MILITARY VIDEO GAME COMPLEX: METAL GEAR SOLID 2 AND THE WAR ON TERROR

The ongoing series of United States Military endeavors following the September 11, 2001 terror attack known collectively as the War on Terror saw a major change in the way wars would be waged. A war for the new century characterized by the use of new digital technologies and government distrust. Secret torture regimes, mass surveillance, government lies, it sounds like the plot of your favorite action movie. What happens when your escape from reality becomes indistinguishable from the real thing. What can be said when a video game published mere months after the attack is jarringly similar to the real event, and ended up predicting wide swaths of the events that would result from America’s War on Terror. By deconstructing the 2001 video game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, one may see how the burgeoning tech industry and its consumer market is inextricably linked to the maintenance of war abroad, and more-so how American-ness influenced the way the war was waged. 

The Metal Gear Series

Auteur game designer Hideo Kojima’s 30 year old franchise distinguishes itself from much of the industry for its anti-war messaging. The stories follow enhanced spy soldiers through notoriously convoluted overarching stories that move through various politically charged moments in an alternate American history. More akin to interactive movies, the series is lauded by its cult following for melodramatic voice acting, in game cutscenes that can last individually up to half an hour, but ultimately, for being deceptively thoughtful works of artistic storytelling paradoxically relayed through the high-octane world of shooter video games. Each title tends to climax in a boss fight with “Metal Gears”, autonomous bipedal tanks often carrying nuclear payloads, controlled by variously motivated military groups, some anti-nuclear anti-war types, some totalitarian fascist. The only thing you can safely expect throughout the series’ plot twists  is that the character you once heroically helmed can be ideologically positioned as the villain of the next game.

Our Hero

MGS 2 begins with the player following Solid Snake, your prototypical action hero. Chiseled features, deep blue eyes, and a sexy jaded voice provided by David Hayter lend themselves to Snake’s depiction of a stoic himbo; who’s lack of interest in the romantic passes by female characters verges on homosexuality. Implied queer themes are prevalent throughout the series but tend to only be perceived by the more dedicated fans, which is why much to the dismay of the mass market, only a couple hours into the game Snake is left to die and the player takes on the helm of Raiden. A then unknown character standing in stark contrast to Snake’s machismo, many teenage boys were perturbed by the pale, blond, ninja wearing a techy catsuit with heels. 

Snake

Raiden

Raiden Concept Art from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001)

Raiden’s character design was unabashedly feminine, his character model was built from a female base, his animations were feminized, apparent when in the company of Snake. Fans dismissed his questioning of duty as whiny, but as players experienced the story alongside live coverage of the invasion of Afghanistan, Kojima’s heraldic intentions behind the replacement grew clear. 

Political Context

The fundamental question of the series is that of the U.S.’s place in world affairs. Metal Gear Lore begins at the end of WW2 where the Philosophers, a secret group of the wealthiest and most powerful minds from the USSR, U.S.A, and People's Republic of China, created a one hundred billion dollar slush fund to steer the world away from brutal needless warfare, imagining “One world without borders.” Inevitable infighting and undermining saw the U.S come out on top, inflaming the cold war. This “Philosophers' Legacy” strongly resembles the Marshall Plan, erected in 1948, in which countries could get a piece of the American pie by pledging their loyalty to the U.S, resulting in an international system of military alliances and economic dependency. Leading to enduring wars of ideology against non conforming states, this world order was justified and articulated as America ending its years of isolationism to spread the great ideals of democracy and freedom to the undeveloped world using peace through democracy. Such was the thinking by much of  President George W. Bush’s neoconservative presidential cabinet. Their belief in security through intervention was arguably justified and undoubtedly amplified by 9/11. Chickens coming home to roost only had the effect of ‘patriotizing’ the people of the nation, as support for a war in Afghanistan was near unanimous by a populous armed with raw emotions and the ideals their action stars had for so many decades championed.

