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Part 1: The Generational Gulf

Writing this essay is difficult, because depending on very specific thresholds of where and when you were born, your gender, and other cultural aspects… I’m either talking about one of the most familiar and foundational works of your childhood, your culture, and how you conceive war, culture, politics, history, and what it means to lead a good life… Or I’m talking about something you’ve never heard of.

The Metal Gear Solid franchise to this day is the primary, (maybe only?) property that exists at the intersection of the Tactical (Tacti-cool) Special Forces obsession of American Culture and Gamer culture more widely… And the Japanese Cyberpunk Philosophical Paranoia of late 90s Classic Anime and Anime-esque Games and media.

This has given it an extraordinarily prominent cultural purchase for young men (and women) of military or martial leaning. Having sold 65 MILLION copies across it’s franchise life it is the third most prominent “Modern Warfare” franchise after Call Of Duty and Battlefield.

Across America, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Korea Something between 10 and 30% of men between the age of 18-40 (fighting age) have played at-least 1 of the games… With the ratio almost certainly rising or even doubling amongst the young men who actually enlist… Metal Gear Solid “MGS” is only surpassed in its field by of the 500 million copies of Call of Duty sold, over 50% have probably played a COD game… (Battlefield sold 88.7 million, basically comparable to MGS)

But whereas Call of Duty and Battlefield focused on fast paced twitchy multiplayer combat, with the “narratives” in their “story mode” that are remembered mostly for memes, action set pieces, and ridiculous dialogue… Mad Japanese game developer Hideo Kojima has become an icon in himself for his twisting multi-layered narratives, aspirational, haunting, and absurd characters, meditations on military trends and technical developments, philosophy, history, conspiracies, duty, and life.

It would not be a stretch to say the Metal Gear Solid franchise is almost certainly THE core text of how Millennials and Gen Z grew up imagining warfare and the philosophical implications of war.

I don’t think older generations realize the impact just because they don’t recognize the references when they come up or know enough to recognize the influence… It is almost impossible to walk around on any military installation in the west without hearing the “Codec Call Sound” used as a ringtone by various soldiers, marines, and airmen, or the “alert sound” for text messages (bonus points when its an actual Colonel or Major calling). Conversations with soldiers regularly get into detailed dives into tactics, equipment, paranoid implications, and practical and not-so-practical ideas “Just like the game”.

I’ve heard of more than one real life military exercise, AI testing, and at least a few drones in actual combat, “cheesed” by a Metal Gear Solid-style cardboard box… Yes this happened.

(Yes, as far as I’m aware, the pun between box the literal cardboard device, and “box” a slang term for “pussy” translates between Japanese and English)

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Indeed the Japanese pacifistic paranoia of Hideo Kojima, a man deeply ambivalent about America, if not openly hostile to it’s Government and Military… Is almost certainly more influential on soldiers across the West, NATO, and even gamers in non-western militaries like Russia, or the Gulf States below a certain age threshold than works like Tom Clancy’s oeuvre, Saving Private Ryan, Rambo, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, MASH, Lawrence of Arabia, To Hell and Back, The Storm of Steel, All’s Quiet on the Western Front, Boy’s Own Adventures, the Stories of G. A. Henty, the stories of Walter Scott, The Red Badge of Courage, War and Peace, Le Morte De Arthur, and The Iliad… Combined.

Yet the very thing that keeps Kojima’s work in relative obscurity compared to his extraordinary pop-culture reach is the very thing that gives him so much purchase on the young… He made videogames. Unlike films or TV shows he gets tens or even cumulative hundreds of hours out of his individual fans at something approaching full attention, and includes a level of detail that’s just not possible for film or TV, and very rare in book form… the script for Metal Gear Solid 2 alone is 900 pages, a text a large percentage of his fans will and have gone over multiple times across repeat playthroughs (very few 900 page books get repeat readthroughs). And yet this same extraordinary investment, buy-in, and considerable effort the games require on the part of his adolescent and still forming fans acts as a barrier to scrutiny, and as such the works have been subjected to shockingly little, if any, wider cultural critique and scrutiny as compared with almost any other medium or artform.

