Lessons Learned
Metal Gear Solid’s post credit scene reveals that the nuclear-equipped Metal Gear Rex’s test data survived Solid Snake’s missiles, its log an invaluable learning experience for the developers. Similarly, snaking through the occupied Shadow Moses military base where Rex was developed required a lot of in-the-field training and dozens of hours, rations, and Game Overs, stats the game totals onscreen at its end. Of course, this is all created by a third set of data, the combined mechanics, systems, art, scripts, and modes that are the game. If the elements in Hideo Kojima’s classic thriller supports the theme of biological evolution, the very existence of its 1999 special edition, Metal Gear Solid Integral, tells us much about the new worlds that technological evolution is building for us, even on societal levels, as it upgrades its digital bootcamp to MGS version 1.2.
An important relationship exists between a design such as a videogame, its developer, and its user, with elements cut or added depending on how successfully they make the whole function. As people play a game, the developers see which parts work and which don’t and tweak future versions. Games provide tools to overcome the challenges in their worlds, and as a game’s gameplay builds over its series, the ability to experiment with its ideas becomes that much more important. MGS’s success drove demand for more missions as Snake, more places to sneak and shoot through, which required the devs at Konami Computer Entertainment Japan to add new tools to Metal Gear’s arsenal.
Hideo Kojima’s directorial style developed by zigzagging between action games and visual novels, first Metal Gear then Snatcher, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake then Policenauts, taking every opportunity to experiment with new ideas and tech to tweak his two gameplay designs until he could finally merge them. The PlayStation’s polygonal camera was that opportunity, making the incremental change from 2D Metal Gear to 3D Metal Gear Solid possible.
Despite how important the camera system is to Solid’s design, its default top-down view and third-person shooting kept Kojima from capturing the intimate real-time shootouts of even Snatcher and Policenauts, especially after they got light gun support. While still primitive, MGSI’s ‘1P View Mode’ was good practice for a FPS, as double tapping triangle locks the POV from Snake’s eyes as he snuck past guards or shot them at range. The mode may lack precision aiming but it lets MGS and its boss fights be as thrilling and personal as Kojima’s other works. It marks an important step for future MGS gameplay.
As much as 1P View further connects the player and MGS’s world, putting you inside Shadow Moses, Integral’s true mission was to discover what that world was capable of producing by rearranging its cogs into 300 self-contained VR levels. Because of the relationship between developer, design, and user, this allows all to grow together: players teach developers how to better make games that train them to beat it, and for Metal Gear Solid, that means new ways to transform you into its legendary Metal Gear-destroying hero, Solid Snake.
The Test Environment
In addition to listing stats, that end-game report rewards your performance with a codename, but where MGS’s story portrayed Solid Snake as a super-agent that fit the moniker, your “Mouse” rank for dying a bunch and tripping too many alarms likely left some cognitive dissonance. The original set of 30 VR Missions was prep for the main game, distilling mechanics and systems down into simple challenges that taught the increasingly complex concepts needed in Shadow Moses. Integral‘s VR Missions Disc, sold separately outside Japan, was a chance to test new scenarios while keeping the player focused on their exercises, all to mold a soldier that can efficiently complete any mission the first time.
Initially, the missions are simple maps with a specific weapon, but by adjusting rules, systems, and enemy properties, KCEJ could create hundreds of different tasks. Shadow Moses was itself a large layout of small maps connected together whose dynamic changes depending on the direction you enter, even if the enemy patterns remain the same. The game’s overall pacing is controlled by which maps get connected and what custom scenarios get inserted between them.
One of MGS‘s strengths was regularly switching between its standard stealth sections and mini-game setpieces, and VR Missions explored more ways to combine elements in unique ways. Instead of repelling down a building, fighting up a tower, and enduring torture, Integral has puzzles, variety levels, photoshoots, and adventure-game styled mysteries, all of which teach you how to interact with MGS and vice-versa. Integral even explores its place as a kaiju film, having you protect Meryl from the massive Genolla, a genetically modified Genome soldier whose individually targetable body parts would be used in future Metal Gear battles.
