Max Comora 5/2/23 Max Comora 5/2/23

4.23

things i liked that came out in april 2023:

succession season 4 episodes 1-6
barry season 4 episodes 1-4
lovestreak by tony shhnow
OXygen by matt ox n surf gang
trickstar by bb trickz
Pain by omar s

things i liked a lot that didnt come out in april 2023:

metroid prime remastered
regular show
dead space remake
views by drake
slime season 4 by young thug
whisper of the heart

Max Comora 4/19/23 Max Comora 4/19/23

Anomalisa Review

Michael Stone steps out of the shower and ties a towel around his waist. A small buzz begins forming and Michael wipes off the condensation from the mirror and stares at himself in the mirror. The buzz has turned into a deep drone, overpowering the senses. Michael’s face begins to contort into all different expressions. Who is Michael Stone? Is he a husband and father? Is he a customer service expert and motivational speaker? Is he an author? Is there anyone behind any of these expressions? Michael begins to peel off his face as it clicks and clacks with each new expression. Michael Stone is a puppet, and his bathroom is not a real room – it is a miniature replication of a bathroom. Michael’s identity is based solely on how he compares himself to others, and each of his actions are guided by something larger than he is.

Michael Stone is the protagonist (and antagonist) of Charlie Kaufman’s 2015 stop-motion film Anomalisa. We watch Michael’s 24 hours in Cincinnati, from flight to return home, as he attends and speaks at a customer service conference and grapples with his identity. By the time Michael has disembarked from his plane and is making his way through the airport, however, it is clear that Michael is the only unique individual in the film – all the other puppets share the same nondescript, generic face and are all voiced by the same actor with the same monotonous, deadpan delivery. Michael does not treat anyone he encounters as an individual – to him, and the viewer, they quite literally are not individuals. Michael comes to represent America’s capitalist power structure through Kaufman’s tour through his psyche.

Through this psychological analysis, Anomalisa shows the ways in which capitalism, specifically in post-9/11 America, strips identity from individuals and actually encourages apathy from those in positions of power. Ever since the end of World War II when America dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, they have been firmly established as a global superpower. America’s industrial economy has continued chugging along through to the 21st century, wreaking havoc on the rest of the world and its own people. America is capitalist – big corporations are left untouched by the government, and, especially as of late, the wealth gap between the rich and the poor is growing exponentially. According to a report from Insider by Juliana Kaplan and Madison Hoff, “US families in the top 10% of the wealth distribution added about $60 trillion to their wealth from 1989 to 2019, while the bottom half of Americans added just under $1 trillion to their total wealth during the same time” and that the top 1% of Americans hold a third of its overall wealth. Amongst all this inequality, workers are worked tirelessly for criminally low wages all in the name of productivity. How could the owners and executives of these companies be so apathetic as to actually make the people who built up their empires struggle? Through Michael Stone, we are offered an insight as to why.

Michael Stone is a customer service expert, and he has made a living telling workers how they should behave in order to be most productive. Anomalisa is centered around one of these talks at a conference, and by the time Michael gives his talk at the climax of the film, his tone is surgical, with occasional, artificial inflections. Michael’s whole speech feels distinctly familiar – and that’s because it is. While lacking the glitz and glamor of a TED Talk as, contextually, that would not make sense for a customer service conference in Ohio, Michael is still speaking what Houman Harouni describes as the “language of TED” in his essay “The Sound of Ted: A Case for Distaste” in The American Reader. Harouni describes the language of TED as “a style that comes from corporate conference rooms, where product ideas are pitched to potential investors”, comparing it to “the fundraiser’s speech” where “everything you say and how you say it should be calculated, catering to the cold, calculating investor” (Harouni). Michael may not be looking for investors, but that does not matter – “the language of TED constitutes a special style that did not exist in the public imagination until 2006, and now it is so firmly planted there that everyone leans toward its sugary tone” (Harouni). Michael, as a customer service expert, gives directions to workers on how to behave, telling them to smile and put on a mask. For Michael, though, this job is his mask – he doesn’t believe any of the things he’s saying. He even begins to break down during his speech, rambling about the president and the state of the world, revealing his true feelings before insulting his audience. Through Michael’s tone, though, the performance he embodies for his job is the “language of TED” – a cold, disingenuous performance rooted in investment and American capitalism.

