was cheap.

The sheer scale and longevity of WWI meant that all of humanity was equally capable of the

same monstrosities.

Modern art evokes a cynical pluralism by depicting the same scenes from multiple angles at

the same time. Always with the clock, constantly ticking away in the background. Virginia

Woolf and James Joyce happened and these writers depicted characters that were

fragmented, bipolar or self-aware of their places, characters and books. When city planners

jumped on board, they built wide-open celebratory squares that eventually were used as

meeting points for brutal regimes. Everyone’s morbid obsession of dehumanizing efficiency

of this economy led to another World War with an even shorter wind-up and cool down than

the last one. But Industrialism never stopped.

In the seventies, the first world’s manufacturing economy turned over into a service one.

Cheaper jobs got outsourced to other capitalist countries thousands of miles away.

Communications got faster and – yet again – so did travelling. The fleeting nature of time

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and volatility of business now mean that workers live episodic moments of the present. Kids

grow up in phases and the unemployed are in-between jobs. We’re always trying to plan

ahead, so the future has been folded into the present and on top of that is the confusing

realisation that this entire planet, which is actually quite a small and lonely place, is filled

with an astronomical number of human beings who all need to be individually respected. In

the midst of the entire society of identity crises and contradicting moral values, a new search

for greater personal meanings arose. People want a solid moral foothold in this very

unstable world, so individuals paruse in and out of major lifestyle brands and political

movements. So the postmodern arts and entertainment that evokes the postmodern era are

inherently schizophrenic. You have characters with a conflicting sense of time and place,

who often have to juggle multiple plots at once, each one within uncertain context. If

modernist fiction popularized meta-narratives, then postmodernist fiction popularized meta-

fiction. You have highbrow literature delivered through lowbrow mediums. Stories, that tell

stories about other stories. You have a deconstruction of what narratives rules constitute

realism and fiction that is critical of those dogmas.

The nature of postmodern art is to question the dogmas of what came before it. That is the

rules and techniques that were accepted as permanently modern despite ironically

characterizing a very brief period of history. And one of the most affective ways to do that is

to highlight the context in which art is presented. Often times by pranking the viewers and

questioning whether is art or not at all. The urinals and soup cans of Marcel Duchamp and

Andy Warhol didn’t take a vast amount of skill to make and they are not pretty to look at.

But what’s important about them is the context that they are presented within the art

gallery. The real showpieces are how ready people were to put them on pedestals. These

artists knew that they already had fans, who would justify whatever they made. And they

also knew that people would care enough to argue about it. And even that is a part of the

context these pieces are actually showcasing. They use this context to deliver messages

about taste and class or about reproduction or originality. In other words: postmodern art

ask questions about art by putting it into an unfamiliar context.

The fifty shades of Hideo Kojima

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A proper understanding of the context that Metal Gear Solid 2 was released under is

required for a proper understanding of the game. More specifically, understanding that

context is required for understanding how the incredible differences between these two

chapters were designed to manipulate fans.

Most importantly, the manipulation began actually long before the release of the game.

There are already Metal Gear fans who would have bought it and loved it based on the name

alone. It’s a bit difficult to remember that this game might have been the most anticipated

product of its time. Sony was distributing VHS tapes with trailers. People were buying Zone

of the Enders® by the thousands just for a twenty-minute demo. It was a massive step up in

terms of fidelity of what we have seen before and would finally meet the standards for what

actual next-generation console games would look like. It was also still a young series

following a cliffhanger ending that left plenty of room for an exciting and dangerous sequel.

The hype was massive and throughout it all, they never once showed us, what 90 per cent of

the games were actually going to look like. They never hinted that Raiden was going to be a

thing. He isn’t even on the back of the box. But for all intents and purposes, he is the main

character of the game. Even after the game’s launch, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that.

After all, the first hours are carefully constructed tech demo design a completely pandered

to fans. The opening tanker sequence is the most convincing piece of misdirection of them

all. It exceeds what was shown before. It carefully sets up for a sequel that it almost too

good to be true, while also fan-servicing the living daylights out of Snake and Otacon. The

first cut scene keeps Snake hidden behind smoking mirrors for an entire three minutes

before the grand reveal. And once that’s over, it isn’t shy about showing off the gameplay

changes either. It points out, that guards are tougher than before and that you can shoot out

lights to play with shadows. There are multiple entryways in a non-linear level design, but

the layout place fondles you into accidentally discovering the vast amounts of detail they in

here and how those details affect gameplay. Even Snakes wet footprints don’t go ignored

and neither do all these breakable objects, which were meticulously animated before the

days of physics middlewheres. The attention to detail is crazy and so far the call-backs are

tasteful. They even threw in a Raven-revival fake-out to foreshadow the craziness that’s to

come. Everything about this tanker is built to showcase the features of an ideal sequel. It’s

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exactly what players expected and wanted out of Metal Gear Solid 2, which would have

been a creative and bold, but also self-congratulatory sequel.

