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Adilegian
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 Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2014 1:54 am |
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| parker wrote: |
| By the time they get to MG1 in the timeline how are they going to explain the u.s. military hiring big boss to lead their special forces unit and investigate this crazy thing called "outer heaven" going on that nobody knows who is in charge of or anything about. Some patriot orchestrated mind game training thing or a lot of retconning is going to happen I guess. |
I'm leaning in the direction of patriot mind game. I mean Ocelot's dual role between the Patriots VS the Outer Heaven gang would probably be a good pretext for that anyway.
| CubaLibre wrote: |
| Adilegian wrote: |
| It's silly but effective for the draw of the series that, in the world of Metal Gear, all of the world movements in the last half of the 20th century come down to the disputes between two dudes and their loose network of personal and professional associates. |
Turns out MGS is closer to AssCreed than I thought... |
Yep. I there that there are more than one reason why MGS games contain little love letters to AC. Besides the Altair costume in MGS4, you can do the dive-into-haystacks maneuver in Peace Walker.
| TXTSWORD wrote: |
| I wish the date with miller WAS canon. Miller is my fav character (minus played us like a damn fiddle scene) and homosexuality is p tight. |
Given how stiffly he walks in the trailers in TPP, I'm wondering why he has stiff prosthetics instead of the clearly rad Super Arm that Big Boss got.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2014 4:42 am |
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I kind of don't know why you would expect any different. The games have always been pretty straightforward in telling the player by way of the character exactly those details. You might as well be describing the intro to MGS1, the main difference being that Ocelot isn't telling you to PUSH THE SELECT BUTTON.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2014 6:27 am |
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| Rei wrote: |
My realization from seeing the trailer was that Kojima was always a bad writer and now I'm fully realizing that I wasn't liking what I saw; I was always expecting better.
I think a 2015 game should have better writing than a game from 1998, not worse.
Kojima tells us the best is yet to come, but he sure isn't talking about the script. |
I actually like the weird, just slightly off-balance tone of the scripting in the series. It never struck me as something that needed improvement. There are plenty of watering holes where I can find dialogue that sounds like normal communication between two or more native English speakers. The slight jank in the way the English scripting turns out sort of reinforces the dream-like quality of the experience.
I can see the expectation of a more natural spunding dialogue, and I can see how the lack thereof would detract from the experience. The weirdness of it was part of what I enjoyed about the games and part if what drew me into the close relationship that I've had with the series over the years, so it's not something that I'd change. For all of my work in localization and as many J-to-E scripts I've come across, there's something peculiar and ethereal about the disjunction between what I expect from characters in a given situation and what the MGS script delivers.
So you've got a weapons developer asking a genetically engineered supersoldier about love and the battlefileld, and the question isn't deflected but strangely engaged for the rest of the scene. You've got an amnesiac child soldier all grown up in high tech sneaking equipment with nano-primed blood in his body asking same said supersoldier about identity in the middle of morning traffic in NYC. These are all weird and strange in a compelling way, almost operatic in effect by way of keeping characters in scene and laboring a soecific idea. It's a strangeness that's been part of the games' aesthetic that I'm actually glad to see has been retained.
Laboring through this post on a virtual keyboard, apologies for typos.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2014 6:32 am |
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| Grant Dempsey wrote: |
| Adilegian wrote: |
| Given how stiffly he walks in the trailers in TPP, I'm wondering why he has stiff prosthetics instead of the clearly rad Super Arm that Big Boss got. |
I figure he's decided to forgo the super-prosthetics.
He's the "businessman" and strategist of the bunch, and he never seems to leave Mother Base. He hasn't got an urgent need for full limb functionality, as Big Boss does. Kaz can afford to go without.
