Abstract
The adage “it’s just a game” is commonly used to dismiss video games as simple entertainment incapable of having any meaningful impact on their audience. However, it only takes looking at the latest Call of Duty game’s record-breaking profits to see that video games, especially franchise wargames, are a major part of modern American culture. Considering that wargames rarely look outside a narrow, US-centric perspective of war, understanding them within a wider context of militarized entertainment can shed light on how this context intersects with their cultural influence. The influential military stealth/action-adventure video game franchise Metal Gear is a rare example of a wargame franchise that presents an alternative perspective of war. This franchise occupies a unique position within and yet aware and critical of the military-entertainment complex: a reciprocal and mutually beneficial, though not necessarily direct, relationship between the U.S. military and the entertainment industry. This paper will examine the game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, specifically how its arguments about the military-entertainment complex are driven by the unusually two-sided connection between the player and the main player character, Raiden. This line of analysis reveals how the game not only subverts typical franchise wargame characteristics but also actively challenges its audience to think critically about the military-entertainment complex. This illustrates how video games can grapple with complex themes and influence how people see the world, and understanding that is the first step to consuming them more critically instead of allowing their influence to remain unchallenged behind the assumption that “it’s just a game.” Keywords: Metal Gear, video games, military-entertainment complex, franchise wargames Introduction If you want to understand the place of video games in American culture, look no further than the latest Call of Duty game. Modern Warfare II released on October 28, 2022 and, including presales, made $800 million in its first three days—more than twice the box office record-holding opening weekend of Avengers: Endgame (Hume). Mike Hume, editor of The Washington Post’s video games and esports department Launcher, writes that “it’s well worth thinking of Call of Duty beyond a mere ‘video game’ and more as a cultural touchstone,” as much a part of American culture as the NFL. Modern Warfare II exemplifies the modern military video game and its cultural prominence—so it is troubling that its campaign coopts real-world events under a thin veneer of fictionalization and presents them, stripped of context, to ferry players from one cinematic setpiece to another. This is archetypical of works within the military-entertainment complex: a reciprocal and mutually beneficial, though not necessarily direct, relationship between the U.S. military and the entertainment industry. In their book The Military-Entertainment Complex, Lenoir and Caldwell describe how video games and especially “franchise wargames,” exemplified by Call of Duty, are significant components of this relationship. Considering that these franchise wargames usually portray a narrow, U.S.-centric perspective of war, understanding their position within a wider system of militarized entertainment can shed light on both this system and its cultural influence. This paper will examine a rare example of a wargame franchise that presents an alternative perspective of war. Metal Gear, created by Hideo Kojima and published by Konami, is a primarily stealth-focused action/adventure franchise that includes 23 games across 31 years, most prominently the Metal Gear Solid series. The franchise pioneered the stealth genre, was one of the earliest action series to heavily feature narrative, and is often included among the best games of all time (Perry et al., Wikipedia). Metal Gear is not the only game to be critical of the military-entertainment complex--Spec Ops: The Line is another notable example—but Metal Gear is particularly worth focusing on because it is more critical than others with similar influence and popularity. It is also very much part of the military-entertainment complex—yet simultaneously aware and critical of it, which is a unique position that can reveal assumptions about the possibilities for video games and especially franchise wargames. As Suraya Murray says in her book On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender, and Space, "the faulty idea that video games are unimportant galvanizes their power" (15). Therefore, by studying Metal Gear, we can gain insight into how wargames influence us and our culture. For the sake of scope, this analysis will be limited to Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (hereafter MGS2), which was chosen for both its popularity and its heavy thematic focus on the military-entertainment complex. Specifically, it will examine how its arguments about the military-entertainment complex are driven by the unusually two-sided relationship between the player and the main player character, Raiden. The Raiden/Player Relationship Raiden was created to have a lot in common with the player. He is a rookie soldier with no field experience* who was purposefully designed to be less impressive than Metal Gear Solid’s previous protagonist Solid Snake; in an interview with the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Metal Gear’s creator Hideo Kojima explains that he created Raiden so “new players could play [him] and it would make sense that they weren't the ultimate bad-ass” (GamesIndustry International). Building connections from players to their in-game character is common in video games, but creating a new character specifically to parallel the player suggests that this was especially significant for MGS2. Building on this common ground, MGS2 equates Raiden’s training—which was all done in virtual reality—to the player’s (potential) experience from the first Metal Gear Solid game (hereafter MGS1). The most immediate parallel this sets up is that both Raiden and the player have only experienced war through simulation. Raiden’s role as a more fallible protagonist then suggests that simulations were not able to fully prepare him for combat, questioning the ability of digital technologies to accurately portray war. The game gets much more direct, though; when Raiden is explaining his training to Solid Snake, their conversation plays over footage of bonus “VR” levels from MGS1. In this discussion, Solid Snake expresses scorn at the idea that VR training is effective, arguing that it downplays real-life consequences and therefore gives participants an artificial affinity for war: “War as a video game-- what better way to raise the ultimate soldier?”
Through Snake, MGS2 argues that video games—including MGS2 itself—show a version of war that makes players more likely to think more positively of war and the military. This is a direct criticism of the military-entertainment complex. Yet, at the same time, MGS2 is citing a work in its own series as contributing to that inaccurate portrayal, so that clear criticism is complicated by the game’s contribution to the issue it is challenging. This complexity is an excellent illustration of Metal Gear’s nuanced relationship with the military-entertainment complex.
It is also notable that the footage of MGS1 missions is contrasted with real-world footage of military training. Stamenković et al., in their analysis of MGS1, point out that the game uses real-world documentary footage as a rhetorical tool when discussing real-world issues to encourage its audience to make connections from the game to their own lives (18). This supports the idea that Raiden and Solid Snake’s discussion of simulated military training is intended to reflect the real world military-entertainment complex. Furthermore, combining this with Kojima’s statements on how Raiden was created to mirror the player, MGS2 can be interpreted as not just arguing that wargames present a misleadingly sanitized perspective of war but also suggesting that, like Raiden, the player themself has been misled in a way that extends beyond games and into real life. In much the way that Lenoir and Caldwell describe military-based entertainment “encouraging viewers to step into the shoes of real soldiers” (23), MGS2 places players in the shoes of Raiden—but simultaneously places Raiden in the role of a subject within the military-entertainment complex, allowing the player to reflect on their own situation.