But, as Kaufman shows us, Michael’s job is more than just a performance. Because his job puts him in a position of authority, power, and has made him wealthy, Michael has actually made his social role his identity. When he exerts his power over others, he feels good about himself, like when he coerces his fan Lisa into sleeping with him, but when his authority, and his position in society, is questioned, he begins to doubt this identity he has built up for himself. This is represented in Michael’s face. Michael, like all other characters in the film, is a stop motion animated puppet. What separates him, though, is the fact he has a unique face plate and a unique voice – he is quite literally the only unique person in his world. To him, everyone else is the same and everyone else is unspecial. The cracks in his worldview begin to show, though, when his authority is questioned. After attempting to manipulate his ex-flame into sleeping with him and failing, Michael goes up to his room and showers. When he gets out of the shower, a loud droning begins and Michael begins peeling off his face-plate in horror, recognizing that he has no true identity.

In his essay “Six Ways of Looking at Anomalisa” that analyzes Anomalisa through six different specific lenses, David L. Smith writes that Michael “is horrified by the discovery that he might be ‘merely’ a puppet—presumably because he clings to that sense of self-awareness and self-determination that most of us associate with being human” (Smith 23). Michael positions himself as “the protagonist of his own world”, as “the only unique being” (Gerber), but just like everyone else, Kaufman makes Michael a mechanical puppet. Michael “stands apart, yes, but only on the outside, only by appearance” and “his ego is founded on distinction” (Gerber) and his separation from others. What Smith and Gerber fail to recognize, though, is why Michael constructed himself in this way. Michael is successful – in a niche, sure, but successful all the same – and we see many instances of him with distinct power over others. And, more often than not, Michael gets what he wants. The position of power afforded to him by his job, coupled with the fact his job requires him to construct a confident, slightly chauvinist persona, has erased any hint of Michael Stone, human, and created Michael Stone, customer service speaker, with nothing underneath.

Therefore, Michael Stone, a man in a position of power, comes to embody and represent capitalism’s treatment of working-class people through his more direct, interpersonal interactions with workers. Anomalisa spends much of its first half hour of runtime in uncomfortable silence or mundane small talk as Michael Stone makes his way from airplane to hotel room. When he gets in the cab to the hotel, we sit with him and the taxi driver for the whole ride. The unnamed taxi driver continuously tries to spark up conversation with Michael about anything from chili to the city’s famous zoo, and Michael continuously shoots him down, getting frustrated with his attempts at human interaction. To Michael, his taxi driver is just a taxi driver, whose purpose is to get him from one location to another – the driver’s attempts at genuine human interaction, which reveal the genuine personality that exists underneath the performance of the driver, frustrate Michael, who does not even see the driver as an individual. In his essay “Anomalisa, or the Effort of Recognition” for Epoché Magazine, Timofei Gerber looks at Michael’s interactions with service workers and how they reflect his feelings towards them. He writes that Michael is able to distinguish people and that “distinction aims at properties, the type, the genus people participate in, in virtue of their social and pragmatic duties; it attributes roles” (Gerber). What Michael is unable to do, then, is “to recognize people [...] he’s completely ignorant of the individual that assumes said role” (Gerber). Across America, workers are underpaid and given horrible working conditions. The cost of living continues to increase as the wealth gap grows ever larger. Michael, on the other side of this gap, treats these individuals as the American capitalist machine treats these workers – they are nameless, faceless, and expected to do a task.