And judging by his speech in last year's trailer, I think he's embraced his phantom pain to intensify his feeling of loss, and the condition of his body as a symbol of loss. Big Boss is the leader the Diamond Dogs need to bring them to their revenge, while Kaz is their living memorial to the MSF comrades they're avenging. |
Okay yeah, this makes sense. I'm curious how this will translate into Miller serving as a trainer and tactics adviser, but it's not like he doesn't have years of combat experience or the slight jerkface quality to his character that makes for a certain kind of effective trainer. I guess this comes out even in his provocation of the kid on Mother Base by whapping him with a cane while Big Boss holds out an AR to see how the kid will respond.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2014 9:05 pm |
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Since this is the currently active MGS thread, this seems like an appropriate place to drop a YouTube link.
I was invited to speak on a couple of panels during INDIE3, an event that ran parallel to the big event. One of the panels was about MGS4. I got to talk about analogos's and my work, and I got to namedrop Rei's work which got some decent Twitter circulation after the panel was done.
Anyway, here it is.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 6:21 pm |
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I mean I'm excited about the game but that's a level of anticipation that not even I can reach.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2014 5:58 pm |
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| Ebrey wrote: |
| Do you guys think there will ever be any real connection between the Peace Walker / MGS V Miller and the one from MG 2 and seemingly in MGS? I like his character in the new games but right now, it feels like it would have been simpler to just make him a completely separate character. |
I speculated a bit on this in an earlier post, c/ped below.
| Adilegian wrote: |
Looking through the MGS Graphic Novel (which I received as a gift from SB's finest, dongle), I'm recalling a question that I had about TPP's development of Outer Heaven: where's Roy Campbell?
Campbell's an interesting addition to the mix, particularly since he was introduced to Big Boss back in Portable Ops.
According to current canon, both he and Miller served with FOXHOUND at the same time, though Miller appears not to have been support during Metal Gear 1. Among the mid-series (timeline wise, not sequel-wise) characters, I'm interested to see that they chose Miller as the comrade for Big Boss to go to hell with in TPP. Given this affiliation, there's something sly about the timing of certain characters' appearance within FOXHOUND as an organization.
In Metal Gear 1, Big Boss is CO of FOXHOUND. Presumably, guessing off what canon looks like, his use of Solid Snake during this operation could be both an attempt to (1) create the appearance of compliance with Zero's developing Patriots organization by standing against the Outer Heaven organization from which, I guess, he would have created the appearance of defecting... and to (2) dispose of Solid Snake as the "unwanted son" who was raised and trained by the Patriots as an organization. (Big Boss got Liquid, and it's evident from the trailers why Liquid hates Big Boss. Solid Snake is presumably elsewhere, being raised "by a lot of different people," as he notes at some point in either MGS1 or MGS2, I don't recall which.)
So Solid Snake beats Big Boss in armed combat in Metal Gear 1. Big Boss's dual loyalties are exposed, and it's evident that he and Zero are on opposite sides of the same power struggle. Enter Miller and Campbell to FOXHOUND. Both have strange overlaps in their relationship to Big Boss, since each has been key to Big Boss's building of private armies. The FOXHOUND unit that Big Boss develops with Campbell in Portable Ops is clearly the prototype for the later FOXHOUND Unit in which Solid Snake serves. Once Big Boss gets the ... cash donation ... from Gene in Portable Ops, he can start funding a serious private army. Campbell goes his own way to continue his military career, and Big Boss has Gene's former "Army's Heaven" bankroll that he uses to start up MSF.
Enter Miller. After becoming loyal to (and apparently falling in love with) Big Boss, he takes over Campbell's former role as base contact and tactical coordinator. The way that they build MSF is more sophisticated than how Big Boss got his band of mercenaries with Campbell -- no more "back of the truck" conversions in lieu of Fultoning soldiers to Mother Base -- but the role is essentially the same. Given the fact that Miller and Big Boss "go even further" after being "sent to hell," there's now a kind of parallel between the fact that Miller shows up serving under FOXHOUND after Big Boss served as CO, implying that either Miller has defected from Big Boss or that he, as Big Boss had in Metal Gear 1, is feigning defection as a double agent, which is completely plausible given his post-credits phone call in Peace Walker.