The S3 Plan: Extending the Raiden/Player Parallels The mirrored roles of Raiden and the player are further reinforced as the game progresses, eventually escalating to character breaking the fourth wall. Throughout the game, Colonel Campbell—Raiden’s commanding officer, who gives orders via video call—occasionally references the mission playing out according to a “simulation.” These references are largely glossed over until near the climax, when Raiden begins to realize that Campbell is actually an AI controlled by the faction masterminding the game’s plot—at which point Campbell begins glitching and spouting “nonsense” (see images).
Raiden is baffled by these messages, which suggests the intended recipient is the player themself. Sven Dwulecki, analyzing rhetorical techniques of the Metal Gear Solid series, defines this sort of fourth wall break as an immersion fracture: a moment of purposefully breaking the player’s immersion to directly deliver a rhetorical point (162). Immersion fractures are particularly memorable moments in games—which makes them rhetorically powerful (Dwulecki 163). Campbell telling the player not to worry because “it’s a game” draws attention to the assumption that games cannot meaningfully affect their audiences—and coming from an antagonist attempting to persuade Raiden/the player to turn back, it invites the player to challenge the saying. This further emphasizes how the Raiden/player relationship goes in both directions; MGS2 wants the player to know they aren’t safe from being influenced just because they're on the other side of the fourth wall.
MGS2 extrapolates from the Raiden/player relationship to draw parallels between their positions within the military-entertainment complex. These parallels are centered around the S3 plan and are explicitly discussed in the game’s climax. S3, which antagonist Revolver Ocelot explains stands for Solid Snake Simulation, is a set of artificially arranged circumstances designed to turn a participant, in this case Raiden, into a soldier on par with the legendary Solid Snake by recreating the events of MGS1 (in which Snake was the protagonist/player character). Ocelot explains that everything in MGS2’s plot was orchestrated as part of S3, as shown by the many plot points repeated from MGS1 (such as a virus and a mysterious ninja). By depicting a “simulation,” as Ocelot puts it, with intentional parallels to a real-world video game that is being used to train soldiers, MGS2 draws attention to increasingly blurred lines between video games and military training. It raises an implicit question: if MGS1’s events (and VR levels, as previously mentioned) are shaping Raiden into a soldier, how might MGS1 and other wargames be affecting the player? MGS2 argues that the military-entertainment complex’s influence goes beyond training players as soldiers and, more significantly, shapes players’ perspectives of war. This is reflected by the full extent of S3 as revealed by MGS2’s final antagonist, the Patriots, an organization that has secretly controlled the U.S. from the country’s founding. (The implications of MGS2’s final antagonist being named “the Patriots” and representing the U.S. government are a potentially interesting avenue for future research.) S3 actually stands for Selection for Societal Sanity, a plan to censor digital information to shape humanity’s evolution through control of memes (in the original meaning of the word coined by Richard Dawkins, i.e. a unit of culture passed between people). The full implications of the S3 plan involve Metal Gear’s memetic approach to information and are out of scope for this paper (but highly recommended as an area of further analysis). However, it is useful to contextualize the “Solid Snake Simulation” as a successful aspect of S3’s broader goal to shape perspectives—“not to control content, but to create context,” as the Patriots explain. By presenting the situation from a certain perspective, S3 manipulated Raiden toward certain goals—e.g. reach a location, defeat a boss—without directly controlling his choices. This depiction of the military-entertainment complex is more nuanced—and more accurate, according to analysis by Lenoir and Caldwell. They describe how the military-entertainment complex shapes the cultural perspective of war “not by making arguments but by creating powerful affective experiences attached to… technologies of the new American way of war,” which makes players more inclined to see these technologies as “simply the way we conduct war today” (47). They add that, although direct collaboration between the military and games companies does exist, the more significant cultural impact is a byproduct of affective experiences being useful to increase player engagement and thus increase companies’ profit. The capacity of the military-entertainment complex to train potential recruits is therefore overshadowed by its capacity to shape the context in which people think of war—which is reflected in how S3’s original goal to “produce soldiers,” in Ocelot’s words, is revealed to be less important than manipulating perspective. In his analysis of MGS2, Tanner Higgin agrees with Lenoir and Caldwell’s view of how the military-entertainment complex predisposes those within it to support its normalized, narrow perspective of war and observes Raiden is “representative” of people influenced in this way (262). Using S3’s manipulation of Raiden, MGS2 makes clear connections between S3 and the military-entertainment complex. S3’s manipulation of Raiden is also mirrored by MGS2’s manipulation of the player. Like S3, MGS2 recreates the events of MGS1 and presents them in a context that makes the player naturally choose to play through them, i.e., as objectives in a video game. This equivalence is emphasized during Ocelot’s explanation of S3, when he says, “Everything you've done here has been scripted -- a little exercise set up by us.” The phrasing is purposefully ambiguous about who “us” refers to. On the literal level, Ocelot is referring to the Patriots, who he works for; however, “us” could also be interpreted as the game designers, with the “exercise” being MGS2 itself. Ocelot’s line draws attention to the fundamental lack of agency within MGS2, explicitly telling Raiden and the player their choices were not only limited by S3/MGS2’s parameters but that they were unable to realize this from within those parameters. The parallel between S3 and MGS2 extends to S3’s representation of the military-entertainment complex. Higgin summarizes this relationship: “[Whereas] Raiden is trapped within and shaped by the [S3] simulation, the modern player is ensnared within the seductive mythologies and trappings of the war video game which accustoms her to a world of conflict” (265). Like Raiden’s perspective is manipulated by S3, the player’s perspective is manipulated by MGS2—and, the game argues, the military-entertainment complex. The parallel manipulation of Raiden and the player drives home MGS2’s overall arguments about the military-entertainment complex. The lack of player agency Ocelot points out is a purposeful rhetorical choice. In Persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames, Ian Bogost introduces the concept of procedural rhetoric, a key concept for studying persuasion in video games. Procedural rhetoric is a way “to make claims about how things work” (29) through processes, especially the processes executed by computers (like those within a video game). Bogost