Michael’s treatment of workers extends to his treatment of his personal relationships. But Michael Stone does not exist within Anomalisa as an individual – he serves to represent capitalism itself. In his essay for The Rumpus, “ANOMALISA, THE INSANITY OF CAPITALISM, AND THE POWER OF CULTURE,” Jacques Servin looks at Anomalisa as a critique of capitalism. He argues that Anomalisa is “not only about a ‘commonplace narcissist’ who is ‘fundamentally alone’”, but also “a culture in which even emotions, insights, and facial expressions are Taylorized for the sake of ‘productivity’” (Servin). To Michael, relationships are transactions, and everyone is reduced down to a puppet wearing the mask of their societal role. How, then, should we as individuals living under capitalism live our lives? If we have to spend so much time to fit in nicely to the role in society we perform, how do we build our own identities? Do we find ourselves in the people we surround ourselves with? In the media and products we consume? In the art we create? What does it mean to connect with people in a culture that discourages connection?

At the end of the movie, Michael is alone in a house full of people he doesn’t know with a family he does not love. Lisa, on the other hand, is driving into the sun with her friend, happily listening to music. Why has she, of a lesser social status, found herself so much happier than Michael? Why has she managed to retain such a positive outlook with just a fraction of what Michael has? So many movies and TV shows as of late have taken to lampooning the cataclysmic income disparity in America. Surprisingly, though, a lot of this media goes beyond parody and digs into the psychology of the uber rich. Shows like Succession, The White Lotus, and Mad Men, all of which are some of the highest rated programs in the past fifteen years, look at miserable, wealthy people and examine what makes them so miserable. Like Anomalisa, these shows demonstrate how marrying personal identity with one’s prestigious job or title creates an empty husk of a person incapable of forming meaningful relationships. These shows, along with films like Anomalisa, show a growing dialectical approach to wealth depictions in media, but what does it mean? Can the ultra-rich find personal happiness and an identity of their own to finally be able to empathize with the people they exploit? Is it even possible to separate yourself from your social position once you reach a certain level of wealth and influence? At what point do the two become one? Is there any way to separate them? And if there isn’t, how do we move forward as a society being ruled by apathetic people trapped within their social roles without sense of happiness or belonging, who run our world into the ground?

This new style of “eat-the-rich” show, still growing in popularity, raises all these questions and more. What they fail to do, however, is provide any answers. In fact, as Sam Rosenberg writes for Consequence of Sound in his article “The Menu, Glass Onion, and the Limits of the Eat-the-Rich Satire”, this growing number of wealth satires “simply view their characters as one-dimensional caricatures, whose toxic behaviors are punished but never fully explored” and they do not have the room “to build out the psychologies and motivations of their characters [...] to flesh out their satirical observations” (Rosenberg). Because these films are produced within Hollywood, where multi-million dollar productions are expected to turn a profit, eat-the-rich satires play it safe, promising fun revenge fantasies that are “just interested in telling us things we already know” without “[challenging] us to see beyond what we think we know” (Rosenberg). Rosenberg is particularly critical of the failures of big-budget Hollywood vehicles that satirize the rich, but notes that serialized productions like The White Lotus and Succession do a better job of pushing satire forward because they force us to confront uncomfortable truths – the uber-rich are not cartoonish caricatures of evil, but real and miserable people.

Even still, serialized dramas like Succession, The White Lotus, and even Anomalisa, which similarly uses the psychology of rich individuals to satirize wealth inequality, fail to answer any of the questions they pose. I can’t help to think that this is an intentional choice on behalf of the directors and writers. The people working on these shows are incredibly smart and talented – they could pose their answer to wealth inequality if they wanted to. Instead, they pose questions and problems and leave the viewer to sit with them and think about them. These pieces of media force the viewer to think critically about the problems the shows prove, putting a lot of trust in their audiences to engage with these serious ideas on their own terms and draw their own conclusions. In a country where the news is controlled by the wealthy and the education system is whitewashed and uncritical of the wealthy, these forms of entertainment double as an education on class inequality and different systems of power.