So you've got the two dudes who helped Big Boss build his mercenary army side by side, in the same unit, with the difference being that one of them (Campbell) seems to have stepped into the role as a promotion in his extant, clean military career whereas Miller appears in an advisory capacity after having (presumably, because of his affiliation with Big Boss) been a thorn in the Patriots' side.
One of the things that, from a long-view plot perspective, I think is neat about TPP is the possibilities it opens up to complicate the loyalty relationships that were very simple and two-dimensional when Metal Gear 1 and Metal Gear 2 were released. I do like to see the MGS series own its byzantine structure of character relationships. |
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2014 6:04 pm |
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Incidentally, does anyone have any idea what this thing is other than Videogame Death Vector?
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2014 8:51 pm |
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There really needs to be more endless drum barrel fanart.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2014 9:49 pm |
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Crossposting this from elsewhere, but, since this is the current Metal Gear thread:
Solid Cheep sends Liquid Cheep reeling over the edge of Metal Feeder.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 1:43 am |
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Bunch o'MGS3 pictures. Because why not.
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Adilegian
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2014 12:38 am |
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| Rei wrote: |
| http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/18/hideo-kojima-interview-metal-gear-solid-phantom-pain |
I find it very interesting that the RACE theme has been dropped almost completely from publicity about TPP. My gut feeling (and I'm curious if analogos would back me on this) is that KP could get away with idiosyncratic definitions of words like GENE, MEME, and SCENE, the last item teasing out much more the tendency to assign an almost ideographic spectrum of meanings that you can pull out of the word -- and that those meanings do not necessarily coincide with the language that the word is borrowed from.
They also do this with with words ZERO and NAKED, as there's cross-referential idiosyncratic use of these words between the ZOE games (particularly The Second Runner) and MGS3.
So my gut says that the word RACE seemed innocuous enough a term to treat in this matter, likely referring to the multiple affiliations that inform our identities, how we view insides and outsiders, and so on. Through that lens, the whole "US VERSUS THE WORLD" rhetoric that Kaz brings to the trailers makes sense as perhaps a concept embedded in the game's starting design ideas.
Aaaaaand I suspect that someone wisely decided that RACE is not a neutral "oh what have we here" word to pluck from the English language such as GENE, MEME, SCENE, or even SENSE (which was, like RACE, announced as a starting design concept but then dropped from future PR discussion of MGS4). I remember the hullaballoo surrounding the announcement of RACE as a theme, including my own, before I stepped back and contextualized it within the way other English words were idiosyncratically claimed by the design team to represent the game's concept. I still think that the crux of using the word RACE was less inflammatory than the announcement portrayed it to be, but it's nonetheless a very very smart idea to have dropped the word from association with the game's motifs.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2014 7:36 pm |
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| The Troops wrote: |
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlzBe5dV5e4 |
Wow.
Re-reading my last post up there, I still think the patterns of English use hold out, though I'm less convinced that the RACE thing is what I initially suspected it would be. We'll see.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 10:33 pm |
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| analogos wrote: |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE8SSWvBDSI
direct feed, english |
Catching up on media. Quiet still makes me wince facially, internally, mentally. Just hemorrhaging in my brainmind at how the series' portrayals of women as objects seems to have aggressively retrograded to an even deeper entrenchment in bad ideas.
Upside: Boss has an MGS1 style collar'd sneaking suit. Getting a better feel for Kiefer Sutherland as Demon Boss.
Also hasn't anyone on staff ever held a small quadriped? Gotta support that lower half so they can breathe.
Approving of eyepatched moe dog. That's the kind of silliness from MGS that was painfully absent from GZ.
