How Metal Gear Solid manipulated its players, warning us of an age of Fake News - Sensationalist Headlines

Metal Gear Solid is also vastly more popular/widely known so using it as a metaphor device will gain more attention

MGS 2 will always be the best game in the series.

I wouldn't say its that bad though. It obviously suffers but its still manageable. Snake Eater is only truly bearable with subsistence or hd camera layout, especially in such open environments. 4 on the other hand, changes things in a way that I can't really tell if its right or wrong. It has a different aim.

What's scary is something like Peace Walker actually did exist, in a way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand USSR had a system which would automatically give the order to launch nuclear weapons if certain conditions were met, including if the country was nuked.

I don't know about best, because they all do things differently, in different kinds of time. Take a look at FF games on the ps1. They all do more or less the same thing, but there clearly is a way to tell which one is better than the other. This is all subjective ofc, but I think it's almost universal that, of the 3 ps1 "main" games (7 8 and 9), 9 is the very best, also usually seen as the best out of all of them even, 7 is great but ends up being eclipsed by nostalgia and the fact that it was the change to a bigger thing, and 8 is, well, it isn't nearly as great as the other two. Not even close. Its good, but not even close. Yet, they all have a very similar playstyle. Mgs 1 2 and 3 are different. They all do things differently, more noticeably 2 and 3, where gameplay changes come down to the theme of the game, like where mgs2 didn't make sense in having a stamina and healing system past rations and bandages. Story is something that is also completely different a d subjective, which I adore seeing how mgs1 feels like an action movie with a few deepish bits and characters that sound kind of real in comparison to the rest, mgs2 is a fuckin surreal piece that scared me the first time I went through it, and mgs3, which was the hardest for me to like in the past, is a full on Bond movie that I genuinely love nowadays. But they're all great to me. They all have ups and downs, yet are all different enough to not br made into first, second and third places.

Hillariously to me, if you'd said this 15,10, shit even 5 years ago it'd have been a super controversial statement and you'd be ostracised by a fucking ton of MGS fans. The really good in depth analyses we've had come out for the game recently have massively shifted the opinions you see around for the game. MGS2 was always a excellent game, for all the reasons already stated, it just took the players a while to generally agree on that.

I'm fairly certain Kojima is a time traveller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6S-eabDsc0

To be fair the message of MGS 2 is another story of "the truth is in the middle" imo. Even when the baddie starts preaching it's basically against his very own words. When they call out the disconnectedness of different narratives about the world they won't really spell out which one they would actually stand for, the supposed real truth, and so the story doesn't step on any toes and is left up to interpretation. then snake defuses the whole existential crisis at the end by just encouraging raiden (and the player) to basically decide for themselves what to believe in and to be a good person, which while some pretty good advice, is also pretty disarmed.

I dunno why Raiden got so much hate. I think they turned him into a cyborg in 4 just to try and make fans happy.

Etsu Tamari wrote that.

iirc make america great again was used in reagan's first presidental campaign, its a callback to that

Yep, that's right. MAGA isn't even something that Trump can really claim credit for, he just managed to meme it hard enough through the power of the internet.

Honestly I doubt MGS2 will ever be taken as seriously as stuff like 1984 due to how absolutely ridiculous it is. Sure, the core plot has themes reminiscent of the modern day, and it is a great game (actually thinking about starting a new game with it tonight, this article's gotten the nostalgia flowin'), but then you have the terrible, campy voice acting, hours of exposition, the crazy bomb guy on roller skates, a bisexual vampire, an immortal chick and Raiden doing naked summersaults with his hands clasped on his junk. Don't get me wrong, I love the game, but it has a lot of issues with bad writing, bad dialogue, unending monologues that serve no purpose other than to explain the story in a manner akin to beating the player over the head with a plot sized hammer, weird, self-referential stuff that seems to kind of hint that the game takes place in VR but then MGS 4 happenened, etc. With all that in mind it's going to be really difficult for a lot of people to take anything it has to say seriously.

I think it's pretty crazy how MGS can fly so quickly from serious dramatic political stuff to wacky stuff like a guy who shoots bees.

kinda says something about the state of writing in video games if MGS2 is in the top tier of well written video games

I don't think we need to be preoccupied with what is taken seriously or not. Some of the greatest criticisms I've seen in media come from films or games the general populace would never take seriously. Take Starship Troopers for instance, in my opinion Verhoeven's best satire but it's really obscure to the general populace. Most things you see online from "professionals" trash the movie and don't get how masterful it is because they take it at face value. We shouldn't care about what top academics think is most important to study and analyze. That just leads to an intellectual standstill, you yourself should deem what is important, what media really affects you.

