Man, that Kojima.
It’s arguably a sentiment that no one who plays games can really escape while making their way through Metal Gear series creator Hideo Kojima’s postmodern masterwork, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. It is also one that I had not experienced until just a couple of weeks ago, a dozen years after its initial release.
Criminal.
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There was a soldier – a son of a poor peasant – who had never seen a flying machine in his life. It was 1961; the year of the biggest mimic warfare operation of the Warsaw Pact and only a year before the Cuban missile crisis, his Hungarian platoon boarded a Soviet Hound transport helicopter to cross a wide river. He was so afraid of flying that he defecated himself – and then spent approximately 40 hours in his own excrement before the drill was over. (more…)
Imagine if your mother became your worst enemy. Imagine, if you will, that she is everywhere at once, controlling your every move, making sure you ate a certain thing, went certain places, picked up certain things, kept telling you that you’re getting fat…it’s not hard to imagine, is it? Well, not if you have my mother. (Mother, that is a joke – look, I’ll go to the gym soon, okay? No, I won’t brush my hair.)
Videogames use this idea of the controlling mother figure to play with us, to scare us. She’s meant to be caring, protective and helpful but she often turns out a bitch from hell. I’m talking about the soothing computer voice – the Artificial Intelligence we all trust. And these days, it’s usually a ‘she.’ (more…)