Wondering if the TGS Special Mission will be DLC at some point. I'm assuming that having Destiny-esque Sparrowbike summoning powers over a horse immediately after drop-off will have to be coordinated in some way.
Dismissing the horse by Fulton? Love it.
The little MGS1 VR Mission complete sound effect that plays when Boss gets into his Sneaking Suit is wonderful. Little things like this are giving me some confidence that there's going to be a sense of tonal continuity with the weirdness and self-reference of the series. Not sure how that's going to mesh with the polar opposite seriesness of Important Themes though.
Would buy those boots.
The low visibility of the jungle terrain gives me good Snake Eater vibes. Going off the gameplay demo, this looks more like how I thought SE would feel based off the early trailers. And maybe SE fit those expectations and I'm so far removed from the initial experience of jungle orientation to remember. I'm fairly sure that having the Subsistence camera helps to preserve that feeling of disorientation and low visibility that was somewhat sacrificed by the need to keep Snake visible from a classic top-down view in SE. (yes always will be known as Subsistence camera despite the fact that it is in no way unique to Subsistence.)
I like the sense of weight that Big Boss has as a virtual body. Reminds me of how meaty Snake felt in MGS1 as compared to the comparatively light feeling of MGS2, probably because there were more foot-associated noises in MGS1 (that I recall anyway) than in MGS2 where Raiden just seemed to foot-whisper through the halls.
Very pleased to see that the helmets don't pop off when a tranq round connects like they did in PW.
Being able to command a unit of specialized soldiers looks like a fitting expansion of skills appropriate to Big Boss. Granted, you were technically outfitting soldiers for action in PW since you could take them into action. But controlling plot-significant specialized combatants is where Big Boss is headed with Outer Heaven and (presumably if MG1 and MG2 are at all still canon) Zanzibarland, so it's very cool to see that development reflected in some gameplay options.
While I do like the bite-sized mission segment style that the series has taken with PW, I do miss the feeling of selecting a difficulty at the outset and playing entirely through without the ability to change that if you decide that you've made a terrible mistake. I don't know, call it a sense of commitment to choosing a harder mission.
Would accept PT's Lisa as a unit member.
Going to be saving all the puppies ITG.
Jesus don't Fulton out a puppy like that, support the legs, christ, serious lack of puppy research going on
That said I am perfectly fine with the level of realism involved in a prosthetic magic arm that has Volgin powers.
Very neat seeing an updated, more slender bodied version of the super heavy armor from PW.
What the hell Youtube throws ads in the middle of videos now?
From the looks of the enemy shooting the Fulton, it looks like those are now no longer magic invisible balloons (or less so since how could you miss the flying humans being caught by a helicopter overhead). I was actually wondering, right when they showed the balloon getting shot, why the balloons hovered in the air before flying off. If it's to give room to penalize the player for not using Fulton stealthily enough, that's great. If they're going to keep that game element, I really want to see it bracketed with more restrictions than it had in PW.
Setting fire to dry grass looks awesome. Looking forward to the potential of setting small fires as a stealth distraction.
Hand grenade + sniper for redirection was pretty awesome. Nice to see that Quiet keeps up with you when action starts so you don't have to micro-manage her while fighting. The AI seems to have chosen good spots for her during the demo, though there's no telling if those are scripted actions or if that's actually the game's character AI dynamically responding to changing situations.
I did notice that the gun refilled its ammo stock right after the demo used "oh no no ammo" as a pretext for the grenade + sniper technique, which I'm sure can just be assigned development-wise to a button combination not available in the actual game for the sake of maintaining stock for the sake of presentation. So that opens the door to question which aspects of the demo that appear dynamic are scripted.
Having a run-away, post-strike, parkour flight extraction looks like the Assassin's Creed touch that Kojima's probably been wanting to include in one of these games for a while, outside of the nod to AC with the bird dive into hay in PW.