Contrast the political discussions and think pieces that surround a book or film like Rambo: First Blood and the treatment of homeless veterans, or American POWs in Vietnam… Or how works like Platoon or Saving Private Ryan do or don’t discourage service and sacrifice on the part of young Americans, and its remarkable that at the same time young Soldiers were mass quitting over Vax-Mandates and others refusing to enlist, no one commented that the first Metal Gear Solid… the first modern entry in the CORE piece of Millennial and Zoomer Media to do with the US Military…(spoilers) centers around a decorated US Soldier being manipulated, blackmailed, and threatened into being turned into a unwitting suicide bio-weapon via a designer Virus hidden within a mandatory injection.

Gee. I wonder if that affected Vaccine hesitancy in young soldiers who’d played the game?

Yet as far as I can tell not ONE paper written in the period of the COVID mandates referenced the “FoxDie Virus” of the Metal Gear Solid series, or the fact that a critical mass of US soldiers had been trained since childhood not to trust unexpected US Military injections… That indeed the core lesson of one of their most popular stories is that the greatest soldier fighting and playing perfectly still cannot be saved from the mistake of trusting the Military/Medical establishment before the action has even begun.

Hideo Kojima’s strange and prescient vision has acted as a philosophical and moral introduction to the world of arms for tens of millions of young men. It is deeply political, and is massive and detailed in a way that has already altered the course of military history and martial culture… Seemingly with hardly ANY comment or interest by the military establishment or the broader world of war commentators.

Largely because of the anime-esque absurdities of the series: variously wooden, melodramatic, self-serious, historical, conspiratorial, obsessive, humorously slapstick, and subtlety manipulative… which are cat-nip to millennials and Gen Z on the one hand, on the other make older generations intuitively cringe away at encountering something clearly awkwardly dubbed and translated, balancing between languages, mediums, cultures, nationality, and stages of adolescent development in a manner that openly invites dismissal and joking unseriousness… a conscious unseriousness which serves to hide the complexity of its political and military vision… both for shock value within the narrative, and arguably for propaganda value in delivering Kojima’s various messages.

By contrast comparatively unheard of works like Oliver Stone’s Platoon ($137mil Box Office), Francis Ford Copolla’s Apocalypse Now ($150million), or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket ($120mil) have been subjected to extraordinary Military and Academic study and assessment of their themes, cultural impact, effect on recruiting, and effect on soldier’s outlook… whilst Metal Gear Solid ($2.5+ Billion franchise sales) has received almost none, with only 200 JSTOR entries for the entire series, compared to 1400 for Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and 5400 for Apocalypse Now.

The only real critical discussion of the works is within the gamer subculture in various Youtube video-essays. These works vary from simple appreciation and “memeing” (Dawkins’ coinage from The Selfish Gene was indeed partially popularized by Kojima in Metal Gear Solid 2), to politically and philosophically relevant deep dives into the the various themes of the work and Kojima’s predictions…

Yet the most relevant analysis: the assessment and reassessment of Kojima’s works from a military, social, geopolitical, and strategic theory perspective, works which in many sub-areas and theoretical sub-specialties are STILL on the cutting edge of 4th and 5th generation warfare, theories of espionage, and theories of information control even decades after their original release… That’s not been done, or only been tertiarily done by Youtube amateur philosophers, who don’t know or care how Kojima’s work relates to 5th Generation Warfare Theory, or indeed how it has almost certainly covertly influenced the development of that theory via 25+ years of fans in the military-intelligence world.

“Metal Gear Solid 2 Predicted Everything” is itself a meme, but not uninformative.

To put it bluntly, trying to understand modern intelligence and 5th generation warfare theory and practice without understanding Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid is like trying to understand the warfare of Late-Bronze and Early Iron Age Greece without understanding Homer’s Iliad.

What the hyper-reality fantasy of the work lacks in technical accuracy or realism to the actual warfare on the ground, it more than makes up for in the completeness and strangeness of it’s insight to the era, its philosophy, and culture.

Indeed the works themselves are an unending assault on your very conception of your own knowledge and understanding of tactically, strategically, politically, and psychologically relevant information… the ultimate 4th and 5th generation nightmares.

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