Hideo Kojima, who debuted in Konami and later founded an independent studio, is one of the most well-known game producers of the moment. His work has always had a distinct author's color, and he himself has been involved in almost every aspect of the game production process, from blueprint conception to publicity. Players familiar with Hideo Kojima who are familiar with the game can feel the "island smell" that overflows the screen when they open the game and see "A HIDEO KOJIMA GAME" appear on the screen. The so-called "island flavor" is an abstract adjective, and the elements that make up "island flavor" are complex and diverse, including the motifs that he enjoys discussing tirelessly, his understanding of international politics, his personal narrative techniques, and his well-known exploration of cinematic games. This article aims to disassemble the typical elements of these games by analyzing many of the works led by Hideo Kojima, and discussing Kojima's thinking about politics, narrative, and even the future fate of mankind contained in these "island flavor" sources.
Nuclear crisis and arms race
"Peace" and "Nuclear Crisis" are the two motifs that run through the Metal Gear Solid series (hereinafter referred to as "MGS"), and the game's English name "Metal Gear" refers to the large mechanical devices equipped with nuclear bombs that appear repeatedly in the game. Throughout the MGS series, nuclear weapons are everywhere, and battles with Metal Gear are interspersed with the protagonist's stealth missions. The world in which the MGS story takes place is based on the reality we live in. Modeled on the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, Kojima anthropomorphizes the complex international political landscape in the form of conspiracy theories: a struggle between several idealists with different ambitions, leading to international disputes and wars.
The real world after World War II has gradually become irrational, the development of science and technology, the expansion of media, and the complexity of social composition have made it difficult for the general public to digest, and conspiracy theories have become an efficient way of thinking to rationalize the international chaos. That being the case, why not use conspiracy theories to pull the international political landscape into the game narrative, so that players with different levels of understanding can quickly enter the fictional world? Therefore, in the world of MGS, historical events such as the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear tests, and wars in the Middle East have been interpreted as interest groups competing for the "legacy of philosophers", trying to unite the world as one, and competing for hegemony. In the eyes of serious political history enthusiasts, such depictions are very "small-minded", but this kind of narrative with strong monogatari color also creates a number of deeply rooted characters and successfully serves as a tool for Hideo Kojima to export his personal ideas.
Screenshot of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Hideo Kojima strives to seek an independent path that is not dependent on any power within the framework of dualistic opposition and the Cold War, and even hopes to use the new neutral force to protect the weak who may be ravaged by the great power game. The Outer Heaven established by the protagonist of the story is called the third choice between heaven and hell, that is, the third path beyond the enemy, good and evil, truth and falsehood. And this road in the story of the island is always infiltrated by the forces of the two poles and turned into a real chaotic road. The construction, reconstruction and destruction of Outer Heaven hint at the island's encounters in trying to break away from the Cold War mentality of good and evil. Neutral zones beyond heaven and hell have been repeatedly invaded by Cold War ideologies, borderless armies have slipped from neutral third-party forces to the tools of opposing sides, and mercenary neutral armies have instead caused more wars and crime.
Perhaps it is the feelings of historical problems such as "atomic bombs", or perhaps the "nuclear" has deeply affected all aspects of contemporary life, and Kojima has a fondness for the topic of "nuclear". A nuclear monopoly means the marginalization of nuclear-weapon States from non-nuclear States, and nuclear proliferation leads to a loss of order. In mgs3's story, the launch of a nuclear weapon becomes a turning point in the story-oriented tragedy (even though the launched bomb itself did not cause casualties). The island's unbreakable link between the "detonated nuclear bomb" and "The Boss must die" is implicitly told that the threat of "nuclear" lies not only in its powerful destructive power, but also in the geopolitics controlled by "nuclear". In the main line ending of "Parallelists", Kojima expresses his writhing attitude towards nuclear weapons: he has a fondness for the motif of "nuclear" and realizes that nuclear weapons should never be launched.