Long camera leer at Quiet's posed figure makes me increasingly uncomfortable when I remember that this is the product of seasoned industry professionals.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2014 3:20 am |
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| Mr. Mechanical wrote: |
| Well Ground Zeroes is on PSN for ten dollars this month so I bit and downloaded it. Looking forward to playing it after supper! |
Looking forward to what you think about it! I have Opinions but will save them from being repeated in the thread until you've had a chance to experience as much of the game that you want.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2014 5:49 am |
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| Mr. Mechanical wrote: |
Working on finishing GZ at S Rank on Normal. I think I'm going to 100% this game y'all. I'm having a pretty good time in this sneak-em-up.
edit-And boom I did it. S-ranked the main mission, that is. Took me 72 minutes and six retries but I wasn't spotted, didn't kill anyone, didn't lose any helicopters and rescued everyone. |
As someone with older MGS standards for Big Bossing European Extreme, I have difficulty accepting the terms of GZ's S-Rank criteria.
Awkward suiciding to return to the title screen and reloading the entire save file because you got seen by accident OR BUST
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2014 3:51 am |
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So I don't remember where I put these videos, but I finished another mammoth MGS3 FOXHOUND Rank video.
Whole lotta Groznyj Grad going on.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2014 8:41 pm |
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Really good reception of the newest video. Think I'm going to celebrate by putting another Broncobuster CQC circuit video together. This time the Groznyj Grad hangar.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2014 3:30 am |
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I'm more and more feeling that changing to Sutherland will make Snake easier to detach from as a beloved character.
Here he is being beloved fast.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2014 4:57 am |
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| Isfet wrote: |
so!
i bought a PS4 the other week and downloaded Ground Zeroes
MAN
uh.
well, i am not going to start an argument, but i guess i'll just say i really like the game itself and really wish it had a totally different story that didn't involve me having to listen to a woman's screams/other graphic things involving aforementioned woman.
like, Phantom Pain looks really fun, and GZ was also fun, but if it's chock full of the cinematics i saw in GZ, then i think i'm gonna have to pass, because it was really difficult to sit through? |
I'm not sure what the Serious Story in TPP will look like, but, at the very least, TPP will have more MGS idiosyncrasies to redeem it from what might be a horrible grasping attemp at moral/emotional gravity.
Also QWOP 3D seems like a good enough reason for at least a rental.
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Adilegian
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Fri Jan 09, 2015 3:57 pm |
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I'm replaying Ground Zeroes since I picked it up as a downloadable game on my PS4.
The simple fact that the PS4 version renders more environmental detail makes it much more rewarding to play. I'm able to make better informed decisions, and I also don't have to wait to get within a certain distance of an enemy for his model to render.
Also, there appears to be a TPP trailer after the main mission that I don't remember on the PS3 version.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2015 1:33 am |
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| sponkmonkey wrote: |
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See, goddammit, this is the Metal Gear I didn't see even in the margins of Ground Zeroes.
Looking forward to this incredible trainwreck.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2015 1:33 am |
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| sponkmonkey wrote: |
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See, goddammit, this is the Metal Gear I didn't see even in the margins of Ground Zeroes.
Looking forward to this incredible trainwreck.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2015 9:13 pm |
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This is the only active MGS thread soooooooooooooo I'm dropping this MGS2 thing here.
I found a bunch of video files of a Big Boss rank playthrough of MGS2 that I made in 2006.
This proof further collaborates that any of us existed before SB.
Going to throw commentary over this and call it a cake. I'll probably make a frontpage post about it once I'm done. Amazing how much more quickly a project goes when the video is already done.