says that “each [piece] in a procedural representation is a claim about how part of the system it represents does, should, or could function” (36). S3 and MGS2 present events from the perspective of gamified war to shape their subjects’ choices, which is a claim that the system it represents—the military-entertainment complex—does the same. Higgin points out that this makes the overall arguments more effective because "[the player] is not only told she is being controlled but she is meant to feel and intuit it" (253). On its own, Raiden’s manipulation by S3 simply tells the player they are being manipulated by the military-entertainment complex. By creating a relationship in which the player themself is manipulated in parallel with Raiden, the player experiences MGS2’s arguments much more viscerally and gains a deeper understanding of how the military-entertainment complex not only can but is affecting them. S3 and MGS2 represent the military-entertainment complex as a procedure that subtly shapes players’ perspectives, and this argues through procedural rhetoric that the actual military-entertainment complex does these things too. Failure and Destabilization MGS2 further underscores the parallels between Raiden’s situation within S3, the player’s situation within MGS2, and the wider context of the military-entertainment complex by having Raiden and the player fail to escape their influence even after it’s revealed to them. Even defeating the final boss—usually the most triumphant point of a game’s narrative—was part of S3’s plan. As the Patriots tell Raiden (and the player), “You accepted the fiction we've provided, obeyed our orders and did everything you were told to. The exercise is a resounding success.” By playing a franchise wargame, even if MGS2 is a subversive one, the player’s perspectives had already been shaped enough to accept war as a video game. Existing within or accepting the game’s parameters meant Raiden and the player respectively had already lost. Digital humanities researcher Jordan Youngblood argues that “MGS2’s mission is failure… even the failure of a game to ‘end’ and the real world to begin” (221). When Raiden and the player fail to break out of S3 and MGS2’s influence, it emphasizes that they have failed to break out of the military-entertainment complex’s influence as well. Raiden and the player’s shared failure to achieve a typical victory, however, opens an opportunity for subversion. Youngblood applies Halberstam’s queer understanding of failure to Raiden, who she calls a “locus of failure.” This is important in the context of queering failure—for Halberstam, failure is not a negative experience but rather a “way of being” that “confronts norms of human behavior… and destabilizes systems of hierarchical knowledge” (Youngblood 214). This means Raiden—having failed to defeat the game’s ultimate enemy—is a locus not only of failure but of destabilization. MGS2 communicates this via Snake , who shows up post- boss fight give to Raiden advice on moving forward with the knowledge of S3’s control. Snake directly brings attention to the lack of agency Raiden and the player have in S3 and MGS2 when he says, "I know you didn't have much in terms of choices this time." This has a similar purpose to Revolver Ocelot’s explanation of how the events of the game were “scripted,” but the key difference is that Snake follows up by offering a way to regain agency: “But everything you felt, thought about during this mission is yours. And what you decide to do with them is your choice…” This provides the first potential avenue to meaningfully escape the influence of S3 and MGS2. Snake’s advice also plays over real-life footage of New York City, which—recalling Stamenković et al.’s analysis—encourages players to make connections to real life. The footage may be especially effective because it contains scenes of everyday life, which players can connect more easily to. Snake’s advice is also an immersion fracture; his ambiguous use of second-person, combined with Raiden not being present on-screen as real-world footage plays, can certainly be read as a “direct address of the [player]” (Dwulecki 162). This underscores that MGS2, through Snake, is making an important rhetorical point to the player. By telling Raiden and the player to “[c]hoose [their] own legacy,” Snake challenges them to think outside of the systems that have been manipulating their perspectives: S3 and MGS2. Through Snake, MGS2 gives Raiden and the player agency to finally step away from the control of S3 and MGS2 itself—and by extension, the military-entertainment complex that they represent.
____
MGS2 ending - Snake's advice (0:00 - 0:30) (Transcript by El_Greco, provided for ease of reference.) Snake: I know you didn't have much in terms of choices this time. But everything you felt, thought about during this mission is yours. And what you decide to do with them is your choice... Raiden: You mean start over? Snake: Yeah, a clean slate. A new name, new memories. Choose your own legacy. It's for you to decide. It's up to you. ____ MGS2 ending - Raiden's dog tags timestamps: (0:30 - 1:17) (Transcript by El_Greco, provided for ease of reference.) Snake: By the way, what is that? [Snake notices Raiden's dog tag. Raiden takes it off to look at it.] Raiden: Dog tags? [The dog tag says the player's name and birth date and whatever else the player entered in the first node.] Snake: Anyone you know? Raiden: No, never heard the name before. I'll pick my own name...and my own life. I'll find something worth passing on. [He throws the dog tag as far as he can.] _____
MGS2 immediately presents an opportunity to act on this advice when Snake draws attention to Raiden’s dog tags. The dog tags have the player’s name and other information that they entered at the beginning of the game. This is the simultaneous end and culmination of the Raiden/player relationship and the destabilization Youngblood describes. The parallels between Raiden and the player have been the core of MGS2’s arguments about the military-entertainment complex, particularly the procedural arguments made by S3 and MGS2’s shaping of Raiden and the player’s perspectives. By destabilizing his relationship with the player, Raiden also disrupts the control of these systems. Higgin also identifies throwing the dog tags as a moment of disruption, applying Judith Butler's concept of "rupture," an act that not only disobeys but actively challenges systems of control. Raiden throwing the dog tags symbolically enacts Snake’s advice to challenge the perspectives of S3 and MGS2 and instead choose his identity for himself. As part of this action, however, Raiden also directly acknowledges the player’s existence through their name on the tags he has been carrying the entire game, a culmination of their two-sided relationship. Raiden’s explicit reference to the player is the strongest fracture of the barrier between the game and real life—which, according to Dwulecki’s analysis that the intensity of a fracture corresponds to its impact (163), creates the most powerful immersion fracture of the game. Raiden breaks away from S3 (and MGS2 with it, since the rest of the game is cutscenes with no player control over his actions) when he and the player are most strongly connected—and in doing so, in one final parallel, he/MGS2 invites the player to do the same and break away from both MGS2's influence (via ending the game) and the military-entertainment complex.