But then Snake dies.

You are an hour into the game and suddenly the game as you know starts all over again. And

this time it’s an awful lot like the first game. You see “Snake” dive into the docks of a

terrorist-occupied workplace and he wears a mask while waiting for a guarded elevator to

arrive. Even the colonel is there, saying exact the same lines as last time. There is so many

unsettling and outlandish little details in the beginning of this chapter, that it’s hard to keep

track of them all. The tone is considerably darker and the levels are now linear metal

corridors. The dialogue is very stiff and dull and we find out that Raiden, our new character,

who couldn’t be any more different than Snake is going through an almost nightmarish

ordeal. His name, his relationships and even his blood have been taken from him for the

sake of this mission.

Colonel: “You’re currently using artificial blood, primed with nano-machines.”

Raiden: “What did you do with my own blood?”

Colonel: “It’s been kept in cold storage. It will be circulated back into your body when

you return.”

And these codec calls are relentless. Seriously. You play the game and one minute bursts

here. The frequency of these calls got a lot of back lash and reveals of the first game and

there were lights in the tanker, so you have to wonder why they are so furiously return to

explain tutorials and expositions that you already know. This issue could not have passed

play testing. It had to have been included deliberately to make a point. If the first few

minutes of the tanker chapter are, what a great Metal Gear Solid sequel would look like,

then the first few minutes of the second chapter shows just how much worse it could have

gone. There is stuff here, that lashes out against both fans and critics. It’s a facade that the

game maintains up until the very end. The general pacing of the plant chapter looks a lot like

the first game and that was deliberate too. Though it is a totally new story, it is a story both

about the events of the first game and also about how we processed those events.

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Solidus Snake: “S3 stands for ‘Solid Snake Simulation’. It’s a development program to

artificially reproduce Solid Snake, the perfect warrior. The result is a

FOXHOUND-commando, when FOXHOUND no longer exists, a

simulated Solid Snake shaped by VR-regiment. Sound like someone you

know, JACK?”

At the very end, the S3 plan reveals, that the fan’s expectation has been carefully toyed with

this whole time. It almost makes a mockery of them and certainly makes a mockery of

Raiden. If the nutshell of the story involves shadowy conspirators, who constructed

command centres, that allowed them to fabricate grand lies, then it’s easily an extended

metaphor for the game itself – with Raiden being the analogue for the player’s real life role

as a Metal Gear fan. He is a delusional video game adult rookie, who was a fan of Solid Snake

and he believed a conspirators lies up until the very end. And once the curtains are pulled,

he is frustrated and confused and does not really know what to think of it all. It was a

deliberate bait-and-switch. Kojima knew that Players were not expecting this, he knew that

Raiden was unappealing and would be unpopular. He knew that people were not going to

like it and used that to tell the story. Like with the urinals and the soup cans, it is a piece that

used context to make its message. The message is about fanboyism and hype. It is about the

environment that surrounded the game’s launch and what they expected it to do. If you

already know, that the main character is not the guy on the box, then the shock value of that

twist is spoiled.

To take the fans’ expectations a deliberately betray them before making an upright mockery

of them was ballsy as hell, but also a financial powder cake. Keep in mind, that this was one

of the most expensive productions of its time and to throw its customers that much of a

curveball could have easily been career-suicide for these guys. Even it’s own sequels have

not danced this close to the fire as this one, so it is no wonder, that the very next game

actually plays it much safer.

In comparison, the events of Metal Gear Solid 2 seem almost aliened to the rest of the

series. Like so many other works of postmodernism, there is a loose sense of temporality

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and a shaky grasp on what parts of it are supposed to be realistic. There are so many

inconsistencies and holes, that the fiction of this game might not even be rooted in the

fiction of its own series.

A nightmare on DVD-ROM

Like all nightmares, the events of this game are grounded in just enough logic and reason to

make it scary. To juxtapose it against the comforting realism, that we all experience in

waking life. Nightmares rarely make sense. They rarely end on a satisfying conclusion or tell

a really well written story. Even during this game’s most ridiculous moments, even when

doctor “Robot-neck” is rollerblading around whit his girl and her flamenco-vampire, it is still

grounded in realism. It’s a magical realism, one where this kind of stuff can happen, while

still maintaining the presentation of a griddy R-rated hostage movie that takes itself

seriously. And the funny thing about these nightmares that take themselves so seriously, is

that they are usually very aware of the fact, that they are nightmares.