The VR Missions were the closest things MGS had to an arcade mode, right down to their scoreboard. Developers know that scoring systems motivate players to master a game, and VR Missions’ bite-sized levels means they can be run and rerun quickly for the hi-score, which provide more feedback loops for player improvement while Snake’s support crew showers them with praise. These small accomplishments help sustain player interest until they are trained into an efficient agent deserving a great codename.
As much as VR Missions helped iterate Metal Gear’s gameplay, what could happen inside its world, Integral secretly iterated on the identity outside it. From the OG, MGS reveled in being a videogame, of having branching story elements and fourth-wall breaking moments. But Integral took it’s meta level antics even further, setting up story elements that would soon make you re-evaluate what Metal Gear Solid’s machine was, especially where it came to the next player to take up the Snake codename.
Full Scale Deployment
To support Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty’s meta commentary, its protagonist, Jack, revealed that he trained in VR Missions as Solid Snake, which directly and clearly re-contextualized MGS1. It asked you to accept that Integral‘s program existed within Metal Gear’s world as the Solid Snake Simulation which could create entire scenarios like the Shadow Moses Incident, and with it tacitly claimed that videogames are tools to program behavior. Despite the admission supporting MGS2’s larger analysis of media manipulation, it changed the perception of Metal Gear and videogames entirely, removing the barriers between developer, game design, and player, exploring how you are being revised and redesigned.
Social engineering is a multi-faceted field that studies manipulating people and controlling environments, and causing distractions, sabotaging surveillance, and swiping access cards to impersonate the owner fall under its auspices. But if a videogame provides tools to overcome its challenges, it is a social engineering machine whose gameplay, story, and presentation are designed to manipulate you into performing the behaviors it wants.
Metal Gear Solid‘s main story had already done a lot to keep you wanting to hone your skills, offering a gripping plot about heroism with multiple endings that instill the difference between accomplishing the mission and earning a happy ending. But score adds hefty gamification to that mission, stripping the valiant pretext from the violent actions until only the raw skills remain, a 180 degree turn from a narrative that grappled with the morality of killing. This very theme would be thrown back at the player in Sons of Liberty when talking about Jack’s detachment from his actions and their consequences.
The manipulation is even more interesting with the cyborg ninja missions, a fun hack and slash mode that lets you cut through waves of Genome soldiers. If the Solid Snake Simulation uploaded the ‘Snake’ persona onto Jack, then it uploaded Grey Fox’s too, a form of memetic determinism. But an important question remains: Did Solid Snake play the cyborg ninja missions in VR, particularly the mission to kill Solid Snake?
What do MGS2’s revelations say about MGS and Integral? If we are to believe that the Solid Snake Simulation was a secret project and Raiden its first trainee, could that mean that Metal Gear Solid never had you controlling Snake, it had you controlling Raiden as he ran Solid Snake through the Shadow Moses simulation? It certainly could be argued, and the problem with meta commentary that begs you to beLIEve so much wild stuff is that it doesn’t get to decide when you stop, up to reframing Metal Gear Solid from an artistic work about war to a game product that simulates an artistic work about war.
Sequels and new hardware offer the best chance for major gameplay revisions, and the PlayStation 2 gave Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty a deeper first-person mode and location-based damage on top of new equipment and enemy A.I. MGS2‘s own Substance special edition offers more VR, but with media manipulation and social engineering so central to its story, it’s unique modes like Snake Tales and Casting Theater that truly support its theme, the latter of which swaps characters in cutscenes to continue engineering false records of the game’s events like MGS2‘s famous trailers. As the user and design becomes increasingly inseparable, Metal Gear would soon field test the larger system’s manipulative ability, and gives us a chance to see the future that society’s developers have designed.
DEVELOPER: Konami Computer Entertainment Japan
PLATFORM: Playstation
1999
Dane Thomsen is the author of ZIGZAG, a sport-punk adventure in a world of electrifying mystery. With the voice of her people as her guide, Alex walks neon purple streets thrown into chaos, wielding the concussive force of her baseball bat the mighty ‘.357’ against the forces of evil. Print and kindle editions are available on Amazon. For sample chapters and to see his other works please check out his blog.
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