Implications MGS2 challenges the player to consider and break away from how the military-entertainment complex affects their perspective of war. It demonstrates how video games can and do influence the real world, and argues that the military-entertainment complex uses this influence to create the context in which people think of war. The effectiveness of this argument could be debated, but its existence and its questioning of the military-entertainment complex are undeniable. Ignoring video games’ potential to shape perspectives of war lets them wield a massive amount of rhetorical and cultural influence without being examined. Thinking critically about video games—as academics, as players, and as members of a society shaped by gaming—is therefore a vital first step toward understanding their influence rather than letting it remain unexamined behind the excuse that “it’s (just) a game.” Works Cited Bogost, Ian. Persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames. MIT Press, 2007. Dwulecki, Sven. “Building the Future and Keeping the Past Alive Are One and the Same Thing”—A Rhetorical Analysis of the “Metal Gear Solid” Saga.” In More After More. Facta Ficta Research Centre, 2016. El_Greco. “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - Game Script” IGN, 20 January 2005, https://www.ign.com/articles/2005/01/21/metal-gear-solid-2-son-of-liberty-premium-package-game-script-538904. Accessed December 1 2022. GamesIndustry International. “Hideo Kojima: 25 Years of Metal Gear Solid,” GamesIndustry.biz, October 1, 2012, https://www.gamesindustry.biz/hideo-kojima-25-years-of-metal-gear-solid. Accessed 1 December 2022. Higgin, Tanner. “'Turn the Game Console off Right Now!': War, Subjectivity, and Control in Metal Gear Solid 2." In Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, 2009. Hume, Mike. “Call of Duty made $800 million in one weekend. Here’s what that means.” The Washington Post, 4 November 2022. www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/11/04/call-duty-modern-warfare-2-sales/. Accessed 6 November 2022. ---. “‘Modern Warfare II’ does ripped-from-the-headlines in the worst way.” The Washington Post, 25 October 2022. www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/modern-warfare-2-campaign-review/. Accessed 6 November 2022. Kojima, Hideo. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Konami Digital Entertainment Co. Ltd, 2001. Lenoir, Tim and Caldwell, Luke. The Military-Entertainment Complex. Harvard University Press, 2018. Murray, Soraya. On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender, and Space. Perry, Douglass C. et al. “Top 25 Games of All Time: Complete List.” IGN. https://www.ign.com/articles/2002/01/23/top-25-games-of-all-time-complete-list. Accessed 7 November 2022. RedEnvelopeMedia. “Memes The DNA Of The Soul.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TDC9s-Kt-8. Accessed 21 October 2022. SourceSpy91. “Metal Gear Solid 2 - Normal Difficulty Walkthrough - No Commentary.” youtube.com/watch?v=2qsHbwpvHcA. Accessed 12 December 2022. Stamenković, Dušan et al.. "The persuasive aims of Metal Gear Solid: A discourse theoretical approach to the study of argumentation in video games." Discourse, Context & Media, Volume 15, 2017, Pages 11-23, ISSN 2211-6958, doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2016.12.002. Wikipedia. “List of video games considered the best.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered_the_best. Accessed 7 November 2022. Youngblood, Jordan. “‘I Wouldn’t Even Know the Real Me Myself”: Queering Failure in Metal Gear Solid 2. In Queer Game Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. (un)Final Reflection What haven’t I learned about research this semester? I’ve learned what research is. After so long enjoying the idea of research but struggling with the moment-to-moment process thanks to untreated depression, it felt amazing to experience the process to the fullest and just go. I understood research in an abstract, words-on-a-paper way at the beginning of the semester since I’d heard plenty of teachers explain it, but that was a far different understanding than what I got from reading through sources in Main Stacks, taking notes on sources for fun over lunch, or feeling my understanding of my research fundamentally shift as I analyzed a new source. I felt like a dragon gleefully sitting on my hoard of books, interviews, academic papers, and other sources both directly and indirectly about Metal Gear. Digging through that hoard and pulling out the most relevant pieces gave me a thorough, visceral understanding of what it means to do research. I’ve learned I think in diagrams on chalkboards, whiteboards, and spare pieces of paper much more naturally than in an immaculately structured outline, and that I can lean into that gleeful chaos if it’s helpful for me. Experimenting with approaches to writing, note taking, and brainstorming has let me find a style that feels comfortable, something I can enjoy rather than awkwardly try to mimic, which has made my research feel like a natural extension of my voice and expression. I’ve learned to be comfortable with imperfection—more comfortable, at least. My Project 3 was far from perfect, but it’s important enough—to me and, I think, to the world—that I’m willing to make it imperfectly rather than not make it at all. Perfectionism might not be something I ever fully shake, but I think that’s okay; I can learn to use it as motivation to create work I’m proud of rather than an oppressive fear that overrides my self-care and self-worth. (Hah—not expecting perfection in my escape from perfectionism.) This semester has helped me work toward that. Most of all, I’ve learned that I love research. Working on this class’ projects has been challenging and sometimes frustrating, but it’s also been a source of immense joy. I want to keep doing research—submitting to the Library Prize, going to grad school, and whatever other forms it might take for me. I’ve learned that doing what I love is a path to self-actualization, I’ve learned that path is so worth walking, and I’ve learned that research is a way for me to walk it. I’ll see you on the trail.