Raiden: “And that vampire too… It’s like…it’s like being in a nightmare you can’t wake

up from!”

Rose: “Jack, snap out of it!”

The nightmare that happens in this game manifests that self-awareness by staging it all as a

VR-simulation. If you are going to look at it from the wider kenology of the other Metal Gear

games released before this one, then that’s seriously the only way you can explain away

what’s going on here. For starters, the preparatory logistics of Raiden’s mission bugs down

once you ask, how he was supposed to get through the oil fence without Snake doing it

before him. Which is odd, because the colonel constantly reassures us, that Snake was not

an intended part of the simulation.

Colonel: “(…) because they were never a part of the simulation. They’re an unknown

factor!”

Raiden: “You can take your simulation and… We’re out here, we bleed, we die!”

Rose: “Calm down!”

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Raiden tells us, that he’s trained in infiltration VR-missions before, but he only says that, if

you’ve completed the tanker level.

After completing tanker chapter

Colonel: “You’re now designated ‘Raiden’! Alright, Raiden… You’ve already covered

infiltration in VR-training!”

Raiden: “I’ve completed three hundred missions in VR! I feel like some kind of

legendary mercenary.” (referring to Solid Snake)

Without completing tanker chapter

Colonel: “You’re now designated ‘Raiden’! This will be your first sneaking mission! The

arms will naturally have to be procured onsite!”

This suggests, that we might have been playing as Raiden playing a simulation of the tanker

level, which is suggested even further with the following line:

Raiden: “I’ve gone through VR-training of the tanker mission before…”

Snake: “Yeah? Well, I doubt that it accurately simulates the events of that mission!”

It’s also weird, that we’re now getting flashbacks of the tanker mission, which show a

different tanker in comparison to the one we have played. It looks like cut-content, like the

lengthy escape sequence, that didn’t make it into the final version of the game. Instead, we

saw the tanker just snap in half and Snake spill out. If the details of this flashback are

supposed to be canonical, then how do we look at Raiden’s VR-mission or Snake’s actual

flashbacks? The plot of this games leads us down a loop a circular logic. We are also told,

that Raiden’s VR-missions are indistinguishable from the real thing, which he oddly says after

encountering a supernatural vampire. Snake remarks, that the vampire is something you

have never seen in VR, but if VR is indistinguishable from reality, then what’s stopping their

whole waking existence from being VR?

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Raiden: “I’ve had extensive training! The kind, that’s indistinguishable from the real

thing!”

Snake: “You won’t see that in VR, I guarantee!”

We can already see from the cut scenes, that there really is nothing stopping unrealistic

characters from showing up in VRs, so how could he possibly exist, if this wasn’t VR? The

reality, that Raiden had prepared himself for is torn apart and quickly turns into something

surreal. The name associations teased up to this point suddenly get taken literally. Like how

the colonel, who is actually the AI-core of GW actually plays the role of a computer kernel.

The Big Shell is a shell interface that Raiden uses to interact with the simulation. He real

name ‘Jack’ is a plug we jack-in to, to interact with the shell, while the kernel processes all of

our actions into plot-outcomes. Suddenly, the fact that he flips through your game option

screens inside the game no longer looks purely utilitarian. Right around the time, that the AI-

kernel is revealed lines of code would begin to seep the walls and soon we hear Snake say

this:

Snake: “If you run out of Ammo, you can have mine!”

Raiden: “You’ve got enough?”

Snake: “(pointing to his bandana) Absolutely, infinite Ammo!”

This is the smoking gun.

Here is Solid Snake, the picture-perfect representation of what Snake looks like as an

idealized video game hero, just as he appeared during that glorious and fleeting first act.

Even better is, that he has cheats turned on. Literally! This line of dialogue references an

unlockable bandana from the first game that gave you unlimited ammo. So in this part of the

game, when Snake and Raiden are fighting alongside each other, what does he do? Well, he

tosses you unlimited ammo.

This nightmare is not based on a fictional reality. It is based on our own.

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Enter The Truth

Despite being a series of meta-games, no other Metal Gear has come this close to total

absurdity. Snake actually turns on cheat mode right in front of you and the plot just rolls

with it. It is even underplayed. They make way less of a spectacle out of this than they do

other fourth-wall-breaks. You are just supposed to roll with it, but it is absolutely unreal.

