Metal Gear Solid 2 and Authority
With the re-release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty as part of an HD Collection, I recently had the time to jump back into an old favorite and relive years-old nostalgia for a classic. It's funny, how as we grow older, and our minds mature we go back to things we used to enjoy, and review them from our new, supposedly enlightened perspective, and ponder how messages we never picked up on before seem so clear now. Our perception of reality, and comprehension of information, is an increasingly important ability to be aware of in an age of information oversaturation.
Consider when Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was released - November of 2001, just after the beginning of the 21st century. The Internet was becoming faster and smarter, the whole world was being connected, and information was suddenly more accessible than ever. More and more people were joining communities, posting on message boards, and news was becoming more and more accessible.
Now you can't even have a Presidential election without questioning the legitimacy of a candidate's birth certificate. Of course, the majority of people fronting this idea, and the people falling for it, weren't able to criticize it from a logical perspective, questioning the authority spreading the rumor - and thus a large portion of the United States, the world's remaining superpower, believed a completely untrue piece of information thanks to the Internet.
Sons of Liberty serves as a warning, and a deconstruction using it's own mechanics, presented on the cusp of society's transition into this new age that we now live in. I can start learning a skill from my smartphone, I can have access to how to preform a life-saving medical procedure through the right app and a 3G data plan, and broadcast my everyday actions to a network of millions. Yet at the same time, there's no authority on what's factual and what isn't - one can easily lose their total grounding in reality without the proper mental toolset.
Sons of Liberty begins with the player character from it's predecessor - the apex of American masculinity, Solid Snake - a badass soldier dedicated to his mission, who is also a James Bond esque super spy - unafraid of getting down and dirty, dedicated to his country and his mission, and openly flirtacious with the ladies - this is what society tells us is a hero.
Two hours in, this player character is killed off. Dead. Cue the beginning of the Big Shell portion of the game, enter Raiden - a skinny white boy with a whiny voice and has no experience other than hours upon hours of virtual reality training. Raiden is the player, through and through, if not as a metaphor, but directly when the player is prompted to input their name, birthdate, and even bloodtype.
Raiden answers to a man on a codec - a distant, older, masculine voice that tells the player what to do - pretty much an oversatured element in videogames. In a sense, Sons of Liberty uses the player and their relationship to authority figures in society as a chance to challenge this notion of always trusting that gravelly voice at the end of the line. Why trust that voice? Because that's what we've been taught to do. They don't lead us astray, and have been around a lot longer than us.
Torwards the end of the game, as Big Shell is revealed to be a covert operation for Arsenal Gear, a giant mobile fortress that exists as not only a combat unit, but also as an information warfare system that can censor and filter data on the Internet as it appears. It's essentially one of the major fears of the information era - censorship, message control, and the idea that we're being told nothing but lies. This is an important foil with the Raiden/Colonel relationship.
At a very specific segment towards the end, the Colonel figure starts slowly deteriorating - voice distortion, general disconnect from the reality of Raiden's situation - basically becoming unreliable - and this slow reveal is one of the most famous moments in videogame history, as it runs with the premise of what if your commanding officer is a computer - and what if that all powerful computer starts glitching the fuck out. At a deeper level, it questions why we trust authority and what it tells us to do, and if Colonel didn't start glitching out, would we have followed their orders to a natural end?
After we witness the freakout of the Colonel, the player falls into line behind their thought-to-be-dead hero, Solid Snake. Of course, this is again another foil - the player wants to be Solid Snake, Raiden is an imitation Solid Snake who doesn't have the real world experience (admittedly this is weakened by the child soldier plot reveal, but it doesn't mean the idea is worth discarding) and is only as skilled due to hours practicing at a videogame. So much to the extent the Colonel breaks the fourth wall to tell the player to turn the console off.
Colonel is a stark reminder of the reality we now live in - that the standard authority figures that tell us what to do and what to think, that our enemies and our allies, and our entire worldview, is shaped by the information we accept into our minds. Colonel is the gravelly voice in a videogame that tells us where to go and who to shoot. We trust him because time and time again videogames have taught us that is how we progress - by listening to an authority figure.
When Glenn Beck used to stand in front of a blackboard and communicate to us through chalk drawings, you think that sort of imagery wasn't intentional? We were raised believing in the authority of teachers, we were raised being told that a person talking in front of a chalkboard was an authority that could be trusted. Yet at the same time, that authority figure so many people took seriously was also, like the Colonel, prone to glitch the hell out and make their intentions very obvious.
Metal Gear Solid 2 existed as a warning - a love letter to the turn of the century but also a warning that we were coming into an age where shady individuals with their own agendas, weilding wealth and influence, can cast a shadow of mistruth and manufacture realities over a country, to make an entire political party believe in an utter falsehood against all evidence, in order to forward said agenda. In the age of the Internet and the constant flood of information, it has become easier and easier to fool people into believing nonsense.
At the end of the game, when Raiden falls behind Snake in the final charge, Snake says a few words in the line of individualism - accepting there's no absolute reality, that our reality is only as real as the brain says, and to find something worth believing in and passing on to the future. In a sense, this vague statement could be interpreted in a number of ways - but at it's core, it's a warning to not get lost in someone else's agenda, someone else's mistruths.
At the beginning of the game, the player inputs his name, DOB, and bloodtype - and at the end - is printed on the dogtags Raiden has been carrying his entire mission - he is the player, through and through, and his casting off of those dogtags in Sons of Liberty's final moments is a separation of the two entities. Raiden is off to find his own destiny, and the player now has to find their own truth to pass on to future generations.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was a warning - to find and keep our own identities, and pass down our own truths to future generations, and not get swept up as "consumers," cogs in a political machine, or labelling ourselves as part of a group. People loved Solid Snake because he was his own man, he was tough yet funny yet smart, and Sons of Liberty stated in it's end, that to be like him, you had to go your own way.
