This review contains spoilers
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War as a video game - what better way to raise the ultimate soldier?
Do you ever look back at art and history and wonder how do we keep making the same mistakes? How, if we have every ounce of information at our disposal, do we not learn anything? Cycles and patterns repeating in clockwork loops of geometric precision. Politics is theater and people are players. We carry out the scripts, their sequences coded into our genes, but in knowing this, shouldn't we be able to change? If we could see the puppetmasters, wouldn't we want to cut our strings?
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty gets cited as prescient in its prescriptive notions of how propaganda and disinformation were going to be deseminated over the Internet, or how individuals in power would be subsumed by the very systems they designed to order society. While never outright declared, its clear that "the Patriots" and their goals - nebulous though they seem - are meant to carry on the hegemonic war machine parlaying power between an upper crust whose own nebulous motivations could potentially be boiled down to, "Line goes up." Capital, it has been said, makes the world go ‘round. And there's a lot of value in making sure it stays that way.
Metal Gear Solid as a franchise has always been critical of the war machine, despite being an action-hero fantasy in which the right soldier in the right place at the right time makes all the difference in the world, and Sons of Liberty is hyper-aware of this contradiction. Kojima's fourth-wall breaks prodding at player agency aren’t just mechanical gimmicks, now needling condemnations under the player’s skin. You've been playing war too long. You'll hurt your eyes staring down that scope. Take a break, there will be other battles tomorrow. At the fulcrum of the game’s foundational twists is the reveal that Sons of Liberty is a reskinned varietal of its predecessor. Raiden, the fresh-faced soldier boy who becomes the primary protagonist after a short prologue, has been following in the footsteps of Solid Snake, his muscle memory and the player’s coalescing into the ultimate amalgam of head-fuckery. Of course this is Shadow Moses. What else could it have been? War, like capital, cannot be critiqued without glorifying it. So now it’s a video game.
The message Kojima imparts after our “heroes” and “villains” perform their roles as pieces on a chessboard almost reads as passing the buck. We decide the future; our genes do not define us; truth is relative, so be critical of your experiences. And yet, these kernels of wisdom, buffered by a jazzy interlude and FMV footage of New York City, represent Sons of Liberty’s thematic overture. In a self-perpetuating system of war and avarice, we can choose to be more than pawns, more than players, more than we are designed to be. To fight for the future is to fight against today. We can escape the cycles and patterns, we can learn from history. Ultimately, we can change. In micro, this is a story about identity and legacy for a man denied his own life. In macro, this is a story about identity and legacy for a nation that, at the time of this game’s release, was poised to lash out at the world for daring to pay it back in kind. Sons of Liberty is a warning and a lullaby, a waning piece of a-history that holds up a jagged mirror to the world outside our windows every time violence and cruelty are enacted in the name of the status quo. And I so desperately want to believe what it believes about us: that we can fight. We can learn. We can change.
War as a video game - what better way to raise the ultimate soldier?
Do you ever look back at art and history and wonder how do we keep making the same mistakes? How, if we have every ounce of information at our disposal, do we not learn anything? Cycles and patterns repeating in clockwork loops of geometric precision. Politics is theater and people are players. We carry out the scripts, their sequences coded into our genes, but in knowing this, shouldn't we be able to change? If we could see the puppetmasters, wouldn't we want to cut our strings?
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty gets cited as prescient in its prescriptive notions of how propaganda and disinformation were going to be deseminated over the Internet, or how individuals in power would be subsumed by the very systems they designed to order society. While never outright declared, its clear that "the Patriots" and their goals - nebulous though they seem - are meant to carry on the hegemonic war machine parlaying power between an upper crust whose own nebulous motivations could potentially be boiled down to, "Line goes up." Capital, it has been said, makes the world go ‘round. And there's a lot of value in making sure it stays that way.
Metal Gear Solid as a franchise has always been critical of the war machine, despite being an action-hero fantasy in which the right soldier in the right place at the right time makes all the difference in the world, and Sons of Liberty is hyper-aware of this contradiction. Kojima's fourth-wall breaks prodding at player agency aren’t just mechanical gimmicks, now needling condemnations under the player’s skin. You've been playing war too long. You'll hurt your eyes staring down that scope. Take a break, there will be other battles tomorrow. At the fulcrum of the game’s foundational twists is the reveal that Sons of Liberty is a reskinned varietal of its predecessor. Raiden, the fresh-faced soldier boy who becomes the primary protagonist after a short prologue, has been following in the footsteps of Solid Snake, his muscle memory and the player’s coalescing into the ultimate amalgam of head-fuckery. Of course this is Shadow Moses. What else could it have been? War, like capital, cannot be critiqued without glorifying it. So now it’s a video game.
The message Kojima imparts after our “heroes” and “villains” perform their roles as pieces on a chessboard almost reads as passing the buck. We decide the future; our genes do not define us; truth is relative, so be critical of your experiences. And yet, these kernels of wisdom, buffered by a jazzy interlude and FMV footage of New York City, represent Sons of Liberty’s thematic overture. In a self-perpetuating system of war and avarice, we can choose to be more than pawns, more than players, more than we are designed to be. To fight for the future is to fight against today. We can escape the cycles and patterns, we can learn from history. Ultimately, we can change. In micro, this is a story about identity and legacy for a man denied his own life. In macro, this is a story about identity and legacy for a nation that, at the time of this game’s release, was poised to lash out at the world for daring to pay it back in kind. Sons of Liberty is a warning and a lullaby, a waning piece of a-history that holds up a jagged mirror to the world outside our windows every time violence and cruelty are enacted in the name of the status quo. And I so desperately want to believe what it believes about us: that we can fight. We can learn. We can change.