Max Comora 5/28/19 Max Comora 5/28/19

OUTER HEAVEN

My first exposure to the work of Hideo Kojima was not experiencing his famed Metal Gear Solid video game series. It was not an article discussing the impact he had on video games or a review of one of his works. My first experience with Hideo Kojima was when I was six years old playing a Nintendo game. Super Smash Bros. Brawl released for the Nintendo Wii in 2008 as the third game in the famed Smash Bros. crossover series that sees Nintendo all-stars going head to head in battle. The first non-Nintendo character to make their way onto a Smash Bros. roster was Solid Snake, protagonist of Metal Gear Solid and brainchild of Kojima himself, in Brawl. Snake fights with grenades, C4, rocket launchers, and his fists. This appearance in Smash Bros. is likely people’s only exposure to Metal Gear Solid, and Solid Snake has thus been characterized as a gruff military man from a gritty military series to reflect his playstyle in Brawl. Engaging with the Metal Gear series, and Kojima’s work at large, reveals that this projected image is an intentional front, and deep inspection of the games reveals a subversion of its own militaristic image.

Hideo Kojima was born in Tokyo in 1963. Hardly a generation removed from the carnage of World War II, Kojima grew up seeing firsthand the effects war could have on a nation on its people. What he also saw, however, was the massive influx of American pop culture into Japan in those postwar decades. Kojima’s entryway to American culture was his father – he “hated the Americans for the war,” but, with time, “accepted and finally fell in love with American culture” (Noon and Dyer-Witheford 3). Kojima describes this dichotomy as a tightrope, and says that he walks the same fine line. From there, he fell madly in love with American cinema. From Blade Runner to Mad Max to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kojima absorbed all corners of American film.

He knew he wanted to take his love for film and create films of his own. But now, decades into his professional career, he has never directed or worked on any films, but is credited as working on dozens of video games. The interactivity of the medium unlocked whole new potentials of storytelling for him and allowed him to tell narratives that would be impossible through film.

To analyze Kojima’s works, a framework for analyzing video games must be established. Since the inception of the video game industry with Pong in the 1970s, scholars have debated the proper way to frame game analysis. Are games traditional narratives that include elements of interactivity? Or is one’s experience with the gameplay foremost, and the story is just there to prop up the fun? Video game scholar Cody Mejeur proposes a hybrid model of analyzing interactive media that looks at gameplay, cutscenes, overall narrative, and player’s experience. What makes video games so unique is how interactivity often hinges on “the flowing emergence of possibilities that often buck against the limitations of narrative’s structure” (Mejeur 2) while still containing structured narratives. Ludonarrative theory is “a ‘hybrid hermeneutic’ that looks at the shared structures of games and narratives” and looks to “understand the "whole" of a game by viewing gameplay, story, and the player in their many relationships with each other, rather than viewing narrative and play as inherently opposed, conflicting elements as previous scholarship often did” (Mejeur 2). It was this complexity and incredibly personal nature of interactivity that drove Kojima to the games industry rather than the movie industry. Thus, we will analyze all these aspects of video games, from gameplay, player experience, linear narrative, and the context in which the games were released. With all these components working together, we can truly understand the intent and story of Hideo Kojima’s works.

Kojima began his work in the video game industry with a job at Konami. There, he worked on a few video novels, like Snatcher, before working on Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2.

His big break, however, would not come until he directed and wrote Metal Gear Solid. Metal Gear Solid, the first 3D entry in the already established Metal Gear series, served as a soft reboot and easy entrypoint for new fans. It was released on the Playstation 1 in 1998 and became an instant smash success, selling over seven million copies and being lauded with rave reviews. To this day, Metal Gear Solid is considered one of the most influential, important, and groundbreaking video games of all time. You play as international super spy, Solid Snake, as he is tasked with infiltrating military base Shadow Moses Island that has been taken over by rogue militant group FOXHOUND. The game plays primarily from a top-down perspective as you are put in a variety of sandbox environments featuring heavily armed enemies. The player is given the choice to tackle these encounters as they see fit, whether with stealth or guns-blazing violence. The game has a cold color palette consisting of blues, whites, greys, and blacks, and features a fuzzy, pixelated look due to the 32-bit limitations of the Playstation 1. What really set Metal Gear Solid apart from other games on the market at the time was its use of cutscenes. Kojima translated his love of film into the game by directing and writing digital movie scenes that help tell the story of the game. While this had been done before, no game before Metal Gear Solid had the same cinematic feel.