From the original design of the "parallelists" to the subsequent crisis, it reveals Kojima's antipathy to the use of nuclear weapons in war, especially those triggered by political interests. The "parallelist" is designed to be a peace defender who can only defend against counterattacks, but if I use its counterattack mechanism to send the wrong signal and make it mistakenly think that it is attacked, it can turn the peace defender into the initiator of the attack, which makes the word "peace" ironic - when I am afraid that I will be attacked, I always hold the butcher knife that can destroy mankind, is this really protecting peace? And the two "characters" named "peace" in the story: Kaz and Paz, the former parting ways with the protagonist, the latter buried in the sea, the identity, behavior, and motivation of the two are also contrary to "peace", perhaps peace is like the resurrection of Paz, is a beautiful but false dream. The fragility and irony of peace is also Kojima's self-deprecation, and his attempt to speak of peace in a game about war and where players can kill people naturally leads to an inconsistency dead end, which may be one of the reasons why he tried to explore entirely new game modes in later works.
Surreal style and cinematic dreams
There are three treasures of kojima storytelling: mission introductions, tape recordings and ultra-long broadcasts, coupled with the alternate world of surreal elements, these four combine to form an "island flavor" narrative. Mission synopsis and tape recordings scattered throughout the game are already a commonplace narrative for gamers. What makes "island flavor" easy to identify, in addition to the above two bonuses, is his persistent pursuit of cinematic sense and his surreal conspiracy theory worldview. As early as MGS2, the wonderful mirror operation of the cutscenes and the storyboard design of the spy film in the BOSS war, that is, the visual sense, all made the player refreshed. MGS2's trailer fraud at E3 became a talking point among players years later. Whenever a game is released, players are fooled by the "trailer" and find that the promotion does not match the physical object, and the joke discussion of "Did Brother Island lie to you" reappear on social media. How deep the "psychological shadow" left by MGS2's "trailer deception" left players, and how amazing it was when it was first shown on E3. Even today, when cinematic games are very common, people can ignore its outdated mosaic quality and lament its exquisite lens language.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Children of Liberty screenshot of the 2000 E3 promotional video
The cinematic storyboard design gives the Metal Gear Solid series an outstanding charm, applying the mature techniques of the film language to the cutscenes CG. The filmcast was used in MGS4 to the point of "heartbreaking". The extra-long CG broadcast makes MGS4 a veritable "anti-game" game of "five minutes of gameplay, one hour of broadcasting". MGS4's cutscenes are as good as ever, but as the saying goes, players sit in front of the screen with a grip on their game, not a movie (Eurogamer even dismisses cutscenes as a deduction for the game in media reviews). In addition, Kojima often does not do a good job of laying the groundwork for the worldview in the narrative, in order to explain the background of the story, he always inserts a large-scale memory monologue of a character in the second half of the game flow - The Boss reminisces about the past before the boss of MGS3, and Eva introduces the origin of the "patriot" at length in MGS4, so that the island narrative of the MGS series has also been criticized.
As mentioned earlier, Kojima likes to use the background of reality and reshape it in the form of conspiracy theories when constructing his worldview, making reality understandable. The illusion that "the world can be understood and controlled by human reason" gives people a sense of security, but reason is losing its power with the decline of print literature. When the speed of information dissemination has not yet exceeded the speed of information disseminators, "the world around you" is not a pejorative description. People live in a small community and are therefore able to gain a deep understanding of the people and things within the community. Nowadays, times have changed, the fastest flying aircraft is not as good as the transmission of digital signals, we are surrounded by information from all over the world, and we can be gassed by a netizen thousands of miles away without leaving home. The Internet allows people who do not intersect at all to meet in a cyberspace of 0 and 1, making people realize that there are many things in the world that are completely different from their own, and the rules that have long been taken for granted are relative conventions. Even ordinary people can't understand each other, let alone the game of diplomacy and financial giants between countries, which is something that most people know is something outside the cognition of the majority of the people, and it is a problem that ordinary people's cognition cannot be exhausted. Thus, in the context of the "entertainment to death" of modern people, when the creators of a story want to compile a vast worldview to tell a grand narrative like the Cold War, conspiracy theories become a very safe and efficient method, although it sometimes seems too personally heroic and naïve.
