I just finished Metal Gear Solid 2

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Originally Posted by StriderKyo

And while Tim Rogers doesn't know how to express it, there is a metanarrative about games and the experience of consuming them as media in there that's sort of interesting - it's the kind of thing Warren Ellis always writes except he's a writer and not a game designer so he knows how to do it. Whether the fact that Kojima chose to include that in this game is completely self-indulgent is up to you to decide.

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There isn't any metanarrative going on with MGS2 or the entire series.

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Originally Posted by kingoffighters

There isn't any metanarrative going on with MGS2 or the entire series.

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Sure there is. The whole thing between Raiden and the computer colonel has this subtext about him being a digital cypher. His personality being a blank slate, and the talks about layers of control, manipulation and awareness are not so subtly couched in gaming terms.

And at the end of it all, Snake makes his big speech about culture as a means of passing on experience, it's like Kojima is apologizing through Snake for the whole mishmash of philosophizing and didactic storytelling. Like he's saying "look, it's my duty to pass on what I feel and think, and my medium is making games, not books or music, so this is how it's going to happen." That's a paraphrase of what Snake says, but not a huge one, and his speech doesn't really make any sense in any other terms.

I think - okay, I know - that Kojima's just using this spy story as a vehicle to deliver all his ideas about everything, and one thing he clearly thinks about a lot is game design and the way a player interacts with the characters and world he's creating. The whole thing plays out like he's expanding on the 4th wall breaking stuff he introduced in the first MGS with having to switch controller ports etc. by asking what the characters would think about living in a world like that.

Maybe.

THE PAIN!

I'm fighting THE FEAR! right now. He's a dickhead.

Postmodern.

Warren Ellis's book Crooked Little Vein was shit compared to all of his other work.

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Originally Posted by StriderKyo

Sure there is. The whole thing between Raiden and the computer colonel has this subtext about him being a digital cypher. His personality being a blank slate, and the talks about layers of control, manipulation and awareness are not so subtly couched in gaming terms.

And at the end of it all, Snake makes his big speech about culture as a means of passing on experience, it's like Kojima is apologizing through Snake for the whole mishmash of philosophizing and didactic storytelling. Like he's saying "look, it's my duty to pass on what I feel and think, and my medium is making games, not books or music, so this is how it's going to happen." That's a paraphrase of what Snake says, but not a huge one, and his speech doesn't really make any sense in any other terms.

I think - okay, I know - that Kojima's just using this spy story as a vehicle to deliver all his ideas about everything, and one thing he clearly thinks about a lot is game design and the way a player interacts with the characters and world he's creating. The whole thing plays out like he's expanding on the 4th wall breaking stuff he introduced in the first MGS with having to switch controller ports etc. by asking what the characters would think about living in a world like that.

Maybe.

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That was really neat to read. He always wanted to do movies but never could.

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Originally Posted by Cowutopia

Warren Ellis's book Crooked Little Vein was shit compared to all of his other work.

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Never read it; I was thinking about Planetary, where there are all these conspiracies and layers about who's fictional and who's not - the government is working on a rocket that can land inside a book, Godzilla is real, etc. I think that's the kind of thing Kojima wanted MGS to be.

Please don't read it. It's like the literary equivalent of Goatse (seriously his point is pretty much to "shock" you by presenting you with the many forms sexual deviancy, but I don't think anyone who has been to the depths of the internet will shock) and while he can still turn a phrase it just doesn't flow right for a novel.

If you're a prude, it might be a good read.