As Solid Snake, the player is tasked with destroying the Metal Gear unit that FOXHOUND has taken for themselves at Shadow Moses. Metal Gears, the namesake of the series, are bipedal, pilotable weapons with nuclear capabilities. Metal Gears are not the only outlandish part of the narrative, however. The game features cyborg ninjas, gun-slinging cowboys, clones of characters, and twists revealing characters to be secretly related. Kojima relishes in the camp of it all and indulges classic science fiction, spy and western movie tropes. While the plot of Metal Gear Solid is incredibly complex and referential to classic Hollywood,

the central idea of it is very clear denouncement of nuclear arms and war and critique of America. What elevates this simple concept is the way Kojima utilizes the interactive nature of the medium to get this point across. From the very beginning of the game, “the player is explicitly (verbally) or implicitly (non-verbally, and mostly visually) instructed not to kill an enemy unless it is completely necessary” (Stamenković et al. 16) through Snake’s low healthpool and the red alert that is triggered when spotted. Even later in the game, when “the player gets access to more and more powerful weapons” and “it becomes easier to fight one's way through the waves of enemies even while in alert mode” the player will find that, due to “limited health and ammo at their disposal, the player who chooses to fight as opposed to hiding will eventually be outgunned” (Stamenković et al. 16) by never-ending waves of enemies. Therefore, through gameplay, the game preaches a pacifist message. Kojima is not just a pacifist on the scale of individual encounters, however. This theme carries over to the macro level when the full scope of the narrative is considered. Metal Gear Solid is about the danger nuclear weapons pose to all of humanity – and Snake is no patriot either. Snake “feels he does not owe ‘anything to this army or this country’” (Stamenković et al. 20). America itself is criticized for the development of these weapons, but such themes won’t be explored much deeper until the sequel. For now, Solid is content with its “references to real-world conflicts, scientific projects, and political organizations and institutions” that “represent vital elements for the communication of the game's core pacifist tenets” (Stamenković et al. 21).

After the critical and commercial triumph that was Solid, all eyes were on Kojima for what he would make next. Finally, at gaming expo E3 2000, publisher Konami revealed Metal Gear Solid 2. The trailer featured Solid Snake gearing up for another adventure. Finally, in November of 2001, gamers got their hands on the hotly anticipated sequel. Players would soon

find it was not the blockbuster they were promised, however. After the introduction character, the player assumes the role of Raiden, a new, blonde-haired protagonist who stands in stark contrast to the stoic, solemn, and badass Snake. Raiden is whiny, confused, and unprepared as he is sent onto oil rig Big Shell to rescue a kidnapped president from a rogue squadron of mercenaries. While Metal Gear Solid featured some fantastical elements, MGS2 pushes the boundary between grounded spy thriller and kooky comedy even further – one of the terrorists Raiden faces is a bomb-obsesesed roller skater named FATMAN; another, an invincible vampire named Vamp. The game follows the same structure as Solid as Raiden takes out the terror cell one by one, working his way through Big Shell as the plot reveals twists and turns. That is, until the very end where a shocking revelation is made: the whole game has been a simulation. See, the whole world is secretly run by a shadow organization called the Patriots. Who are the Patriots? The Patriots are an AI composed of America’s “core ideals” and they have orchestrated the whole Big Shell incident to replicate the events that transpired at Shadow Moses so they can track Raiden and use the information to create another Solid Snake – another perfect soldier. That’s not all – the Patriots want to use a new AI system to, as they say, “save humanity.” They believe that, before the internet, there was a natural filtering of information – only what was important was passed down. Now, however, with the advent of the internet, infinite information can be spread and the Patriots believe humanity will stagnate as they will be unable to distinguish what is important from what is drivel. This serves as a commentary of government internet censorship as well, though,