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Adilegian
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2015 3:40 pm |
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I've been trying to S-Rank the emplacement mission on hard all week. I finally came up with something fast that also lets me scoot out with enough prisoners to boost my score.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2015 11:18 pm |
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| Iacus wrote: |
Is that large block at the end of MGS3 supposed to be Groznyj Grad? It feels weird that it's so much bigger than Big Shell... |
Yeah, there's something off with the proportions here. The Shadow Moses map in MGS4's outline, for example, is larger than MGS1's map of the same space.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2015 1:26 am |
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I think that I'm just going to do any video project like this once I finish the Last of Us thing and the Foxhound Rank video. MGS2 seems like the right place to discover as much.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2015 4:42 pm |
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| Texican Rude wrote: |
| excellent. |
I figured you'd enjoy this, specifically.
I'm also talking for 10+ minutes about how MGS2 isn't postmodern because postmodern doesn't exist and, to the extent that it does, SMB is a better example of postmodern game design. Good times.
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2015 4:09 am |
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Thinking about the probable trainwreck of ignorance TPP will be, I am going to distance myself publicly from MGS as much as possible before the September release. The ramped up, fucked up sexuality of the series has become irredeemably repellant too.
Where is my absurd soap opera with cardboard boxes and possessed arms T_T
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Adilegian
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| Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2015 3:21 pm |
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| Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote: |
Whoa, that's pretty harsh coming from you Adi.
I really haven't been following or frothing for MGS5 more than the bare minimum amount, even though I will probably end up buying it, because after all these years I'm still burned out from MGS4.
What major developments have there been that have managed to sour your impression of the game beyond the general "darker 'n grittier" shtick? |
MGS4 actually had enough in line with my interests that I value it in spite of its sexism. It was also exaggerated in enough other ways that the tone of its sexism fits the to "grotesque" nature of its storytelling, so there are other factors that I consider there in making an assessment of its role in the game. Even giving it consideration of the game's tone, and given that that tone is a quadruple-down on "what makes MGS MGS," it's an incidental admission that the games have horribly exploitative attitudes toward women. If a game that hyper-defines the core qualities of a game series includes sticking a naked woman on all fours and then shooting her in the face, you've had some housekeeping problems for a long time.
PW had its "verification view" gimmick whereby you could peep under Paz's clothes to check out her underwear in order to confirm that she was telling the truth about being tortured. This amounts to an anonymous, voyeuristic strip-down of a torture victim, which, strangely enough, didn't strike the dev team as implied complicity in her humiliation.
PW also had the time-tested, stock anime, "not-statutory rape" scene with Paz. She looks like she's 16 but she's actually of legal age! Some women actually do look much younger than their age suggests, but this is not a real woman. This is a construct that fits within a context of other constructs, and those constructs are embedded in cultural problems that correlate women's representation with women's actual treatment and dignity.
We're in the same territory with how Quiet has been presented. She's a sexed up sniper who Big Boss has already promised to kill. Killing sexed up ladies is a thing that dudes in MGS do, and the games have outstripped the possibility that these are genre-pastiche or ironic choices.
Here is a copy-paste of some other things I've written about this recently on my FB well.
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I think of it like this. Let's say you meet someone, and you get along with that person great. Then they say something that seems kind of awful, but it doesn't match your overall positive impression of their personality. You're willing to overlook it for the time being, chalk it up to miscommunication, whatever. Over the years, this cool person continues to blurt out awful statements on the same topic. Your ability to justify those offensive views as needing more context diminishes. You've got tons of context, and, in context, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that this person has bigoted views. It's not a matter of approaching them in bad faith; it's a matter of actually knowing them and having to make a decision about whether you can still respect them.
In an interpersonal setting, of course, you can talk about things, explain personal boundaries, and so on. This is where the analogy breaks down with respect to a videogame series, but the illustrated point stands, I think. I'm looking at patterns that have emerged in the games for over 25 years, not cherry-picking examples to present out of context, and I can only see the games' treatment of women as alien, untrustworthy, oversexualized, or liabilities.
Some of the negative attributes of women in the games are attributable to male characters, but the difference is how much those characteristics determine a stereotype. Male characters are allowed a range of emotional and personal possibilities, while women consistently have a handful of qualities or fates dealt to them.
