Real Virtuality

Producer and director Hideo Kojima has advocated realism in Konami's acclaimed Metal Gear Solid titles since the series' inception in 1998. During an early IGN interview, Kojima asserted that "if the player isn't tricked into believing that the world is real, then there's no point in making the game." The original game's development team studied the tactics of a California SWAT team for insight on creating MGS's military and tactical gameplay elements. And the series' premise is heavily based on elements pulled straight from American history and groundbreaking scientific advances—the Cold War, the original Persian Gulf conflict of the 1990's, the Human Genome Project, gene therapy. MGS presented players with a cinematic vision of a world made so engrossing because of its sheer believability: even it's more far-fetched science fiction elements become plausible, in context.

In Konami's latest offering, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, series protagonist Solid Snake is cast into a warzone one last time. Like several other wildly-successful games with military themes (Activision's Call of Duty 4 comes to mind), the protagonist finds himself once again in the Middle East—where exposition in the original MGS game revealed Snake had begun his military career as a young soldier. The setting, deliberately or not, is a striking representation of the Afghan and Iraqi wars America is currently waging, occupying our country's national psyche.

But MGS4's conflict has moved beyond America and reached an omnipresent scale, a nonstop World War that propels the global war economy on which civilization's stability hinges. Battlefronts are populated by mercenaries (referred to as PMC's), disposable soldiers who are statistics, valuable commodities to the governments and corporations who employ them. Guns of the Patriots highlights the tragically impersonal nature of warfare, and the trauma it inflicts on the human mind and body.

If the MGS titles presented these issues in a moralizing, heavy-handed way, the commentary would lose its impact. But the motivations and the decisions made by the series' protagonists and antagonists are complex and often ambiguous, dealing with questions of idealism versus reality and often the choice between the lesser of two evils. As writer and director, Kojima strives to create characters that are as realistic as the rest of his meticulously-rendered dystopian world. In a decision unprecedented in series history, MGS4 goes so far as to use four real actresses and models to provide the character models, voice acting, and motion acting for the plot's unsettling villains, the Beauty and the Beast Corps, giving living human faces to this unit of lovely monsters.

What's most fascinating about Guns of the Patriots is that it presents a reality that's only marginally separate from our own. It's a vision of a future so grounded in our actual past and present that you can see how something like it could conceivably come about one day, like connecting points A, B, and C, to eventually reach Z. And by watching characters—who for the past ten years have seemed virtually real to an entire generation of gamers—cope with the price of war, its consequences start to feel surprisingly visceral and immediate.

There are some of us who have seen the horrors of war, either firsthand on the battlefield or in hospitals occupied by US veterans struggling to heal their injured bodies and minds. MGS4 seems tame, glossy entertainment by comparison. It's just a game, after all, though during one particular scene the character of EVA makes a disconcerting comparison between the distant, (arguably) desensitizing violence of videogames and military training.

But throughout the Metal Gear Solid series, Kojima has never hesitated to deliver messages about the philosophy and repercussions of war through the mouths of his characters. In MGS4, he leaves us with a warning in the words of Naomi Hunter, the doctor whose past actions weigh heavily on her conscience: a plea that the sins of the present generation stop with them, that those sins not be allowed to pass on to the next. It's the implicit hope that Guns of the Patriots' present doesn't become our generation's future.