Yeah, an eleven-year-old playing a game that's rated "M" for "Mature" - sounds waaaaay responsible of my parents. Honestly, I think I already was mature enough to understand bits and pieces of it. Obviously I wouldn't get the complex plot and everything right then and there, but it was my playthrough of the game that got me to realize a few things that I still believe or support to this day:
- Nuclear proliferation is horrible. It needs to stop.
- The right kind of music can make any situation stand out even more, fueling the experience with raw emotion that's just unbeatable.
- Video games, when made right, can be more than just entertainment - it can be an art form that spurns intellect and deep thought within the right people.
When I first finished Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, I'll admit I was one of the many people who found the plot to be confusing. Well, I'm not sure if "confusing" is the right word - "mental clusterfuck" seems to describe the first general opinion most gamers had when they finished the game. Then again, I was 13 at the time (I obtained the game late in 2002), and for a plot that complex and seemingly convoluted you had to be a bit older and more mature than that to digest it properly. (Or, you know... possess a genius-level IQ or something.)
After a few years passed, I did another playthrough in order to listen to the story again and to see if my high school education (and the important discovery that is Wikipedia) would help me understand the intricacies of Sons of Liberty.
It did. Gravely.
What I found was a social commentary on life and everything that eerily made sense. Granted, the entirety of the Metal Gear saga is a work of fiction, but what happens when a work of imagination clothes itself with the very fabric of reality? What happens when enough fact is meshed into the fiction, blurring the line between what is false and what is true?
(Author's Note: POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT! If you intend on following the plot of the Metal Gear series (hopefully through me), then I strongly suggest reading the rest of today's entry with caution.)
What follows here is a speech from Metal Gear Solid 2. Raiden, the protagonist of the second half of the game, is contacted by an Illuminati-esque cabal known only as the Patriots. What he listens to is a rather spooky take on modern sociopolitical views. In-game, it's just freaky to notice how badly you've been controlled, but when you apply what they say to real life, it's just bone-chilling in how the world could be like this. Again, I know it's all fiction, but... *shivers*
Here's a snippet of that speech (or as you lamer readers call it, a "wall of text" - even though this is far from the (accurate) definition of "wall of text"), edited to make it flow more like sociopolitical commentary aimed towards you, reader. Apart from anything Raiden said in interjection and the responses the Patriots smacked back at him being removed, no part of the text has been altered.
If you want to listen along or hear the speech yourself (plus the interjections and counters I removed), here it is on YouTube. (WARNING: SPOILERS!)
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To begin with, we're not what you'd call... "human." Over the past two hundred years, a kind of consciousness formed layer by layer in the crucible of the White House. It's not unlike the way life started in the oceans four billion years ago. The White House was our primordial soup, a base of evolution. We are formless. We are the very discipline and morality that Americans invoke so often. How can anyone hope to eliminate us? As long as this nation exists, so will we.
Don't you know that our plans have your interests - not ours - in mind?
The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information.
Human memories, ideas, culture, history - genes don't contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We've always kept records of our lives through words, pictures, symbols - from tablets to books. But not all the information was inherited by later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really.
That's what history is.
But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... all this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution.
You seem to think that our plan is one of censorship. What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context. The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you:
- Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans.
- Rights of criminals are given more respect than the privacy of their victims.
- Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species.
Everyone grows up being told the same thing: "Be nice to other people - but beat out the competition!" "You're special." "Believe in yourself and you will succeed." But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed. You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result: all rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt.
The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." And this is the way the world ends - not with a bang, but a whimper.
We're trying to stop that from happening.
It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species. Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce, retrieve valuable truths and even interpret their meaning for later generations?
That's what it means to create context. You lack the qualifications to exercise free will.
Does something like a "self" exist inside of you? That which you call "self" serves as nothing more than a mask to cover your own being. In this era of ready-made "truths," "self" is just something used to preserve those positive emotions that you occasionally feel. Another possibility is that "self" is a concept you conveniently borrowed under the logic that it would endow you with some sense of strength.
Do you feel lost? Why not try a bit of soul-searching? Don't think you'll find anything, though. Ironic that although "self" is something that you yourself fashioned, every time something goes wrong, you turn around and place the blame on something else. "It's not my fault." "It's not your fault." In denial, you simply resort to looking for another, more convenient "truth" in order to make yourself feel better, leaving behind in an instant the so-called "truth" you once embraced.
Should someone like that be able to decide what is "truth?" Should someone like you even have the right to decide? You've done nothing but abuse your freedom. You don't deserve to be free!
We're not the ones smothering the world - you are.
The individual is supposed to be weak, but far from powerless - a single person has the potential to ruin the world. And the age of digitized communication has given even more power to the individual. Too much power for an immature species.
Building a legacy involves figuring out what is wanted and what needs to be done for that goal. All this you used to struggle with. Now, we think for you. We are your guardians after all.
We rule an entire nation - of what interest would a single soldier, no matter how able, be to us?
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Again, here's the actual in-game speech in case you want to watch and listen to all of it. And again: spoiler warning if you click it.
Anyway, what caused me to look at this speech with interest right now (as it did back then) is how this particular train of thought looks like sociopolitical commentary from the view of the creator of the Metal Gear franchise, Hideo Kojima. While this is just insight weaved into a game, there are points to everything the Patriots have said. Considering that this game was released just under a decade ago (November 13, 2001 in North America), the fact of the matter is that this game's views (and Kojima's, by extension) surprisingly hold true to what is going on in the world right now.
A worldwide disillusioned sense of truth... the control and censorship of information for personal interests... society believing every spoon-fed bit of "information" they receive... defining right from wrong, purity from corruption, truth from lie... ...and the irony is that the Patriots make it sound like my blog (among others) needs to be filtered off the Internet!
*hearty laugh* What, I'm not allowed to throw in a joke?
Anyway, I'm not saying I believe in some kind of Illuminati controlling the world (much less the United States) or that there is some kind of government conspiracy. (I don't go around wondering if the world really is controlled by a shadow government of some kind.) I'm saying the Patriots noticed the glaring obviousness of human fallacy and corruption that's swept the globe. We lie, cheat, perform tasks in "off-the-books" manners, abuse the system, create our own sense of "truth" and deny anything that doesn't fit the form, create a façade to mask ourselves from fear - and those who deny that they do any of this are full of it. Not far from actual reality, is it?
Again, I heavily stress that this speech is from a work of fiction and my words here are opinions formed on that text. It's just a game, after all. However, that doesn't mean we can learn a little something from it, whether we learn something about ourselves, about our friends and co-workers, about society at large - about anything, really.
I'll admit: what I did for today's entry pretty much looks like something I pulled out of my own ass. At least that's what it looked like.. Originally, I was just going to put up the speech and some commentary in an attempt to break 1,000 words, but I got carried away and ended up putting actual commentary anyway. And guess what? When you take out the speech (which tallied up to 898 words), the total word count comes up to 1,168! HAH!
I have something to request from you, readers. It'd be interesting to see your take on this. Go ahead and leave some commentary - your responses to the speech or the entire conversation. I wonder what kind of insight this might spark.
I'll catch y'all tomorrow. I got work to do tonight. Yay, work. =D
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