(mashedmarket)

From Iroquois Plisken’s “I Sic Brecht on Arsenal Gear” post on his Versus CluClu Land blog:

On one hand, Metal Gear Solid 2 is an overstuffed spy drama about a solo sneaking mission to foil a terrorist seizure of an offshore oil cleanup facility in the East River. But on the other hand, it is a fable about the the player’s immersion in fictional worlds and her identification with its characters. Raiden, the game’s protagonist, is not a solider. He’s a stand-in for the player. We learn that Raiden’s scored this solo sneaking gig because he has the highest score in a series of “virtual reality” missions designed to recreate the events of the first “Metal Gear Solid” game. In other words, Raiden is just someone who played Metal Gear Solid; those are his sole qualifications. When you play Raiden you are playing yourself.

Pliskin’s take on Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty thoroughly dismisses the notion “that the game’s conclusion is a piece of audacious but incoherent mindfuckery.” Rather, he argues that ”the critical space opened up by the metafictional craziness in Arsenal Gear” is meant to “[break] the spell of the game over the player” à la Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect. Unfortunately, rather than responding with a critical eye, most gamers just shrugged the whole thing off as extremely weird.

Perhaps Kojima Productions’ efforts would have been more effective had they taken things even farther over the top. By limiting their alienating approach to cinematics, they end up breaking the wrong fourth wall.  As Pliskin notes, their “anarchic tendencies– the manipulation of the interface, the knowing metaficational allusions, the theatrical self-consciousness–” might best be applied to the game’s mechanics rather than its comparatively passive cut sequences.