About an hour later, we see Raiden directly rejects the player’s control to end the game. His

girlfriend, with whom he has been working with and reinforcing the colonel’s decisions this

whole time, is revealed to be another AI construct, before suddenly appearing in front of

him in the flesh. Does she exist or not? Does it matter…? We can tell, that Raiden is almost

completely delusional at this point, mostly from being a self-aware character in a fictional

video game. Snake actually reminds us of that fact in the game’s epilogue:

Snake: “There’s no such thing in this world as absolute reality. Most of what they call

‘real’ is actually fiction.”

Later on, Metal Gear Solid 4 would come out and mostly retcon this reading of this game,

but it’s important to know that Metal Gear Solid 4 was not suppose to happen. MGS2, much

like 3, 4 and 5 were all built to be the end of the series. This ending here was meant to be

conclusive. These questions were deliberately left open to make room for a greater message,

which is to stop worrying about canon and learn to love subtext. Of course, this story is a

linear mess of holes and contradictions, but in the end, you are supposed to have your own

fun trying to come to conclusions yourself.

Snake: “Listen, don’t obsess over words so much. Find the meaning behind the words,

then decide. You can find your own name and your own future. I know you

didn’t have much in terms of choices this time. But everything you felt, thought

about during this mission is yours. And what you decide to do with them is

your choice.”

Games are perfect for liars and sadists. They are manipulative illusions, very deliberately

designed to dupe players into believing they have the agency of choice. But in reality, almost

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every possible interaction and outcome of the game has been carefully cultivated out of

rigorous play testing. Choices are cleverly presented under the false premises of role-playing.

You are not a brilliant strategist while playing Axis and Allies®. You are not a real estate

tycoon while playing Monopoly®. You are not cleverly making up these jokes by yourself

during Cards against Humanity®. You are pretending.

You are not a secret agent, sent out to rescue the president and were not last time either.

You are tapping on a piece of plastic in front of a TV-screen, playing a game. If a recurring

theme of this game’s stories is to frustrate and to confront players of the first game, then

designing the gameplay around that theme must have been the easy part. It is easy to see,

that while the story of this game was written with absolutely cutting-edge design

philosophies. Its gameplay was very much constrained by antiquated design philosophies.

That actually gets in the way of clarifying the point of the story. By comparison, look at Spec-

Ops®. That game wowed critics by featuring a story with delusive causality. A delirious and

delusional character, one who is deconstructed by the players actions. Both games judge

their audience while also asking their audience to ask themselves. And they both embrace

ludo-narrative dissonants in a morally unstable und clichéd military setting. And of course,

both games were falsely advertised.

But one of these games struggles to make its point. The other demonstrates it vividly and

sparked a critical revelation. Spec-Ops succeeded at pulling off all the stunts that backfired

for MGS2. There are a lot of reasons, why. Of course, all of the Metal Gear games are loaded

down with a lot of sequel-baggage and bloated writing. But this story is not supported by the

player’s actions, nor driven by its core mechanics. Raiden’s crisis of self occurs, because

Emma Emmerich uploads a virus to the core AI. Walker’s crisis of self occurs, because the

player thoughtlessly shoots and kills hundreds if not thousands of human beings.

It’s also odd, that this heavy narrative about a loose choice is presenting an awful choosy

game. There is an incredible amount of different ways to sneak pass guards. Your inventory

is huge. There is an enormous amount of tricks you have up your sleeve, if you bother go

through them all and pick them all out. The downside is, that this expensive toolset is

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bugged down by a bunch of fluff-items. Seriously, how many people have actually used the

microphone outside of its one room? And unfortunately, it’s not easy to pull off a lot of

these moves thanks to a camera system that uses claustrophobic horror game angles.

In the plant chapter, you have to do a good deal of sneaking around without the radar. And

that just shows, how much of an elaborate process you’ve got to go through, just to point

the camera at what your character is looking at. You’ve got to hold the directional buttons

towards the wall while holding the triggers…and then, you wiggle the stick. And you cannot

let go any of those buttons without breaking the action. The first person mode is a god-sent,

but peeking around corners with it limits your mobility and also exposes you from cover. By

comparison, sneaking through the levels of the first Splinter Cell® is night and day. It came

out around the same time and proved that you can pull off a lot of these same moves with a

much simpler control scheme. Largely thanks to a completely controllable camera, that’s

always peeking just over your character’s line of sight. In fact, future Metal Gear games

would take that very same camera from Splinter Cell and suddenly, you no longer have to

worry getting spotted by guards, who are out of frame.

This anachronistic conflict between modern day philosophies and dated sensibilities is

further reflected by comparing it with modern art games, which usually use more abstract

tokens to clearly demonstrate complicated concepts. Thing is, despite this game’ mind-

boggling, postmodern plot, there is not much of it reflected in the mind ushé of its

gameplay. Up until you run through arsenal in the very end, it’s a story about a

misinformation and misleading expectations, primarily delivered through cut scenes and not

gameplay. But all that brilliantly changed in the third act.