0 Comments
“Don't worry, it's a game! It's a game just like usual.”: Metal Gear Solid 2 and the Military-Entertainment Complex
Abstract The adage “it’s just a game” encapsulates the common belief that video games are simple entertainment incapable of having any meaningful impact on their audience. However, it only takes looking at the latest Call of Duty game’s record-breaking profits to see that video games, especially franchise wargames, have a major impact on modern American culture. Considering that wargames rarely look outside a narrow, US-centric perspective of war, understanding them within a wider context of militarized entertainment—the military-entertainment complex—can shed light on how this context intersects with their cultural influence. The influential military stealth/action-adventure video game franchise Metal Gear is a rare example of a wargame franchise that presents an alternative perspective of war. This franchise occupies a unique position within and yet aware and critical of the military-entertainment complex, which makes it a valuable source of insight. This paper will examine the game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, specifically how its rhetorical arguments are driven by the player character Raiden’s role as not just a parallel to but a fourth wall-breaking hybridization of the player. This line of analysis reveals how the game not only subverts typical franchise wargame characteristics but actively challenges its audience to think critically about the military-entertainment complex and uses it as a lens to discuss information and control in the digital age. This illustrates how video games can grapple with complex themes and influence how people see the world, and understanding that is the first step to consuming them more critically instead of allowing their influence to remain unchallenged behind the assumption that “it’s just a game.” Keywords: Metal Gear, video games, military-entertainment complex, franchise wargames Introduction If you want to understand the place of video games in American culture, look no further than the latest Call of Duty game. Modern Warfare II (2022) released on October 28, 2022 and, including presales, made $800 million in its first three days—more than twice the record-holding opening weekend of Avengers: Endgame (Hume). Mike Hume, editor of The Washington Post’s video games and esports department Launcher, writes that “it’s well worth thinking of Call of Duty beyond a mere ‘video game’ and more as a cultural touchstone,” as much a part of American culture as the NFL. Modern Warfare II (2022) exemplifies the modern military video game and its cultural prominence—so it is troubling that its campaign thoughtlessly coopts real-world events under a thin veneer of fictionalization and presents them stripped of context to ferry players from one cinematic setpiece to another, using brotherly battlefield camaraderie to brush aside uncomfortable or complex questions. This is archetypical of works within the military-entertainment complex: a reciprocal and mutually beneficial, though not necessarily direct, relationship between the U.S. military and the entertainment industry. In their book The Military-Entertainment Complex, Lenoir and Caldwell describe how video games and especially “franchise wargames,” exemplified by Call of Duty, are significant components of this relationship (Lenoir and Caldwell 31). Understanding wargames’ position within a wider system of militarized entertainment can shed light on both this system and the influence it exerts. This paper will examine a rare example of a wargame franchise that does not advance an uncritical portrayal of the U.S. military and its role in war, instead drawing attention to its own position at the messy intersection of gaming, militarism, and information in the digital age. Metal Gear, created by Hideo Kojima and published by Konami, is a primarily stealth-focused action/adventure franchise that includes 23 games across 31 years, most prominently the Metal Gear Solid series. The franchise pioneered the stealth genre, was one of the earliest action series to heavily feature narrative, and is often counted among the best games of all time (Perry et al., Wikipedia). Metal Gear is hardly the only video game to be critical of the military-entertainment complex—another widely cited example is Spec Ops: The Line—but its influence and popularity makes it especially notable, and it occupies a unique position because it is within the system it is criticizing. For the sake of scope, this analysis will be limited to Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (hereafter MGS2), which was chosen for both its popularity and its heavy thematic focus on the military-entertainment complex. Raiden as Player Insert Much of MGS2’s discussion of the military-entertainment complex is centered around the relationship between the player and the player character of Raiden. Raiden is specifically set up to not only represent but overlap with the player. He is a rookie soldier with no field experience* who was purposefully designed to be less impressive than Metal Gear’s previous protagonist Solid Snake; in an interview with the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the series’ creator Hideo Kojima explains that he created Raiden so “new players could play [him] and it would make sense that they weren't the ultimate bad-ass.” This suggests that a connection between the player and their character in the game was a significant consideration. Building on this connection, MGS2 equates Raiden’s training—which was all done in virtual reality—to the player’s (probable) experience from the first Metal Gear Solid game (hereafter MGS1). The most immediate parallel this sets up is that both Raiden and the player have only experienced war through simulations. Raiden’s role as a more fallible protagonist suggests that simulations of combat were not able to fully prepare him for combat, questioning the ability of digital technologies to accurately portray war. The game gets much more direct, though; when Raiden is explaining his training to Solid Snake,* the voiceover plays over footage of VR levels from MGS1.
(Images: footage of MGS1 playing during discussion of Raiden’s VR training.)
During this discussion, Solid Snake expresses scorn at the idea that VR training is equivalent to real life, arguing that it trivializes real combat and undermines understanding of real-world consequences to make war feel less serious: “War as a video game-- what better way to raise the ultimate soldier?” (Kojima, Sons of Liberty). Through Snake, MGS2 argues that video games—including MGS2 itself—show a version of war that downplays its consequences and warps players’ ability to conceptualize the real version. This is a direct criticism of how the military-entertainment complex portrays war. Yet, at the same time, MGS2 cites a work in its own series as contributing to that inaccurate portrayal; that clear criticism is complicated by the game’s contribution to the issue it is challenging, which is an excellent illustration of Metal Gear’s nuanced relationship with the military-entertainment complex.
(Images: real-world footage playing during discussion of Raiden’s training.)
It is also interesting to note that the footage of MGS1 missions is contrasted with real-world footage of military training. In their analysis of MGS1, Stamenković et al. point out that the game uses documentary footage to encourage its audience to create a direct connection between the game and their own lives when discussing real-world issues. This supports the idea that Raiden and Solid Snake’s discussion of digitally simulated military training is intended to reflect circumstances in the real world, namely the military-entertainment complex. Additionally, as Kojima stated in the BAFTA interview, Raiden was created to resemble the player; combining this with Stamenković et al.’s analysis, MGS2 can be interpreted as not just encouraging players to make connections to the real-world military-entertainment complex but also suggesting that, like Raiden, they are subjects within it who have been shown a misleading perspective of war. In much the way that Lenoir and Caldwell describe militainment “encouraging viewers to step into the shoes of real soldiers” ([find page number]), MGS2 places players in the shoes of Raiden—but simultaneously places Raiden in the role of a subject within the military-entertainment complex, allowing the player to reflect on their own situation.