From the moment MGS2 was announced, Kojima was determined to make sure players were misled. By marketing the game as a Solid Snake follow-up adventure and making him absent for the majority of the game, he defied player expectation as both a commentary on sequel

culture but also so players felt lied to and betrayed. This deception is crucial – it is the same deception Raiden feels when he realizes his mission was fake. The fantastical elements in the game play a similar role. With a similar campy tone and winks to movie tropes, Kojima continues paying homage to American pop culture which makes the anti-American message even more complicated and poignant. These elements do more than just this, though, as Kojima is not content regurgitating the same ideas as his last game. Now, in a game concerned with the flow and restriction of information that has purposefully deceived its players, Kojima uses these fantastical elements to make Raiden, and the player, question the reality around them. There are multitudes of intentional mistakes – people appear in locations without any explanation and powers, such as Fortune’s bullet deflection, appear and disappear in seemingly random ways. All of this is to continue to blur the line between reality and delusion, which feeds into the increased role technology plays in our lives. With so much information at our fingertips, and so much fake news spreading on the internet, it can be hard to decipher what is real and what is not. A random lie can generate as much buzz as real news. With the internet, what is real and what is not? Kojima uses the medium of video games to make us feel the confusion he is trying to explain, whereas, if he made a film, we would just be seeing this confusion in someone else. By making the player an active agent being misled and lied to, he creates a powerful statement on information and truth in the internet age at the intersection of gameplay, video game hype cycles, and the narrative of the game.

Kojima accomplishes more than just this in MGS2. He manages to peel back another layer of the game and questions MGS2’s existence as a game and the role of the player. In the early 2000’s, the video game industry was in the midst of a shift – the market was now dominated by violent shooter games and the colorful, animal-filled platformers of the 90s were

being phased out. Not only were more military games being produced, but the American military themselves had a hand in production. In MGS2, Kojima looks at the violent video game as a tool of real-life war and forces the player to think critically about their role as the player. Kojima scratched the surface of these ideas in MGS when “Snake chastises [another character] Meryl for thinking that combat simulations are the same as real war” (Stamenković et al. 18), but he digs deeper in MGS2. Over the course of the game, it is revealed this is Raiden’s first mission in the field and all of his training has occurred in virtual reality. Because “the virtual simulation in which Raiden has been involved in is a subtly altered replay of the first Metal Gear Solid game,” “Raiden, the VR trained soldier, is just the equivalent of a Metal Gear fan” (Noon and Dyer-Witherford 12). Therefore, Kojima is looking at the ways violence in video games removes the player from the horror, and the whole of MGS and MGS2 “becomes a metaphor for the player’s own potential conditioning for war by virtual play” (Noon and Dyer-Witherford 12). In 2022, this feels prophetic. Today, “the beset directors of remote-controlled armed aerial drones” are “not air force pilots, but hardcore videogamers” who, “controller in hand and monitoring multiple screens, virtually deliver actual attacks on villages” (Noon and Dyer-Witherford 13). Kojima uses the medium of video games to analyze the role technology and video games play in war by forcing the player right in the middle of the conversation.

A decade and a half after Metal Gear Solid 2, the video game industry was preparing for something huge. After a slew of Metal Gear sequels, Kojima and Konami had a historic falling out, and Kojima went on to establish his own studio and announce a new game. At first, the only information made public was that it would feature famous figures from the film industry, such as Mads Mikkelson, Guillermo del Toro and Norman Reedus, and cinematic trailers were released teasing black, inky specters, and strange babies. Hype was through the roof – a game combining

all these film legends and the first independent Kojima game? But then... Death Stranding released in 2019 with a dull thud. You play as Sam Porter Bridges, who shares Norman Reedus’ likeness, as you venture to reconnect a dystopian America by... delivering packages. Most of Death Stranding consists of managing the weight distribution of packages and then traversing mountainous terrains and rivers to deliver the packages from settlement to settlement. The game still has Kojima’s flair for wackiness, from strange Monster Energy product placements to a strange, nearly impossible to grasp plot filled with twists and turns, but the gameplay is incredibly, uncharacteristically slow. There are a few third-person shooting segments and boss fights, but nearly the whole game is spent traversing and delivering packages.