Breaking Bad

Like Spec-Ops, the game boils up frustration and confusion, that’s shared both by the player

and the character. It finally erupts here. Breaking all conventions in a way, that is still

disturbing to this day.

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All of the plots problems are resolved here too. And they are finally being reflected by the

gameplay.

Raiden: “We were shown Hollywood action film every day. The kind with macho guys

and big guns. They call it ‘image training’.

This monologue, when Raiden is talking about his past as a child soldier, that is the precise

moment, where the game breaks over itself. This line, where we find out, that our

character’s back story was a lie and his real story was shaped by fiction, that is, when players

knew, that the author has been subverting, betraying and rejecting their expectations all the

along. And the reason why it works so well, is because of all the conventions and

expectations, that we’ve now grown accustomed to.

The first thing that breaks is your character. After hearing the lies and confessions of nearly

every other character in the game, it comes time for Raiden to do the same. In this following

cut scene, we find out that he is not actually the affeminine war game trained rookie that we

were so shocked to find ourselves playing earlier. In fact, he has a backstory that’s more

sadistically macho than pretty much everyone else. He is not actually an empty Jack that we

can comfortably inhabit. He has baggage. And he is no longer keen to giving us full control.

Stripping him naked in the cut scene serves a dual purpose; It highlights the brutal rebirth of

this character while also giving him a gameplay-affecting reason to reject the players control.

Of course, back in 2002, no one wanted to test to see, if you could have a dude’s junk

hanging out anyway. So for this segment, Raiden can’t bare to show himself to our camera,

which is especially weird considering the life and death circumstances he is under. So you

can’t free his arms for the attack moves that you’ve gotten yourself used to. Your inventory

is completely empty and Raiden actually sneezes against your will too. Your vulnerability and

confusion couldn’t be more overstated. Especially because this chapter also breaks the

physical space of the game, beginning by framing the scene in the memory of ‘Shadow

Moses’. Just like in the last game, your hero is strapped to a torture chair by Ocelot the big

bad and another female henchman. You are literally inside a room from the first game, right

down to the blurry textures and low-poly furniture.

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Solidus Snake: “This situation… I find it very nostalgic.”

You continue on into Arsenal Gear, where geometry is a far cry from the rest of the game, if

only because lines of code and computer windows are floating in the air. The translucent

floor lights up with every step. There is a bottomless pit, surrounding the whole stage and,

once you have finally made it until the end, you might notice that this room looks awfully

familiar. And again, these weird gamey visual effects are not explained either. You sneak

through another Arsenal Gear in Metal Gear Solid 4 and it looks nothing like this. It looks

kind of like a battleship, but in this game, it looks more like a glitch map editor. You are in

the belly of the beast, complete with rooms named after digestive organs.

Space is broken and so is your character and his relationship with the other characters. The

whole game has built up to this moment when Raiden, naked, shivering and sneezing, is

completely dwarfed by Solid Snake, who is gloriously over equipped with the same outfit he

was wearing in the tanker. This part of the game shows Raiden’s admiration of Snake and –

by extension – the player’s as well through both cut scenes and game play. Note that once

this cut scene is over, we start the next scene from Snake’s point of view. His health meter is

longer, his bullets hit for more damage, he is a better shot and he is also surrounded by an

invisible wall that you cannot walk away from.

And the last thing that is broken is the entire pretence of this being a Stealth game at all. For

the next two rooms, you and Snake kill your way through hundreds of these weird Sci-Fi

ninja guys and it is a total blood bath. It is completely antithetical to entire rest of the game.

It is like the game itself forgot, that it is supposed to be about stealth. Because, now it just

gives you a sword and an invisible wall, a bunch of bad guys and infinite ammo. It is insane!

You and Snake just blast your way through these guys and Snake does most of the work. You

finally end it off with a sword fight against the former President of the United States who is

also revealed to be the last thing in the way of the patriots controlling the world. All these

twists and turns reveal the meta-game nature of the plot and in an over the top fashion and

it is driven home by a resolution that asks us to discredit the previous and entirety of the

whole game.

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Was the bad guy really bad? Were we really the good guy? And whose story should we

believe? Who was lying? And is there anything differently we could have done that whole

time? These are the kinds of questions that the game asks you in the end. They also ask

about the state of the world outside of the video game and they challenge the player’s

perception of truth.