S3 Plan Raiden (and by extension the player) essentially spend the entire plot of the game becoming more aware that they’re being manipulated. MGS2 uses this Raiden/player connection to directly involve the player in its arguments. With Raiden and the player connected, the game takes both of them through an escalating series of events where they are constantly manipulated and know less than everyone else about what's going on. The plot of MGS2 takes Raiden and the player through a series of increasingly confusing plot twists and double-crosses that steadily erode their sense of control. Explaining the entire plot would be difficult and take up far too much time, so a brief summary will have to suffice. Raiden discovers that the original purpose of his mission was a pretense and was hiding multiple layers of increasingly complicated conspiracies. Additionally, almost every character has their own agenda or that of their boss' to advance, which often involves double- or triple-crossing each other. This culminates in over 36 straight minutes of back to back cutscenes before the final boss fight in which (most of) the schemes are revealed by way of antagonists monologuing at each other and eventually Raiden. In the penultimate layer of the conspiracy onion, antagonist Revolver Ocelot explains that the events of the game had all been orchestrated by the Patriots, a clandestine group that had secretly controlled the US government since its founding, as part of the S3 plan. S3, which Ocelot explains stands for Solid Snake Simulation (I know this is a ridiculous sentence but bear with me), was a set of artificially arranged circumstances designed to turn their subject—in this case Raiden—into a soldier on par with Solid Snake by recreating the events of MGS1. Ocelot says that “Everything you've done here has been scripted -- a little exercise set up by us.” This strips away the last vestiges of Raiden’s illusion of control or agency; everything that happened was always going to happen, regardless of the choices he thought he was making, because it was simply the way it was designed. However, the language is purposefully ambiguous about who “us” refers to. On the literal level, Ocelot is referring to the Patriots, who he is working for; however, “us” could also be interpreted as the game designers, with the “exercise” referring not just to the game’s plot but the game itself. The game as a controlling system is a meeting point for Raiden and the player in this instance; metatextually, Raiden is a video game character created and controlled by the game’s code, and in the real world, the player has been put through a set of scenarios designed to get them to take specific actions (ie the game’s given objectives) without specifically controlling their choices (just like Raiden was put through the S3 simulation). [Could cite Higgin 257 here.] Raiden is being manipulated on two levels: literally, by the Patriots through 3S, and metatextually, by the game designers through the game’s code. Through the player/Raiden connection, players are invited to infer parallels between their own life and Raiden’s fictional circumstances. Like Raiden, they are being manipulated by the game itself, MGS2 uses this as a starting point; as Higgin says, “[Whereas] Raiden is trapped within and shaped by the [S3] simulation, the modern player is ensnared within the seductive mythologies and trappings of the war video game which accustoms her to a world on conflict” (265).] The player is invited to extrapolate; MGS2 makes explicit the systems of control that underlie nearly every game—players can make choices, yes, but those choices are always constrained by the parameters of the game. (This is what Bogost calls procedural rhetoric.) Normally this relationship is hidden because it’s more enjoyable for the player to feel like they have agency. MGS2, however, directly draws attention to the player’s powerlessness to break away from the systems that create the context of their actions.
The game is purposefully drawing the player’s attention to the systems that are constraining them—in this case, itself—through parallel/interconnected systems in the game’s plot that are constraining Raiden. This is an unpleasant experience for the player, and by design. The game is engendering negative affect toward these systems that create context to indirectly control subjects’ actions and choices—the military-entertainment complex. Affect is an incredibly important part of video game rhetoric. [We are now entering the Memetics Containment Zone.] MGS2 could have stopped there and already been incredibly interesting, research-worthy stuff. MGS2, however, did not stop there. An AI embodiment of the Patriots reveals that S3’s true meaning is Selection for Societal Sanity. Rather than manipulating a single subject, S3 was designed to test the AI’s ability to create contexts that influence people’s choices. The implications of MGS2’s memetics-based arguments about information in the digital age are on a broader scale than the military-entertainment complex, and thus a thorough analysis is out of scope for this paper. (Unfortunately. (I’m coming for it, though. (The Library Research Prize judges had better prepare to hear a lot about memes in a few months.))) I believe it is worth bringing up regardless to illustrate the sheer depth and complexity of MGS2’s arguments, and to provide a more complete view of the context in which MGS2 discusses the military-entertainment complex. This game came out in 2001, and yet its words are eerily similar… [borrow from prospectus] Anyone who says video games are meaningless, mind-numbing entertainment or rhetorical wastelands should try making that argument after looking at this. Hot damn. [We are now exiting the Memetics Containment Zone.] Dog Tags So the game has spent its entire plot building toward showing the player they are being manipulated and making them feel unpleasant about it. What next? Ultimately, Raiden does not defeat the Patriots. Even defeating the final boss was part of their plan, denying both Raiden and the player the usual triumph of a video game climax. After the final boss fight, when Raiden and the player are both deeply aware of their failure to escape the manipulations of the Patriots and the game, and by extension the military-entertainment complex, the game finally offers a chance to break away from these systems. Youngblood applies Halberstam’s queer understanding of failure to Raiden, who she calls a “locus of failure.” This is a (frankly uncalled for) roast, but it’s also important in the context of queering failure—for Halberstam, failure is not a negative experience but rather a “way of being” that “confronts norms of human behavior… and destabilizes systems of hierarchical knowledge” (214). Raiden, then, is a locus of this destabilization. He/the player have spent the entire game failing, and it is in its final, post-boss fight moments that they are finally able to realize this destabilizing potential. The Raiden/player connection has been the center of this argument, and it culminates here, with the dog tags scene (see link to video and transcript on next page). Main points:
Transcript by El_Greco, provided for ease of reference.
Snake: I know you didn't have much in terms of choices this time. But everything you felt, thought about during this mission is yours. And what you decide to do with them is your choice... Raiden: You mean start over? Snake: Yeah, a clean slate. A new name, new memories. Choose your own legacy. It's for you to decide. It's up to you. Snake: By the way, what is that? [Snake notices Raiden's dog tag. Raiden takes it off to look at it.] Raiden: Dog tags? [The dog tag says the player's name and birth date and whatever else the player entered in the first node.] Snake: Anyone you know? Raiden: No, never heard the name before. I'll pick my own name...and my own life. I'll find something worth passing on. [He throws the dog tag as far as he can.]
Counter-Arguments and Nuances
Counter-argument points I might hit:
Implications Video games shape how their audiences see war and the military, often showing a single narrow perspective, and yet this influence is so rarely interrogated due to the common view of games as meaningless entertainment. Metal Gear Solid 2’s criticism of the military-entertainment complex, even with its complexities and caveats, shows that video games are absolutely capable of not only showing alternative perspectives of war but challenging their audiences to think critically about a range of complex issues. Video games influence how people see the world, and understanding that is the first step to consuming them more critically and not letting their influence go completely unexamined.
