An article posted on IGN’s website over the last couple days gives some details of a hands-on session with Metal Gear Solid 4by Jeff Haynes (check out an interview with Hideo Kojima here). Depite the fact that the article is clearly free-advertising for Kojima Studios, a way to keep MGS4in the gaming headlines, it also reveals a couple of interesting tidbits – and I think perhaps more, if I’m reading between the lines correctly! Yeah, I’m taking the bait here, posting this around the blogosphere with every other MGS fan out there, and drooling over the April Fools teaser Kojima collaborated with Ubisoft studios for:
Yep, it’s all marketing. Release this on one day, then the article on IGN the next… But, unlike a lot of other marketing ploys, Kojima Studios tends to deliver on what it promises, and usually tacks along some surprises they didn’t tell anyone about. And the opening of the video hints at the self-awareness and goofery of it all: “The following video presentation has been approved by the parties involved for rampant internet consumption from April 1, 2008″. Then Kojima asks you in the end “Did you like it?” Below are some thoughts about the game based on what these two bits of gratuitous promotion both say, and hint at.
The video is just a demonstration of the perspectives and nature of the gamer’s interaction with the environment. MGS was long criticized for the outdated top-down camera angle until Snake Eater revamped the camera to a closer third-person view more like Splinter Cell’s and the more recent Assassin’s Creed’s system. What’s more impressive though is the dynamic nature hinted at on the battlefield. Kojima has mentioned elsewhere (though I can’t find the reference at the moment) that he has been interested in modeling environments right down to their most basic particles — that when a wall falls, it shouldn’t fall into a series of uniform blocks or pre-rendered actions, but that it should splinter, fracture, and crumble just as a real wall should. Haynes’s article hints that this ambition has been realized to some extent: “when an explosion goes off near Snake, a fine coating of dust covers the camera, adding to the cinematic feel of the game”. Combined with an open battlefield and an AI scheme that seems more realistically reactive (and to some degree proactive), the game should actually deliver on some of gaming’s more cliched promises: ”Never Play the Same Way Twice!”
Haynes’s article also seems to hint at some details concerning the game’s locale. Everything Kojima Studios has released visually has set the game in a thoroughly destroyed Middle Eastern desert overrun by profit motivated conflict. But Haynes says this in the opening paragraphs:
I certainly won’t spoil the plot points or the story here; there is only so much that I’m allowed to talk about, after all. Instead, I will go into more detail on a section we’ve previously covered: the Middle East area that Snake has infiltrated in released trailers or demos.
Read between the lines and there’s a hint that this bombed-out destruct-o-rama ripped straight from nightly news footage isn’t the only setting in which the game will take place. Snake Eater broadened the horizon for the environmental standard, too: lush, swampy jungles; desert-like cliff faces; verdant forests; flowery fields. Snake Eater/Subsistence was widely hailed as a tour de force for what the PS2 was capable of — some of which no one thought the system could manage.
Some recent games on the PS3 and XBox 360 cannot match this kind of detail. (And, it’s rather clear that the single-player mode from MGS4 has been influenced by the level and gameplay design from the online component of MGS 3.) Thus, I will not be shocked if Snake is tracking Ocelot across different locales. The game may not be global, but the hints and history suggest that faux-Iraq isn’t the only setting in which the game takes place.
Another interesting detail emerging from the vidoe is the “seemless transition” from gameplay scenario to cut-scene. Haynes’s article mentions this, though such a concept is not something I’ve always been especially convinced is possible. Markku Eskelinen and some other ludologists have focused on the distinctions between cutscene and gameplay as a fundamental dilemma when analyzing games as narrative devices. Games seem to conflate and muddy the story time and discourse time distinctions grounding narrative theory as it is elaborated in Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse (1978). As my CEA post mentions, Chatman argues that the moment in which a story is told always differs from the moment in which it happens, and that a narrative “fixes” the events into a logical and discernible sequence which allows for meaning to be constructed. Thus, narration is an intepretive practice, reading the real world and feeding it back to a reader as an ordered construct. Games challenge this rather radically because simulation hermeneutics seem to allow for a story to happen, be told, and be “read” all at the same time.
As both a fan and a “scholar”, I’m awaiting this with glee. Maybe I can write a dissertation on it… Of course, I have to find a PhD program that will accept me…