What are you going to do with the experience of having played this game? MGS2 asks you

these things by evoking postmodernism to make a statement about the outrageousness of

its hype by setting the game outside the canon of its own series and by embracing ludo-

narrative dissonance before deconstructing it right in front of the player. It uses these

narrative techniques to warn about the danger of memes to show media consumers of the

digital age that misinformation can lead to lies being culturally accepted as truths. And of

course, the game uses the term ‘meme’ in an ironically more academic sense than we use

the word today. It harkens back to Richard Dawkins’ theory, which compared to passage of

information onto future generations with that of genes.

Colonel: “Raiden, are you receiving? We’re still here!”

Raiden: “Who are you?”

Colonel: “To begin with, we’re not what you’d call ‘human’. Over the past 200 years,

the kind of consciousness formed layer by layer at the crucible of the White

House. It's not unlike life started in the oceans four billion years ago. We are

formless. We are the very discipline and morality that Americans invoke so

often. How can anyone hope to eliminate us? As long as this nation exists, so

will we.“

Raiden: „Cut the crap! If you're immortal, why would you take away individual

freedoms and censor the Net?

Rose: „Jack, don’t be silly!“

Right now, are the colonel and Rose really AI or some kind of totally abstract cloud

consciousness that did really seep out the White House? It is a tempting mystery but the

minor logistics behind it are never really explained. Even in the sequels. And no matter how

hard you look, you will never find a full proof answer.

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But it does not matter what they are. Instead, what matters is what they represent, which is

collective social control through memes. They warn against the social epidemic of junk data,

which leads us to see trends where none exist. On the Internet, information overload is the

norm. People are always looking for a major tidal wave of change when something

ultimately insignificant happens. Memes are collaboratively filtered information. They are

super powered nano-stories. They are propagated though mass preference, deliberately

selected and popularized. “Memetic” online journalism is the survival of the most agreeable

information. The nasty truths get forgotten; the inarguable counter arguments get drowned

out and dismissed.

Colonel: “(…) but in the current digitalized world, trivial information is accumulating every

second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. The S3 plan does not

stand for Solid Snake Simulation. What it does stand for is Selection for Societal Sanity.

Raiden, you seem to think that our plan is one of censorship.”

Raiden: “Are you telling that it’s not…?”

Rose: “You’re being silly! What we propose to do is not to control content, but to

create context.”

Raiden: “Create context?!”

Colonel: “The digital society further humans flaws and selectively rewards the

development of convenient half-truths”

Rose: “Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger

forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever “truth” suits them

into the growing cesspool of society at large.”

Colonel: “The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated,

but nobody is right.”

Rose: “Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in

“truth”.”

Colonel: “And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

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They are talking about conformation bias. And in the digital age, conformation bias controls

information. And it is not just a social phenomenon, but psychological too. It is almost

unavoidable. Let’s take a closer look at this line in the end:

Snake: “There's no such thing in the world as absolute reality. Most of what they call

real is actually fiction. What you think you see is only as real as your brain tells

you it is.”

Are you reading this?

In this elaborate, convoluted plot, Raiden unknowingly enslaved humanity because he

wanted to believe that he could live up to Solid Snake. We enabled him to do so because we

wanted to play a sequel to Metal Gear Solid. Why did he do that? Think about the

overwhelming allure of this secret agent role. Think about how people are so eager to obey

dangerous orders when given the opportunity to lie to others. Think about how eager people

were to abuse each other during the Stanford Prison Experiment. Think about the role that

viral media creators play. Think of guys who actively worked to trick everyone else into

propagating their memes. The people who telly preferences, cross-reference trends and

enumerate words. The people who measure thoughts with scientific models and carefully

alter and manipulate their message to suit their kind of responses they want.

The truth you believe in, is it genuine? Are you enabling lies? Big brother is not me – it is all

of us. Big brother is watching but we are staring right back. The masses are now in control of

our information. For the better or for the worse. What that means it that you are in control

of the entire world. Take your thoughts and put them out there. Public scrutiny will decide

what is right or wrong. Collective, cultural, cumulative memories are what we all leave for

the future.

Everything you know, everything you are thinking about could not have happened without

that effort. We are all responsible.

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And now, think about everything you know. And think about why you know it.

Appendix 1: About Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Characters

The protagonist of MGS2 is a young rookie agent named Raiden. He is supported by his

commanding officer, Colonel Roy Campbell, and Rosemary, his girlfriend. Allies formed on

the mission include Lieutenant Junior Grade Iroquois Pliskin, a Navy SEAL of mysterious

background who provides his knowledge of the facility and later revealed as the claimed

terrorist Solid Snake; Peter Stillman, a NYPD bomb-disposal expert; Otacon, a computer

security specialist; and a cyborg ninja imitating Gray Fox's persona, first calling itself

Deepthroat, then changing its name to Mr. X.