Works Cited [Still need to bring over sources from notes]
Bogost (probably) Dwulecki El_Greco. “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - Game Script” IGN, 20 January 2005, https://www.ign.com/articles/2005/01/21/metal-gear-solid-2-son-of-liberty-premium-package-game-script-538904. Accessed December 1 2022. GamesIndustry International. “Hideo Kojima: 25 Years of Metal Gear Solid,” GamesIndustry.biz, October 1, 2012, https://www.gamesindustry.biz/hideo-kojima-25-years-of-metal-gear-solid. Accessed 1 December 2022. Higgin, Tanner. “'Turn the Game Console off Right Now!': War, Subjectivity, and Control in Metal Gear Solid 2." Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, 2009. Hume, Mike. “Call of Duty made $800 million in one weekend. Here’s what that means.” The Washington Post, 4 November 2022. www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/11/04/call-duty-modern-warfare-2-sales/. Accessed 6 November 2022. ---. “‘Modern Warfare II’ does ripped-from-the-headlines in the worst way.” The Washington Post, 25 October 2022. www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/modern-warfare-2-campaign-review/. Accessed 6 November 2022. Kojima, Hideo. “Brain Structure Episode 1” ---. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Konami Digital Entertainment Co. Ltd, 2001. Lenoir, Tim and Caldwell, Luke. The Military-Entertainment Complex. Harvard University Press, 2018. Murray, Soraya. On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender, and Space. Parkin Perry, Douglass C. et al. “Top 25 Games of All Time: Complete List.” IGN. https://www.ign.com/articles/2002/01/23/top-25-games-of-all-time-complete-list. Accessed 7 November 2022. Philips and Milner RedEnvelopeMedia. “Memes The DNA Of The Soul.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TDC9s-Kt-8. Accessed 21 October 2022. ReliefWeb. “Global Report on Child Soldiers 2001 launch: Child Soldiers - An Overview.” 12 June 2001. https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/global-report-child-soldiers-2001-launch-child-soldiers-overview. Accessed 22 November 2022. Stamenković, Dušan et al.. "The persuasive aims of Metal Gear Solid: A discourse theoretical approach to the study of argumentation in video games." Discourse, Context & Media, Volume 15, 2017, Pages 11-23, ISSN 2211-6958, doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2016.12.002. TIME interview Wikipedia. “List of video games considered the best.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered_the_best. Accessed 7 November 2022. Yager. Spec Ops: The Line. (?) Youngblood (?) (Working title) “Memes. The DNA of the soul.”: Metal Gear, the military-entertainment complex, and memetic systems in the digital age Abstract Video games have cultural importance
Arc One: Context Video games, particularly franchise wargames, are highly culturally significant.
[This paragraph: introduces the cultural significance of franchise wargames, then the military-entertainment complex. Source: Hume, Lenoir and Caldwell] If you want to understand the place of video games in American culture, look no further than the latest Call of Duty game. Modern Warfare II (2022) released on October 28, 2022 and, including presales, made $800 million in its first three days—more than twice the record-holding opening weekend of Avengers: Endgame (Hume). Mike Hume, editor of The Washington Post’s video games and esports department Launcher, writes that “it’s well worth thinking of Call of Duty beyond a mere ‘video game’ and more as a cultural touchstone,” as much a part of American culture as the NFL. Modern Warfare II (2022) exemplifies the modern military video game and its cultural prominence—so it is troubling that its campaign thoughtlessly coopts real-world events under a thin veneer of fictionalization and presents them stripped of context to ferry players from one cinematic setpiece to another, using brotherly battlefield camaraderie to brush aside uncomfortable or complex questions. This is archetypical of works within the military-entertainment complex: a reciprocal and mutually beneficial, though not necessarily direct, relationship between the U.S. military and the entertainment industry. In their book The Military-Entertainment Complex, Lenoir and Caldwell describe how video games and especially “franchise wargames,” exemplified by Call of Duty, are significant components of this relationship (Lenoir and Caldwell 31). Understanding wargames’ position within a wider system of militarized entertainment can shed light on both this system and how it influences people. [This paragraph: introduces Metal Gear, begins establishing its significance as subject of research. Sources: Perry et al., Wikipedia (not scholarly or analyzed—including them as evidence for the claim that Metal Gear is considered one of the best games of all time, which seems like it’s fine to use non-academic sources for)] This paper examines a rare example of a wargame franchise that does not advance an uncritical portrayal of the U.S. military and its role in war: Metal Gear. Created by Hideo Kojima and published by Konami, Metal Gear is a primarily stealth-focused action/adventure franchise that includes 23 games across 31 years, most prominently the Metal Gear Solid series. The franchise pioneered the stealth genre, was one of the earliest action series to heavily feature narrative, and is often counted among the best games of all time (Perry et al., Wikipedia). Metal Gear is hardly the only video game to be critical of the military-entertainment complex—another widely cited example is Spec Ops: The Line—but its influence and popularity makes it especially notable. [This paragraph: introduce Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty as a specific focus, explain connections to digital information systems. Sources: Hume, MGS2, ] Metal Gear is especially interesting as a subject of research because it interrogates the military-entertainment complex in the larger context of information in the digital age. Video games don’t intersect so much as crash head-on into this subject [clarify], which further complicates their relationship with militarism. For example, Hume describes how modern online games like Call of Duty also function as social media platforms where players can meet and talk with friends, meaning they incorporate the complex dynamics and social ramifications of a digital technology that researchers and the public alike are only recently realizing has serious implications on a societal scale. What does it mean that such a wide-reaching “cultural touchstone,” as Hume says, exists so deeply in the shadow of the U.S. military? [Metal Gear loves questions like this.] Metal Gear is primarily single-player, so we don’t get too much of that “social media” aspect Hume talked about, but it sure makes up for that with how much it weaves these sorts of questions into its narrative. The digital information systems of the modern age shape how we see the world, and video games are one part that does this shaping [eesh definitely clean up that structure]—not by violence-inducing brainwashing, as some have simplistically and baselessly claimed, but in a more subtle normalization of a certain perspective of war as “just the way things are.” Metal Gear also discusses the military-entertainment complex alongside and often in relation to a broad range of topics that intersect with this class’ course reader, including questions about how digital systems are changing society. One antagonist monologues about how memes (using the original meaning, i.e. a unit of culture that spreads between people) spread hateful ideologies (RedEnvelopeMedia), which brought to mind Mark Fisher’s article “From memes to race war: How extremists use popular culture to lure recruits.” [I really want to include this because it’s so interesting and stupid… but alas. I think I’m saving this for my follow-up paper about Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.] Additionally, the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2 involves an AI embodiment of American values attempting to control human thought and behavior by censoring huge swathes of digital information (especially the internet) in order to prevent a future where “[everyone] withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum” and “stay[s] inside their little ponds, leaking whatever ‘truth’ suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.” The game came out in 2001, yet its words are eerily similar to Phillips and Milner’s concept of “information silos” (3) in 2021’s You Are Here. (I’m also looking at just MGS2 because it makes the scope way more reasonable—although I do draw on analysis from other games in the series, since I don’t have the techniques to analyze this entire game by myself at this point.) Metal Gear is perhaps uniquely positioned to discuss these systems because it is an artifact of and within them. (Well, to be fair, it’s not uniquely positioned—but it is the only game I can think of in its position that thoroughly commits to asking these questions. (I’m not saying CoD could never—the whole damn point of my research is that it could—but I am saying CoD hasn’t so far.)) To examine [research topic/question], this paper will… In my research, I am asking what rhetorical tools Metal Gear uses to discuss the military-entertainment complex in the context of digital information systems, what arguments it makes about these subjects, and what the wider implications of those arguments are. I will begin by introducing the military-entertainment complex and briefly examining its relationship with the video game industry through a historical lens, contextualizing the cultural significance of wargames and establishing their importance as subjects of serious inquiry. I will then examine Metal Gear within this context and analyze the rhetorical techniques it uses to present arguments. In this section, I will draw on both broad sources (e.g. Lenoir and Caldwell) and more specific case studies (e.g. Higgin, Stamenković et al.), with a particular emphasis on Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, to reach conclusions about the franchise’s rhetoric and arguments about the military-entertainment complex in relation to digital information systems. I can then assess how effectively Metal Gear conveys its arguments and connect this analysis to wider implications. instead drawing attention to its own position at the messy intersection of gaming and militarism Arc Two: Metal Gear Solid 2 is about drawing attention to systems of information/deep memetic frames Military-entertainment complex: the big one First: challenging, directly subverting many (not all) typical military-entertainment complex characteristics
Arc Three: Metal Gear Solid 2 ultimately challenges its audience to think critically about the deep memetic frames around them and make their own memes The entire game has been showing the player more and more systems, and this is where it leads All the layers of revealing systems have been building up—so what now? What does the game do now? Has this been the entirety of its rhetorical goal?