I mean, just because it isn't necessarily good writing in the classical sense, it's still very much enjoyable. Lots of classics are actually pretty shit in various ways Catcher in the Rye

i still love mgs2's story and the implications it holds, it's actually deeper than it looks and the writing isnt that bad, esp if you take MGS4 out of the equation and also account for the over the top things in it, in any other medium however it wouldnt be as acclaimed as it is now though. compare MGS2 + 1 with Winter Soldier, Winter Soldier is better written

Then you have games like Silent Hill 2 that are, in my opinion, significantly better than other forms of media because of the interactability because it gives the ability to explore the story more than other mediums. Plus the writing is on par or better than most examples from other mediums.

The way you play the game not only decides your ending but also gives context to a lot of plot beats throughout the game. The staircase monologue meaning changes slightly depending on the ending you get, such as the on water ending. Not only that, Silent Hill hides a lot of stuff behind exploration, item descriptions and little environment details, I'd dare say that gameplay has a very big impact in how the game is perceived, because it's impossible for it to be such a personal experience otherwise.

Ehhh, yes and no. I don't think every game needs to be a masterpiece to be acceptable. I think people also tend to dilute a game's story to its bare elements and disregard it over bisexual vampires, which is what happened to mgs2.

Yeah, it says that video game writers are significantly more creative and take a ton more liberties with their format. The writing would be terrible for a book because of its crazy inconsistencies, but for a game that tries to balance its own crazy world with both intelligent dialog and its gameplay, the writing is incredible. The aforementioned bisexual vampire and naked somersaults are put next to conspiracy theories and drawn-out dialog about nuclear weapons, putting them all in the same absurdist category, and this crazy dream has become reality in our world. If anything, a bisexual vampire seems more reasonable to rationalize than the president of the United States starting a trade war over Twitter.

acktually the bisexual vampire wasn't actually a vampire, he got all those abilities from nanomachines 😎

MGS4 refers to it as "enhancing his natural abilities" so is a little of both.

Calm down Armstrong, we keep the nanomachines out of this.

Yeah I mean just look at all of the excellent video game movies that have come out that have pretty much completely captured the narrative of the game they were based of off. For example,

He said novel. Notice how people never say the film adaptation is better than the original in ANY format.

I honestly think erosion of privacy is THE most important issue we should be focusing on, and I was honestly amazed at how little of a shit the American and British populace gave about it. Not only that, but both the UK and the US have further eroded our privacy this year, with the US doing it very recently indeed. That episode of LastWeekTonight on government surveillance was eye-opening of how ignorant and arrogant people are on this subject.

Okay, replace movie with novel, then. The number of examples is still exactly the same. The reason that games aren't taken seriously as a narrative medium by the mainstream has nothing to do with games themselves, it has to do with the stigma that still surrounds them to this day. It's easy to forget this when you spend a lot of time in communities of young people who play games, but video games are a young medium and there is still a huge chunk of people who have had next to no exposure to the medium outside of the ATARI 2600 days and whatever they hear on the news, and who who still only think of video games as a children's toy. Remember that most of the people who would be considered respected literary analysts/critics/etc. by the general public are fucking OLD. Despite the enormous success of the industry there are still a shitload of (mostly old) people who haven't even touched a video game since the NES at the very latest. There are still a baffling number of people out there who believe that video games essentially haven't changed since the 80s aside from their visuals and that every game is still just about "scoring points" and "making the HIGH SCORE!!!" Most games with a strong narrative simply cannot be translated to other mediums without losing an enormous amount of their impact. You can observe this in just how much different the experience of watching a youtube video of someone else playing a game is from the experience of actually playing it yourself, even though it is literally the most direct translation that is even possible. How would you translate something like The Sorrow from MGS3 to a film or a novel or any non-interactive medium without it being completely meaningless? You can't. You literally just cannot. And even in games that like Half Life where the player's input doesn't affect the story at all, you still couldn't make the experience anything other than a video game without losing a huge aspect of what made it meaningful. A game can make you empathize with a character in a way that absolutely no other medium can, simply by virtue of the fact that it is a game. The challenges and adversity that a character faces are enormously more meaningful when you yourself are the person that has to actually deal with them, rather than being a passive observer. Hell, going back to Half Life for example. Gordon Freeman is not a character. He is literally nothing. He has no voice, he has no opinions, he displays absolutely no personality whatsoever during the games. The protagonist of your story is literally nothing. And yet, he is someone that people love and identify with. How is that possible in any other medium than video games? It isn't. But it is with a game, because the entire story of who he is, what he wants, and what he is capable of is told through the things that you the player do and the challenges that you the player overcome.

Eh I'd say climate change first then that second