The antagonists of peace are the Sons of Liberty, a group of terrorists who seize control of

the Big Shell Disposal Facility, including anti-terror training unit Dead Cell, and a Russian

mercenary force. The Dead Cell team members are Vamp, an immortal man exhibiting

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vampire-like attributes; Fatman, a rotund man with exceptional knowledge of bombs; and

Fortune, a woman capable of cheating death by apparent supernatural means. The leader of

Sons of Liberty claims to be Solid Snake, previously declared dead after a terrorist attack,

later revealed to be Solidus Snake, a third clone in "Les Enfants Terribles" project. Assisting

the Sons of Liberty are Olga Gurlukovich, commander of a rogue Russian mercenary army,

and Revolver Ocelot, a disenfranchised Russian nationalist and former FOXHOUND agent,

Solid Snake's old nemesis, and henchman of Solidus Snake.

Other characters include Emma Emmerich, Otacon's stepsister and a computer wiz-kid;

Sergei Gurlukovich, Ocelot's former commanding officer and Olga's father; President James

Johnson, held hostage by the Sons of Liberty; and DIA operative Richard Ames. Liquid Snake

returns as he communicates via Ocelot because his right hand, sliced by Gray Fox in the

previous game, has been replaced with the right hand of Liquid.

This game features cameos by Mei Ling, the communications expert who aided Snake in the

first game, and Johnny Sasaki, the luckless soldier with chronic digestive problems.

Story

The game opens with a flashback in 2007, two years after the Shadow Moses incident that

was described in the original Metal Gear Solid. On August 8, 2007, Solid Snake and Otacon,

now members of the non-governmental organization Philanthropy, are investigating the

development of a new Metal Gear by the American marines. Snake arrives on the tanker

transporting the weapon in the middle of an attack by Russian mercenaries, led by Colonel

Gurlukovich, his daughter Olga and Snake's enemy Ocelot, who has transplanted the right

arm of Liquid Snake following the loss of his own in Metal Gear Solid. After Snake knocks

Olga unconscious, he sneaks down to the hold in order to record pictures of the new Metal

Gear RAY. As the mercenaries take control below, Ocelot betrays his allies and shoots both

Gurlukovich and the commander of the marines. Just as Ocelot is about to hijack Ray, Snake

reveals himself. Ocelot is then possessed by Liquid Snake and escapes with RAY leaving the

ship to sink. In the aftermath, Snake is blamed for the sinking of the tanker and is believed to

have perished with the ship. The Big Shell clean-up facility is later constructed, ostensibly to

help clean the Hudson River following the tanker's sinking.

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Plant chapter

On April 29, 2009, Raiden is operating under a reformed FOXHOUND two years after the

Tanker Chapter. He has orders to infiltrate the Big Shell to rescue hostages, including the US

president, from the terrorist group Sons of Liberty (whose leader claims to be Solid Snake),

backed up by the rogue anti-terror training unit, Dead Cell, who are also threatening to

destroy the facility they have seized. All of the SEAL team are killed by Dead Cell members

Vamp and Fortune, and the entire Big Shell is patrolled by the surviving Russian mercenaries

from the Tanker chapter, led now by Olga, who is unaware of the extent of Ocelot's betrayal,

and believes Snake was responsible for her father's murder. The remaining members of the

SEAL assault team, Iroquis Pliskin and Peter Stillman join Raiden to disable explosives

planted on the Shell by Stillman's former pupil, Fatman, now a terrorist. Stillman is killed by

Fatman's booby trap in Shell 2, though he manages to warn Raiden in time, who successfully

disables the respective bomb in Shell 1, preventing the sinking of the Big Shell. Raiden then

survives a direct confrontation with Fortune and Vamp, and kills Fatman on the heliport.

As Raiden searches for the President, he begins to doubt Pliskin's identity, but agrees to the

plan of transporting the surviving hostages off the Big Shell with a helicopter. However, they

are both attacked by the leader of the Sons of Liberty, who identifies himself as Solid Snake.