Beyond that, the same thing happening to a man is simply not the same thing happening to a woman. There are literally millenia of world cultural context and historically attestable injustice showing how these typecastings of women injure women on all social levels. It's punching down, particularly in MGS.
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I get into this during my jeremiad at the end of the video, but MGS1 through MGS3 at least allow for some ambiguity in terms of what supports women's treatment in the games. MGS1 was based on action movie genre conventions, like James Bond and Escape from New York, in which women typically have deceptive or sexualized roles since they're a kind of male power fantasy.
Meryl's a liability, and Snake has to save the girl; Wolf is an over-the-top sexualized femme fatale; these all fit the mold that the game is aping, so they work in that sense. These roles are problematic in the source material, but MGS1 is very clear that it's following genre rules, so I am more OK with attributing problems to copycatting source material rather than attributing those problems to the game itself.
MGS2 both aped off MGS1, and its options for treating women badly reflected badly upon the player and Raiden. It actually made sexism reflect upon the player, and it raised the question, "Why are you, who are playing the game, abusing Emma when you have the option to escort her without harm?" Also support characters actively got mad at Raiden for being an asshole, including his trespassing in women's bathrooms and treating women badly.
MGS3 doubled down on the Bond references, so it became more ambiguous as well, though there was less ambiguity since its handling of EVA was more at the expense of the character than a reflection on the game. Give her enough food, and she'll show you her stuff. Punch her out and drag her through the mud, and listen to her fantasize sexually. These are getting much more in the direction of the overt combination of porn-sexualization and physical abuse that games from MGS4 on have overtly assumed.
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Cultural differences factor in, but they're less relevant here, I think. These games are made for an international audience. They're not stories that a culture tells to itself. They make gestures toward universal, trans-national experiences, and they do so with some of the most one-dimensional awareness of human variety.
Going outside women, for example, let's look at Huey. His inability to walk is both his gimmick and almost his entire identity. It's the source of his sense of inferiority, and it's comprises almost all of his motivations for his life's work. It works on the assumption that someone disabled can only have their personality and identity determined by that disability. Taking the character in context, he is not an effort to create a pastiche or comment upon stereotypes on disabilities. They appear actually only able to conceive of a disabled character regarding themselves as their disability.
The characters are all one-dimensional, and, in this instance, the story takes example of a long-standing stereotype about disabled people to define Huey's sense of inferiority. He introduces himself as disabled; he continues to reinforce his disability as his definition.
The writers' intentions don't matter at all. They wrote a disabled dude whose identity is that he's disabled. That's problematic because of the stereotypes that the writing unironically exploits for emotional affect.
The games are terrible about human beings overall, starting right off with beating Snake over the head with shame for his responses to PTSD -- and by implying that PTSD is somehow resolved or fulfilled by near literally re-performing the source of trauma.
As far as inherent sexism goes, again, I am not writing about the writers' intentions. I also am not writing about Kojima, since these games are written by teams of individuals, and the cult of personality surrounding Kojima appears to be as much a marketing decision as it is egotism.
The games have red flags all over the place that overlap with long-observed and established patterns that constitute sexist representations of women. I no longer find genre-pastiche or irony strong enough in the games to justify passing off sexism as anything other than inherent in the fabric of the games' world and storytelling.
EDIT: This is also stuff that's going to be in my jeremiad, probably verbatim, so please the looking forward.
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Last edited by Adilegian on Fri Mar 13, 2015 3:23 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2015 3:22 pm |
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| Lick Meth wrote: |
| Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote: |
Whoa, that's pretty harsh coming from you Adi.
I really haven't been following or frothing for MGS5 more than the bare minimum amount, even though I will probably end up buying it, because after all these years I'm still burned out from MGS4.
What major developments have there been that have managed to sour your impression of the game beyond the general "darker 'n grittier" shtick? |
Rei did a huge piece on Kojima's ever-present views on women in his games:
http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=43609 |
Rei's collection of evidence is superb.