The Philosophers depicted in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004)

Social Context

Slavo Zizek, in his 2002 book Welcome to the Desert of the Real, offers his interpretation of the responses to the war, resulting in a characterization of the United States as finally being woken up to the realities of war. Americans had long grown accustomed to absorbing news about conflicts in other countries from their televisions in between channels showing movies and television shows depicting dramatized scenes of war and violence. We not only became desensitized to real violence, but also disillusioned by the idea that it would never take place on home soil, unless of course, on screen. Solid Snake was famously modeled on Kurt Russell’s character Snake Plissken who appears in John Carpenter’s Escape From… movie series, even adopting the codename Pliskin after covertly returning from the dead halfway through the game. Russell’s handsome brooding warrior with a giant snake tattoo on his chest tasked with stopping a terrorist plot on American soil, already poked fun at the classic action hero of the 80’s, and Kojima’s subversion forced players to further deconstruct the long brewing emotions behind the American Psyche. Many Neocon thinkers articulated the need for war like it was a sexual act, a country chastised for so long especially after the handling of the Vietnam War, was ready to violently spread the seed of Democracy to other countries. Raiden was the antithesis to this, submissive and whiny, and untypically androgynous. The game forces us to question why we’re so resistant to change through the action hero archetype.

Still of Kurt Russel as Snake Pliskn from John Carpenter’s Escape From New York (1981)

The Military Videogame Complex

Throughout the story, grizzled Snake questions Raiden’s green-ness. After all this is his first mission, but not to worry because Raiden has completed thousands of VR training missions. The idea of a holographic digital world infinitely programmable aimed at providing new soldiers with highly technical simulated training without real world danger is clearly attributed to the new ways in which wars were being fought, as satellites, drones, digital surveillance, all reduced the risk of feet on the ground, and excess American lives being lost, in theory resulting in higher precision yet, millions more civilians would be harmed because of severe collateral and infrastructural damage. One of the series most divisive characters, Hal “Otacon” Emmerich represents the role scientists play in the Military Industrial Complex in a monologue explaining his journey from Metal Gear mechanic to running an anti Metal Gear NGO, he details the exploits of the scientists who created the first atomic bomb. Only given governmental support when it’s time to develop a new weapon, scientists have long been forced to wage war on their rulers behalf, often becoming more useful than the soldiers dying on the battlefield. As computers became small and powerful enough to fit into autonomous weapons of war so too could they be played with in a child’s bedroom. The Guardian describes, “Then there is the obvious parallel between combat drone piloting and gaming. While drone pilots often reject the comparison (primarily due to the psychological toll of operating a real machine that remotely kills people), research does show that gamers excel at this work.” And while there’s nothing to suggest video games make kids violent, there is no doubt that the United States Government, extralegally uses recruit tactics, within videogames to recruit children. As Jacobin and the Guardian point out, online gaming, responsible for much of the gaming industry’s current player base, largely comprises minors. While juggernauts like Call of Duty and Battlefield are free from direct state department input, and there are official U.S. Military games, they have been indefinitely tinged by years of exceptionalist rhetoric. Sullivan and Bartkowiak from Jacobin explain, “Game designers use military consultants to help with story and level design in order to give games a sense of “authenticity,” particularly in the tactical shooter genre.”... “Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War went so far as to include Ronald Reagan, portraying him as a straight shooter willing to bend the rules of international law in service of “the free men and women of the world.” An earlier installment of the series sent players on covert missions in Latin America, and featured consulting work by disgraced Colonel Oliver North, a key figure in the United States’ sordid involvement in Nicaragua in the 1980s.” Even when game developers attempt to approach their stories from a place of neutrality, or even anti-war messaging, complicity lies in the valorization and desensitization of war, particularly whites waging wars on others. To the average gamer that plays Call of Duty and likes the cool guns and killing people, Metal Gear is a hard sell when your protagonist incessantly warns about the cost of war, loss of identity, exploitation, destruction, cyclical violence. From the start of nearly every entry in the series, you’re armed with a non-lethal tranquilizer gun and encouraged to play non violently and non invasively. However Kojima claims not to be a pacifist, it seems like he wants to be, yet he gives players the freedom to play the game how they want, as he acknowledges the job of an artist is not to force thought but encourage thinking.

