Patreon Letter - 24th February, 2018

Hello friends, it is time, we knew this day would come. 

I have played about ten hours of Metal Gear Survive, and I have opinions. Just to cut to the chase: I'm having a decent time. It’s not A Masterpiece or anything, but it’s a much more coherent and thoughtful game than I expected considering every single thing Konami have said and done since 2015. It is clear that the team actually working on the game care a lot more than their corporate masters. It sounds like while a lot of the leads left for Kojima's new studio, the actual bulk of the staff is still the same as on MGSV. The people who made this made it with reverence. I have some more specific thoughts on the game but I really need to finish it before I go into them, and playing it for more than a couple hours at a time is a terrible idea. It is a game designed around playing it for few runs, every day. And so that is how I shall play it. Godspeed to those who have to finish reviews on a deadline. o7.

Now that that's out the way, I guess let's talk about Hideo Kojima.

There are few things in video games I dislike more than the way people talk about Kojima. The man has directed some of the greatest video games ever made, and he has also posted some of the worst tweets ever made. He is not a genius, he is just some guy. He does not single handedly craft beautiful works of art, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he is talked about. The way in which he is elevated has always been bad, but with The Phantom Pain and the split with Konami things went entirely off the deep end. He is now an underdog, a tragic figure who never got to finish his masterpiece, and making a triumphant comeback against all odds.

And look. The man left Konami and spent a year hanging out with movie stars. He has been talking about how he doesn’t want to make Metal Gear anymore for decades. And now he’s got a deal with Sony to make whatever he wants and take selfies with Norman Reedus. And Grimes, apparently. In his spare time he writes really bad blogs about movies and they get published in Rolling Stone. It could not possibly be going better for the man. And this ridiculous fervor around this scorned master auteur really makes it difficult to enjoy the games he makes.

Which is a shame, because I really like looking at Kojima's games through an auteurist lens, in the actual definition of that word. I think his games become more interesting when looked at as a body of work, when considered in their context with interviews and statements he has given at the time. And that isn't a statement of quality one way or the other, or an argument that he's solely responsible for their creation; him being "an auteur" in the sense of a visible enough creative lead that we can examine his work as a whole in order to gain a greater understanding of the games within does not mean that he's a genius. It's just a critical lens, one of many, that you can apply when appropriate. So I'm stuck in this strange position where despite earnestly loving Metal Gear and approaching my criticism of it from that perspective, I sound like a loud and obnoxious hater purely by existing in opposition to a very pervasive cult of personality. 

Online is weird, and bad.

Because for as much as people talk about Kojima as an auteur (read: genious), the level of understanding of what "A Kojima Game" actually means is strangely low. With every Death Stranding trailer there are infinite jokes about how oh so wacky and inscrutable it is, and how that's Kojima! You never know what he's going to do next! When like, even a cursory look at his work and you'll go "oh, mpreg Norman Reedus. of course." Every single Metal Gear game is hyperfocused on the idea of men who can't have children, of the relationship between technology and biology, what it means to be made and not born. Kojima's games are many things but one thing they are not is subtle, and so it's really strange to hear people who are longtime fans talk about his work like it's operating on another level, like it can't possibly be understood.

I'm obviously speaking in extremely broad strokes, and I don't mean to sound like I'm The Only True Critic or whatever. I'm not. There are loads of way smarter people than me who approach Kojima, and anything else for that matter, with a strong and considered critical approach. (related: this conversation about MGS2 with Heather Alexander is my fav bit of Metal Gear content I have done, check it out!!!) But it is certainly true that when speaking about his presence within the culture, that it's a bit weird how beloved and revered the man is, and through that reverence his games get elevated to a level beyond understanding, so much so that a chunk of those fans don't even try? It's bizarre. 

I don't have a conclusion, other than the atmosphere makes it really hard to actually talk about his games. I love talking about Metal Gear, it is one of my favourite series and every game, from the fantastic to the absolutely atrocious, is fascinating to consider. But I really only make jokes on main these days, because Kojima discourse is obnoxious and has exhausted us all. I'm only writing this today because Survive just came out and brought this back up to the surface. God knows how we're going to survive Death Stranding's launch. Maybe twitter will be dead by then. Maybe we will be free.

I'll see you in a couple weeks, folks.
-Jackson <3