It has to be said that although the use of conspiracy theories to construct a worldview has lowered the threshold for players to absorb the story, because Kojima wants to express too much content, and as he himself said, he can not directly show his thoughts, can only use words and images to try to convey, his creations are still too obscure. It is still difficult to explore the third way beyond the logic of duality, what is true patriotism, and other serious propositions in the game with a distinct enemy and enemy camp, and successfully transmit ideas to players. Kojima also likes to add surreal content to the character setting, such as The Sorrow the Necromancer in Metal Gear Solid, the "Force Master" Psychic Mantis, and the Higgs who manipulates BT in Death Stranding, whose abilities are more like witchcraft and magic than their forced scientific explanations, which makes the world that Kojima portrays more and more bizarre.
Combining all of the above factors, Kojima's story is full of incongruous semi-scientific and semi-magical colors, and after a long period of exploration in many Metal Gear Solids films, Kojima has not been able to properly solve the paradox of gameplay and cinematic articulation, anti-war ideas and combat modes. "Five minutes of gameplay, one hour of broadcasting", personal heroism of the conspiracy theory world view, surreal setting, this kind of island-flavored narrative, so that the reputation of Kojima's works is very polarized.
Language and postcolonialism
On the black screen at the opening of Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain, an intriguing phrase is revealed: "Humans do not live in the state, but in language." Chinese is our motherland. ”
This opening line is quoted from the Romanian thinker Xiao Xun, who puts this sentence before the opening of the game, grasping the connection between language and identity in the original text, and pushing the topic that MGS V wants to explore into the metaphysical field. The question of whether the "motherland" is the land or the mother tongue leads to the subversion of the traditional view of language by structural linguistics. The Sapphir-Wolf hypothesis proposes a hypothesis that language regulates the human mind and derives two views: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativism. Inspired by the idea of linguistic determinism, Ted Ginger's novel The Story of Your Life describes a plot in which the protagonist, after learning to master the language of aliens, subverts the original linear thinking patterns of human beings. She transcends the limitations of time and can think about the past, present and future at the same time, and for her, "future" has become "memory". In the stories Ted writes, language is powerful enough to elevate human beings. Because of the use of linear language, human beings are bound by time; as long as they learn the language of higher dimensional beings, they can acquire the ability to predict the future.
The idea of a "language-mind" relationship is based on the tradition of monotheistic beliefs, in which God distorts the language of man in order to punish human beings who try to "reach heaven" and make people oppose because they cannot communicate. But in reality, there are ethnic groups that speak the same language but cannot understand each other. More moderate views than linguistic determinism are the "relativism of language", and later the "New Wolfe hypothesis", which no longer point black and white to "whether language determines thinking", but to "language affects thinking" and "the extent to which language changes the way humans perceive the world".
Skull Face, one of the bosses of Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain, has a scene in the game that invites Snake to ride together to the base, and in this non-skippable/fast-forward performance, Skull Face gives a speech about language, explaining to Snake the motivations for all his actions. SkullFace is a character to savor, and similar "Avengers" images are countless in works from ancient times to the present, and the motives of Skullface's revenge may be difficult for players to understand at first glance: he wants to avenge his annihilation of his native language, "revenge on those who deprive others of their languages". It is not revenge for relatives, lovers, friends, nations, countries, etc. in traditional works, but for the "mother tongue".
Screenshot of Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain game
Skull Face was stripped of its native tongue and learned the languages of different employers. The disappearance of his mother tongue and the mixture of languages have confused his identity. Under the premise of structuralist linguistics, language is not a tool that human beings can use to throw away, language is the premise of human thinking. The skeleton face stripped of his mother tongue is like a wanderer deprived of his homeland, so he points the finger at English, the most powerful colonial language on earth today, and liberates mankind from the hegemony of the United States by "killing" English.