What really sets Death Stranding apart is the way it forces the player to slow down and reflect. Sam is equipped with a BB, a little baby that helps guide him, but sometimes the BB cries and Sam has to rock him in his arms. For the player to input this command, they have to actually cradle the controller and sway it back and forth, forcing the player to slow down, mindfully connect with Sam, and reflect on the journey. Even the controls force the player to be mindful of their actions – the analog triggers of the controller are used to balance Sam in one direction or another if he loses his footing. Where Kojima pushes the boundary is his usage of online play. By the PS4/Xbox One generation of consoles, multiplayer shooters dominate the market. Every online game is competitive and violent. We’ve already seen how Death Stranding flips the violent video game on its head by producing a peaceful, mindful package delivery simulator, but what of its multiplayer functionality? Well, Kojima actually created the first cooperative multiplayer game of its scale. On your quest to deliver packages, you can build bridges, ladders, zip lines and more to make your journey easier. These items will actually appear in the game worlds of other players, and vice versa. By connecting independent American

settlements, players connect with other players in a really subversive but effective way of cooperation. Players were looking forward to violent competition typical of multiplayer games, but Kojima delivered a peaceful, cooperative experience to express a point about connection and technology only possible through the interactive medium of video games.

Like the Metal Gear games before it, Kojima puts lots of references to American pop culture in Death Stranding – Guillermo del Toro’s character is named DIEHARDMAN after the classic film. The game serves as a critique, though, of the way technology has isolated us into small communities, and is all about reconnecting lost people. Despite the difference in gameplay and themes, Death Stranding builds upon everything Kojima worked upon before. While Metal Gear Solid highlighted the tension between American pop culture and American imperialism and Metal Gear Solid 2 questioned the role of technology and the internet in war and the flow of information, they both took advantage of the unique storytelling capabilities offered by video games to insert players into his conversations, forcing them to reconcile with themselves and the themes of the game. Kojima is a real pioneer, a master of subversion, and a visionary director with an incredibly nuanced take on storytelling. In one of his many essays, Kojima reflects on when he heard filmmaker Ryu Murakami say that all stories have the same structure: “the protagonist falls into a hole and either crawls out or dies within” (Kojima 32). To Kojima, this made sense and he “could see nearly all stories fitting into that pattern” (Kojima 32). That is, at least, until Kojima heard the words of Kobo Abe who said that, as a third option, “the man finds a life inside the pit” (Kojima 32). Instead of trying to undo bad circumstances or ignore them, Kojima looks for ways to exist with problems and move forward with them. He doesn’t try to bring humanity back to a time when we were connected or before technology – instead, he looks for ways we can co-exist with and move forward with these technologies. Many video game

directors and designers have delivered impactful experiences. Neil Druckmann with his narrative work in The Last of Us or Shigeru Miyamoto with his gameplay innovations in Mario, Zelda, and Metroid, but no one besides Hideo Kojima has taken full advantage of the medium. When you play a Kojima game, you are not just watching a story unfold or interacting with fun game mechanics and smart design. You are thrust into a story that extends beyond the game, one that questions the role of the player in the wider world while still examining the characters that exist within its digital boundaries. Kojima pushes not just the video game industry forward, but extends the very boundaries of storytelling by delivering experiences impossible without interactivity and not replicated by an industry often fearful of the risk that comes with his unconventional style.

Kojima, Hideo, et al. The Creative Gene: How Books, Movies, and Music Inspired the Creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid. Viz Media, LLC, 2021.

Mejeur, Cody. "Playing with Playthroughs: Distance Visualization and Narrative Form in Video Games." Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 3, 2020. ProQuest, http://proxy.library.nyu.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fscholarly -journals%2Fplaying-with-playthroughs-distance-visualization%2Fdocview%2F255355664 4%2Fse-2.

Noon, Derek, and Nick Dyer-Witheford. “Chapter 5: Sneaking Mission: Late Imperial America and Metal Gear Solid.” Utopic Dreams and Apocalyptic Fantasies: Critical Approaches to Researching Video Game Play, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD, 2010.

Stamenković, Dušan, et al. “The Persuasive Aims of Metal Gear Solid: A Discourse Theoretical Approach to the Study of Argumentation in Video Games.” Discourse, Context & Media, vol. 15, 2017, pp. 11–23., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2016.12.002.