Mass Surveillance

The Philospher’s Legacy was ultimately seized by one Colonel Zero, who interpreted “One world without borders” as a world subject to complete oversight. His organization, known as “The Patriots”, who by the 90’s, had taken complete control of the American Government, and by extension much of the world’s population. In the 90’s the U.S. Armed Forces coined the term Military operations other than War, tactics which include every loophole you could think of avoiding war under normal terms; “Strikes and Raids”, “Support to Insurgency”, “Counterterrorism”, and infamously psychological warfare resulting in torture. Psyops or Psychological Operations as taken from goarmy.com are, “missions involve sharing specific information to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens. This can include cyber warfare and advanced communication techniques across all forms of media.” Before Colonel Zero’s death he facilitated the development of an A.I. program called GW to replace him. GW controlled the global flow of information through all communication channels, automatically manipulating data to censor the existence of the Patriots. It turns out that the Patriots had been the architects of the game’s events the whole time, nothing happened without their knowledge or say so. 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act aimed at tightening national security through surveillance expansion by law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones and smoother interagency communication, the subject of much controversy due to its authorization of indefinite detention without trial of immigrants, and due to the permission given to law enforcement to search property and records without the owner's consent or knowledge.

George W. Bush: signing of USA PATRIOT Act

There’s also the clandestine PRISM program, established by the NSA in 2007 intended to collect internet communications from large telecom companies, only made public in 2012 by whistleblower Edward Snowden. He revealed U.S. courts had bullied giant communication conglomerates Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. into giving unrestrained, warrantless access to user data, and that it was all being intercepted, processed, and stored.

The Story

At this point you might be wondering what even happens in the game. In describing the themes and characters I’ve omitted the plot events which should give you a full perspective. You begin in 2007 as Solid Snake, infiltrating an oil tanker, secretly carrying a new amphibious metal gear called RAY. The tanker was hijacked by Russian mercenaries and fan favorite Revolver Ocelot, who betrays his comrades, scuttles the ship and leaves in RAY. Snake is presumed dead, and two years later, you meet Raiden sent by the Patriots to infiltrate the Big Shell Environmental Cleanup Facility erected to clean the tankers pill. A terrorist group calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, headed by someone calling himself Solid Snake, takes the U.S. President James Johnson hostage during a tour of the facility, demanding an enormous ransom and threatening to destroy the facility leading to further ecological disaster. The Sons of Liberty turn out to be a Patriots’ anti-terrorism group gone rogue called Dead Cell. Johnson reveals the leader of Dead Cell is his Presidential predecessor George Sears, aka Solidus Snake, a clone of legendary soldier Big Boss, just like Solid Snake. He also reveals to Raiden that Big Shell is a facade for Arsenal Gear, a submersible fortress containing the GW virus, and that the democratic process is a sham and everything is run by the Patriots. Raiden and Otacon’s sister Emma upload a half successful virus to Arsenal before the former is taken captive and the latter is killed. Upon imprisonment we learn via monologue that Solidus Snake had killed Raiden’s parents and raised him as a child soldier. Raiden only discovers his past, and his exploitation as the virus cripples the Patriots’ smoke and mirrors. While Snake pursues Ocelot (who is under control of the 3rd Snake clone Liquid), Raiden battles Solidus on Arsenal Gear which has crashed into lower Manhattan. Ultimately, we learn that GW is only one AI, and the real goal is to directly control human thought to prevent society's regression in the digital era from trivial information drowning knowledge and truth in the belief that humanity is too immature to handle the flow of information responsibly, pointing to Raiden’s own lack of individuality and reliance on others for direction.

Solid Snake during gameplay

Dead Cell Terrorist Group

Revolver Ocelot posing in front of a Metal Gear Ray 

Raiden’s existential crisis following the story’s climax

Conclusion

Sure it’s strange that a video games in development for years before 9/11, contained a former military contractor unit, disillusioned by the total hegemonic control of the U.S., who decides to launch a terror attack on lower Manhattan; and the ultimate villain ended up being a covert technology software that shares its name with the real life President of the U.S. who enacted similar domestic technological espionage and suppression legislation. But is it really?  All of the similarities highlighted between the events of this game and real life are, undoubtedly, uncanny, but not coincidental. Like the game suggests, the populus has been sucked into a media bubble that simulates real life as they want to see it, blind to the actual events of the world. 9/11 is not at all surprising in hindsight, and what Metal Gear Solid 2’s subversive spy thriller tries to tell us is to think critically and seriously about the consequences of complacency. Question the goals of your leaders, and ultimately your role in their game. I’d encourage the curious scholar with time on their hands to delve deeper into the world of Metal Gear Solid, as there's pages more content to dissect on this game alone!