equivalent of breathing.”
Philips and Milner, page 20: “From this view, deep memetic frames aren’t bestowed from on high, a way of seeing that somebody assigns to you. Instead, they’re maintained through what we do and say, and what others do and say, within our networks—as well as the cultural cross-pollination that occurs between networks. All that social participation—some direct, some indirect—spreads deep frames between this person and that person, between this group and that group.” 21: “In the process, they didn’t just direct what people saw (or thought they saw); they shaped what people believed should be done in response.” 25: “These forces cleave into two basic categories. First, there were empirically true occurrences: things that were actually happening in the world. Second, there were things that believers experienced as real, cohered by the deep memetic frame of satanic subversion.”
Arc Four: Video games—including and especially franchise wargames—can and do influence how people see the world, which means everyone needs to think more critically about them so this influence does not go unquestioned. [Turns out there’s another layer—the system the MEC is part of—that I also have Thoughts™ about. This game is so thematically dense.] Aspects of Importance of Information
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is about the importance of information: passing it down and sharing it with others, how systems shape it to in turn shape people’s deep memetic frames, how all this changes in the digital age—and ultimately, how information shapes the ways we are human and what “being human” even means. The game encourages its audience to question the systems that shape information around them, and to break away when those systems are manipulative. More than that, it challenges its audience to create and share their own information, information that they choose, that matters to them, that tells others what it means for us (both as individuals and a collective) to be human. What themes could be more relevant in the digital age? These are lofty goals, to be certain. [Agree with Philips and Milner.] My argument is much the same as Sons of Liberty’s. More scrutiny on these systems can only lead to deeper understandings. Question systems broadly and fearlessly. Think about what you take for granted as “just the way things are.” Find your own information worth passing on and share it with others—whether that’s a meme in the academic sense or a meme in the internet sense. Those are all broad goals, however, and difficult to put into concrete actions. Let me then provide a starting point from which to question systems, the one we’ve spent this entire paper hearing me talk about: video games. Video games and especially franchise wargames are one aspect of the broader systems of our society I want to draw attention to as a place to question systems. Questioning the context games create—US-centric, single-perspective, war as exciting, etc.—but also question the context around games themselves. That context portrays their complicity in the MEC as “just the way things are”, but if the hours of my life I’ve spent thinking and writing about Metal Gear have taught me one thing, it’s that even franchise wargames don’t need to uncritically reproduce the US perspective of war and portray it to millions of people as “just the way things are”. These games absolutely influence the way their audiences see the world—that’s the context they create. It would be real great if everyone was aware of that. Metal Gear challenging the MEC/US nationalism/systems of info control/deep memetic frames is important because it shows that not just video games in general but franchise wargames specifically have rhetorical impacts on their audience/can and fucking do influence the way people see the world. We need to stop thinking of these games as mindless entertainment (like Murray says - need to stop treating any games as more/less political) because that’s letting them wield a MASSIVE amount of rhetorical and cultural influence without being examined. Not just academics—as consumers of video games, we also need to be more critical of what we play.
Works Cited [Still need to bring over sources from notes]
Higgin, Tanner. “'Turn the Game Console off Right Now!': War, Subjectivity, and Control in Metal Gear Solid 2." Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, 2009. Hume, Mike. “Call of Duty made $800 million in one weekend. Here’s what that means.” The Washington Post, 4 November 2022. www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/11/04/call-duty-modern-warfare-2-sales/. Accessed 6 November 2022. ---. “‘Modern Warfare II’ does ripped-from-the-headlines in the worst way.” The Washington Post, 25 October 2022. www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/modern-warfare-2-campaign-review/. Accessed 6 November 2022. Lenoir, Tim and Caldwell, Luke. The Military-Entertainment Complex. Harvard University Press, 2018. Perry, Douglass C. et al. “Top 25 Games of All Time: Complete List.” IGN. https://www.ign.com/articles/2002/01/23/top-25-games-of-all-time-complete-list. Accessed 7 November 2022. RedEnvelopeMedia. “Memes The DNA Of The Soul.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TDC9s-Kt-8. Accessed 21 October 2022. Stamenković, Dušan et al.. "The persuasive aims of Metal Gear Solid: A discourse theoretical approach to the study of argumentation in video games." Discourse, Context & Media, Volume 15, 2017, Pages 11-23, ISSN 2211-6958, doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2016.12.002. Wikipedia. “List of video games considered the best.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered_the_best. Accessed 7 November 2022. And, for fun, here are some other (much more chaotic) visual brainstorming sessions I've had while developing my Project 3: I've been having a lot of fun with this.
|
|