MGS V is not the first time Kojima has used "language and thinking" to make a fuss, in MGS4 the "Patriots" group is already controlling the political landscape by controlling language. Orwell's "new language" described in 1984 was borrowed from Kojima's design of the "Patriot": the "Patriot" implanted nanobots into its soldiers, making it impossible for soldiers to say the word "Patriot". In 1984, Big Brother deleted the words "democracy," "science," "religion," making these abstract concepts unthinkable, thus eliminating the foundation of the existence of these ideas; in MGS4, the "patriot" erased his existence from the world by turning the three words "patriot" into five meaningless Japanese kana, "Patriot" by turning the three words "patriot" into five meaningless Japanese kana, erasing his existence from the world's mind, easily convincing the world that a huge Leviathan-style organization did not exist at all.
"The codes deeply rooted in our brains will drain our minds and spread them to the next host." ...... Anyone born in this world cannot escape the fate of being infected. Kojima used the mouth of the skull face to compare the symbol of language to a parasite in the human brain, and then designed the "vocal cord worm", a parasite that kills language. The "vocal cord worm" is a tool worm of the small island, serving the purpose of "making a language completely banned". People who are parasitized by specific vocal cord worms cannot use the language, otherwise the vocal cord worms will be fatal when activated. If a large number of humans are infected with English vocal cord worms, people will not be able to use English, the international lingua franca (otherwise they will die of parasite attacks), and English will be forgotten in time. Skullface's revenge on English contains resentment against the annihilation of indigenous culture, and under the premise of accepting the structuralist linguistics that "man cannot think without language", once the language of the colonial area is forgotten, the cultural customs and even thinking patterns that accompany language will disappear. The colonizer may leave, but the language left by the colonizer will become an eternal shackle.
Death Stranding in the Post-COVID-19 Era
The Cold War mentality has brought a harmful mindset to people's understanding of history and reality: the premise of interaction between groups is to "choose sides", and thus derive a set of "Beauty/Soviet Union, East/West, Socialism/Capitalism" opposing discourses. Under this kind of thinking and interpretation, "choosing the right camp" has become the decisive factor for the development of the left and right. Today, people rightly discuss that "the European revival originated from the Marshall Plan" and "the rise of Japan is a strategic purpose of the United States", attributing the reason for development and prosperity to "choosing the West/The United States". The historical view of "princes and princes" obliterates the specific people of the present world, life is lived by people minute by minute, day and night, the future is so complicated, choosing a certain path is not the same as being sure that you can reach the promised end.
Set against the backdrop of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, "Metal Gear Solid" is difficult to break out of the shackles of the Cold War framework when telling the story of the borderless army of neutral forces. Armies without borders both resist socialism and abandon capitalism, but not taking sides in the cold war mentality means that there is no way out. Death Stranding is a leap forward in Kojima's narrative of the future of human destiny, no longer looking at the shaping of the present in the past, but imagining a future that is free from the diode thinking of "friend or foe", and the appearance of human beings in the face of the inevitable sixth extinction of species. There are many similar statements about the extinction of civilizations in the game: Mass Effect values the outcome, seeing extinction as the old end point and the new beginning; Death Stranding focuses on the eve of extinction, the struggle from the dying species, similar to the First World depicted in Final Fantasy XIV, affirming the meaning of "struggling to survive".
The global outbreak of the new crown epidemic in 2020 has made "Death Stranding" the focus of public attention. Screenwriter Kenji Yano said in an interview with IGN that Kojima and his studio did not produce "Death Stranding" because they were referring to international trends (Brexit, Trump's election, the California independence movement), but the reality unfortunately developed towards the story they created, which is not something to be happy about.
In the day we live, reality and fiction intersect strangely, which is indeed a great misfortune.