Pliskin, however, shouts that the man is not Solid Snake, and assists Raiden in fending off the

leader when he attacks with a Harrier Jet piloted by Vamp. The battle ends with the Harrier

being shot down, though it is seized by the Metal Gear Ray seen in the Tanker chapter, and

the two terrorists escape. Pliskin is now revealed to be the real Solid Snake, who, along with

Otacon, helps Raiden find the location of the President. Raiden moves deeper into the

facility and locates President Johnson, who informs him that Big Shell is actually a facade to

hide a new Metal Gear. Known as Arsenal Gear, it houses a powerful AI called "GW", which is

capable of controlling the transmission of digital information. The president also claims that

the democratic process is a sham, and the true rulers of the United States are a secret

organization called the Patriots. The President then reveals the leader of the Sons of Liberty

is his predecessor George Sears, a direct clone of Big Boss known as Solidus Snake, who fell

out of the Patriots' favor following Shadow Moses, and has now gone rogue with Dead Cell

to escape the Patriots' control. Ocelot kills the president soon after this revelation. Raiden

moves on to disabling Arsenal Gear, going to rescue an Arsenal Gear engineer, Emma

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Emmerich (Otacon's adoptive sister). After fighting and shooting Vamp, who then seemingly

drowns, Raiden rescues Emma, who agrees to assist Raiden in uploading a virus into the

"GW" mainframe. However, the upload is halted partway, when Emma is attacked by Vamp.

Raiden then kills Vamp by shooting him again, although the injuries Emma suffers prove

fatal. Otacon escapes with the surviving hostages, while Raiden is captured by Olga when

Solid Snake seemingly betrays him.

Raiden awakens in a torture chamber where Solidus Snake reveals that he once adopted

Raiden, a former child soldier, as his son during the Liberian civil war, and that Raiden is now

a Patriot agent. Solidus then leaves the chamber, and Olga steps in and frees Raiden, telling

him that she is also a Patriot double-agent within the Sons of Liberty and that she was

blackmailed by the Patriots to aid Raiden in order to protect her child. Olga also tells Raiden

to find Solid Snake, who only allowed Raiden to be captured so he could gain access to

Arsenal Gear. While Raiden makes his way through the bowels of the facility to rendezvous

with Snake, his commanding officer, the Colonel, begins to act very erratically, giving him

odd instructions. Upon investigation, Otacon reveals that the "Colonel" Raiden has been

taking orders from is actually a construct of the GW supercomputer, and that the partially

uploaded virus is beginning to damage its systems. Raiden receives a call from Rose, whose

voice begins to deepen and slow down as the conversation is cut off, but not before she

manages to reveal she is pregnant with his child. Raiden reunites with Snake and his gear,

and the two then encounter Fortune, who fights Snake while Raiden searches for Solidus. He

is then forced into a battle with the 25 Metal Gear RAY units in Arsenal Gear. Olga protects

him, before Solidus kills her and captures Snake and Raiden. Ocelot reveals that he too is a

Patriot agent, and that the entire Big Shell mission was a carefully coordinated attempt to

reenact the events of the Shadow Moses incident, for the purpose of creating a soldier

(Raiden) on par with Solid Snake. Ocelot kills Fortune, before being possessed by Liquid

again, who announces his plan to hunt down the Patriots using his host's knowledge and the

first Metal Gear Ray. Snake escapes to pursue Liquid, as Arsenal Gear goes out of control.

Arsenal Gear crashes into downtown Manhattan, launching Raiden and Solidus onto the roof

of Federal Hall. Solidus attempts to kill Raiden, intending to use Raiden's nanomachines to

lead him to the Patriots, eliminate them, and form a nation of "Sons of Liberty". At this

point, Raiden is contacted by another AI, introducing itself as a representative of the

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Patriots, who reveals that the true purpose of the simulation was to see how well they could

simulate and control human behavior in order to prevent society from dumbing down due to

trivial information drowning valuable knowledge and inconvenient truths. Raiden is forced to

fight Solidus, after the Patriots threaten to kill Olga's child and Rose if he does not cooperate.

After Solidus's defeat, Snake reveals he planted a tracking device on Liquid's Metal Gear.

Snake and Otacon plan to follow him, rescue Olga's child, and hunt down the Patriots, whose

details were hidden in the GW computer virus disc. Raiden is finally reunited with Rose, on

April 30, 2009, the anniversary of their first meeting.

In a brief epilogue, Otacon and Snake discuss the decoding of the virus disc, which contains

the personal data on all twelve members of the Patriots' high council. However, it is revealed

that all twelve members of the Wisemen's Committee have been dead for about 100 years.

Appendix 2: Authors notes

When MGS2 was released in 2001, I was barely nine years old. A boy. I played through the

previous installment in the series, namely Metal Gear Solid, a couple of times without

realizing its message. The word ‘gene’ was unknown to me and I would not understand it

either. So, when I played MGS2 through a couple of time, things changed. I did not

understand a thing. The first 70 per cent of the game were a rather normal action-stealth

game, one like its predecessor. The last 30 per cent were a completely mind-boggling and

weird game with no common sense in it. I was blown away by its weirdness. Things went

from weird to strange… to strange.

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