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Adilegian
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Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2015 7:40 pm |
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| Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote: |
I mean Kojima has been pretty sexist since day one, as Rei aptly demonstrates. (And all-around shit at writing female characters, as anyone who sat through all of Raiden and Rose's codec conversations can attest.)
I'm not about to make excuses for that but I don't see how it's any worse than, like, Ian Fleming. I guess I'm just surprised by the sudden and absolute turnaround in opinion? It probably helps that I am no longer fanatical enough about MGS that recognizing a persistent and unsightly flaw in the series would devastate me. |
I'd argue that MGS1 has enough cues to justify seeing the sexism as genre pastiche, and that MGS2 uses subverts many instances to incorporate it into its overall theme of depriving Raiden (and the player) of dignity. Strong arguments exist to the contrary, and I am convinced by their evidence and the way they're presented, but I'd still maintain that the sexism in those games is sufficiently ambiguous to make them worth considering at length.
The Fleming gestures in MGS3 don't seem as problematic to me, for many of the same reasons that I think they're sufficiently ambiguous in MGS1. MGS3 shows its essential sexism when EVA joins Snake. If you give her enough of the food she likes, she'll take of her clothes. You can punch her out and drag her through the mud while listening to her mutter about sexual fantasies. You can check out her medical history and see evidence of anal sexual abuse with Volgin. These are markedly not Fleming gestures, and they're also rewards to the player for interacting with the game. They are actual usage of video game communication to communicate sexist treatment of EVA directly to the audience without narrative mediation, and that's where my problems with MGS3 mainly exist.
This isn't a sudden turn around. I've been aware of and thinking about this for years. I just handle my thinking about these problems privately. I have wanted my communication on this to be consequential rather than symbolic, and this is the right time and circumstance for that communication.
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Adilegian
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Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2015 9:36 pm |
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Since this project is finally done, I'll make a topic for it specifically and Blood Potion it. Here is a transcript of my Goodbye to Metal Gear bit.
http://www.adilegian.com/OneLastMission.txt
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Adilegian
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Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2015 11:25 pm |
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They sure are going all out to remove Kojima's names from a lot of their products.
Fans are going all out themselves to postulate the nine-dimensional chess game that Kojima must surely be playing with KONAMI. I mean, it couldn't possibly be that Kojima's name is going to be branded, and they won't have license to that branding, so they're pre-empting a future legal problem.
No, Kojima is doing it to make them look bad.
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Adilegian
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Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 2:17 pm |
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| Dracko wrote: |
Continuing the trend of games depicting dogs better than they do women.
Genuinely having a hard time seeing how they've not stacked the odds against them by trying to repurpose a villain as a tragic, sympathetic protagonist, and this is a trend they started way back in Snake Eater anyway. |
This is also a break that they've been avoiding FOREVER anyway. They made BB too likeable in MGS3, and they have kept with that characterization at the expense of the apparent intention of the pre-quel.
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Adilegian
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Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 6:52 pm |
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| Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote: |
| Remember when Troy Baker was just some guy from Texas who did anime voices for Funimation |
Everyone Starts In Anime
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Adilegian
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Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Tue May 19, 2015 5:34 am |
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| Mr. Mechanical wrote: |
Art, and the criticism thereof, can be complex yeah.
I thought it was generally accepted, around here at least, that MGS is pt coo (except for its portrayal of women/minority figures). |
Yep, it is this weird byzantine manlove opera that is maybe the only thing like it I can think of.
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Adilegian
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Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Tue May 19, 2015 2:34 pm |
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| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| I still think it's about as close to a gravity's rainbow videogame as we are likely to ever get, though yeah with a whole host of additional bad shit. |
It largely works for me since my aesthetics are maximalist and why wouldn't you add more weird stuff
MGS isn't my aesthetic ideal in that regard, but the cut of its jib works for me.
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