Kenji Yano, screenwriter of Death Stranding, was interviewed by IGN
Coronavirus/death stranding is an unreasonable act of natural violence for humans. Life as we know it is destroyed, and what was taken for granted — overseas travel, gatherings, public transportation without masks — has all become difficult or even banned. This is cruel to those who are born and raised in modern society, we are born in a globalized world, when the connection is destroyed, leaving only the illusion of remembering the golden age.
The ending of Death Stranding confirms Reagan's speech: In our fascination with the confrontation of the present, we often forget the extent to which all humanity is united, and perhaps we need some external universal threat to make us aware of this common bond. Sci-fi fan Reagan envisioned an alien invasion that would dismantle the Iron Curtain on Earth, and Hideo Kojima used mass extinction to call for a re-establishment of human connection in a crisis. The opposition of "rope and stick" in the game comes from the binary opposition of either true or wrong, enemy or friend. Kojima uses an oriental perspective to dissolve the gulf between the two, the "stick" becomes the "rope", the killing gun becomes the rope that connects everyone, and the transformation of the "rope and the stick" pins the beautiful imagination of casting the sword as a plough.
"Death Stranding" was out of the loop due to the new crown epidemic, and it quickly received a lot of criticism after a burst of fire. Death Stranding is an atypical AAA game that, to exaggerate, is an indie game made by Kojima with a budget of AAA. The gameplay of the delivery simulator makes players who are looking forward to "car gun ball" or ACT shout that the game is "too low gameplay". The author believes that under the premise that there is no consensus on what is "gameplay", it is meaningless to discuss whether the innovation of "Death Stranding" in gameplay violates gameplay. Defining "car gun ball" and "smashing and grabbing" as a highly gameplay standard is the hegemony of American fast food games, and fast food is indeed destroying some IP and gameplay. "Delivery" may not be satisfactory, and this is also a valuable exploration in AAA games - to explore what ways the game can bring happiness to players without shooting or slashing. Kojima also said that he hopes that his next work will be a game that is different and fun for everyone, whether it is a sincere commitment or a casual pie, trying to challenge the existing game paradigm like Death Stranding is worth affirming for these star producers, because the foolproof self-repetition in the safety zone is precisely the death of creativity.
Go back to where the dream began
In his stories, Hideo Kojima often reveals a reluctant contradiction —his attitude toward nuclear, his attitude toward peace, his attitude toward his community, and his attitude toward his own work. He opposes nuclear weapons, but his story is inseparable from nuclear weapons; he calls for peace but believes that peace is fragile; he wants to unite the world, while at the same time fearing that the connection gives birth to Leviathan— the Briggies bracelet that symbolizes the connection and the handcuffs that bind Sam.
In the finale of Death Stranding, Sam chooses to burn the Bridges bracelet and break away from the organization to gain freedom
Kojima is a producer with a strong desire to express and talk, he can't wait to write the core idea of the game on the screen in black and white, and will also quote his favorite music to actively interact with his own work, and the player can interpret what he wants to express (and the entrained bootleg) from it without too much thought. With too many ideas, limited length in the game, and the addition of his own bad taste to the limited game content, he simply made the story like a mosaic portrait collaged from multiple points of view.
Overall, Hideo Kojima's game story is a theory-first narrative. He wanted to illustrate a point of view, so he compiled a series of plots around that point of view. The creation of the Cold War is where the kojima dream began, and although the Cold War has gradually faded from public view, the corpses of the Iron Curtain still plague the international order. To quote Kojima's self-deprecation, he is an outdated storyteller who adheres to anti-nuclear and anti-war themes in the age of swords and magic. If the idea of the island really became something that should be outdated, it would be the good fortune of mankind. And the reality in front of us, even if World War II and the Cold War have become distant memories, wars and confrontations still exist in every corner of the earth. The obsolescence of "anti-nuclear and anti-war" is the ostrich mentality that contemporary people dare not face reality, and the shadow of nuclear deterrence and war has always hung above human heads and has not disappeared for a moment.