Historicizing Neoliberalism

One of the most significant achievements of MGS4 is its rewriting of the history of neoliberalism, only from the critical stance of the transnational public, rather than the celebratory stance of Wall Street elites. In Chapter 3, we argued that the shadowy Patriots symbolize the global reach and limitless greed of Wall Street. At the beginning of Act 2, MGS4 extends this metaphor further, by revealing the motives behind the rise of the Patriots in the 1960s, their rise to global hegemony in the 1970s and 1980s, and finally the emergence of counter-forces to their reign in the 1990s and 2000s. This process of writing the history of neoliberalism begins when Snake and Col. Campbell discuss the motives behind Liquid Ocelot's insurrection against the Patriots:

A cut-scene shows Snake inching forwards cautiously on the floor of a mountain highland forest, in a nameless Latin American nation embroiled in a civil war. He is communicating to Col.

Campbell via a radio transceiver.

Snake: “Colonel, how deeply are they involved in all of this?”

Campbell: “The Patriots, you mean?”

Snake: “The data we got from Arsenal Gear was a load of crap. Twelve founders who've all been dead for a hundred years – give me a break. We know they exist today. If the purpose of this battlefield control system is to control IDs, it fits in with their plans perfectly.”

Campbell: “Seizing control of the world's ID systems, and then using them to manipulate the economy and information flow, for the Patriots, that's the ultimate prize. You might say the

Patriots are the embodiment of the war economy.”

Snake: “Everything that Solidus feared five years ago, it's all come to pass.”

Campbell: “Now with the media and global opinion under complete control, not even the UN can stand up to them.”

Snake: “Then Liquid's insurrection is against them?”

Campbell: “Exactly. It would seem as though Liquid has taken up Big Boss's cause. An age of persistent, universal warfare. A world where mercenaries are free from domination. In a sense, the Outer Heaven Big Boss envisioned is already a living reality.”

Snake: “You mean the PMCs and their war business.”

Campbell: “Right now, Liquid is a slave to the Patriots, forced to fight their proxy wars for them.”

Snake: “He must be dying to break free of their spell.”

Campbell: “Beneath the surface, a new cold war is brewing between Liquid and the Patriots over who will survive.”

Snake: “And no matter who wins, the world has no future. Until we stop Liquid and destroy the System, we'll never be free.”

Campbell: “Snake, what we call peace is an equilibrium kept in check by the war economy.

Destroying the System means wiping out the information society, the end of modern civilization.

Like it or not, we may have no choice but to protract the System.”¹⁷⁴

Far from being the stereotypical arch-villain bent on total destruction, Liquid Ocelot is pursuing an entirely rational goal – he is seeking freedom from a system which enslaves him.

Campbell's explicit naming of this system as slavery is a nod towards the flourishing genre of the transnational neo-slave narrative, represented in literature by Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), in film by Charles Burnett's Nightjohn (1996), and in videogames by Sony Santa Monica's God of War franchise (2005-2010). That said, Snake's comment about Arsenal Gear point in a rather different direction, namely the events of Kojima's earlier videogame, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001).

One of the narrative challenges facing Kojima and his fellow designers was the necessity to reorganize the franchise's sprawling, labyrinthine plot into a coherent story. To its credit, MGS4 manages to wrap up every single narrative loose end and unresolved plot twist of the first three iterations of the series. It achieves this feat by rewriting the franchise's fictional history into an allegorical history of neoliberalism. This task was so important to the design team that the

studio released a free downloadable application to fans on Sony's Playstation Network in 2008 called the Metal Gear Solid Database. The Database provides a canonical version of the

franchise's history, with detailed exegeses of the main characters, events, and features of MGS1, MGS2, MGS3, MGS4 and MGS: Portable Ops (to prevent spoilers, entries relating to MGS4 are inaccessible to users until the player has completed MGS4 at least once).

In addition to creating a thematically unified franchise history, the team also had to rework two ongoing themes of MGS – the discourses of biotechnology (genetic engineering) and nanotechnology. MGS4 transforms the discourse of biotechnology into a site of struggle between the closed, proprietary communications network of the Patriots, and the open source and peer-to-peer networks epitomized by Otacon and Sunny. In like manner, the discourse of nanotechnology is recoded into a site of struggle between Liquid Ocelot's PMCs, and a wide range of non-official media-systems (Drebin's radio broadcasts, Otacon's video feeds, Snake's conversations, and so forth).

The convergence of these two struggles occurs after Snake infiltrates a Latin American research lab in the middle of Act 2. The most prominent symbol of this convergence is a dense thicket of blue roses which grow outside the lab. These roses are a reference to a real-life

example of genetic engineering, the creation of genetically-blue roses in 2004.¹⁷⁵ They are one of the most significant symbols of the politics of neoliberal corporeality in the second half of

MGS4, and are featured prominently during several key moments of the storyline.

As it turns out, Naomi's lab is not just a research facility, it is also a museum of

biomedical history. It contains everything from a human-sized anatomy doll to a photograph of Dolly, the sheep cloned by British scientists in 1996.¹⁷⁶ However, the single most important

exhibit on display is what can be called the videogame body, or put more precisely, the digital bodies associated with videogame culture. That is, biotechnology stands in for videogame software (the game's internal programming, as well as the digitized forms of fan-created media and user-generated content), while nanotechnology stands in for videogame hardware (platforms such as the BluRay disc format and the Playstation 3 console).

Both digital bodies converge in the theme of transnational history. Naomi explains that when the SOP system was disrupted at the end of Act 1, the mass panic among the soldiers was not triggered by an external command or agent. Rather, it was the unintended result of the SOP system's own internal contradictions. The mass panic was something like the return-of-the-repressed of the neoliberal era, revealing that neoliberalism's utopia of limitless speculative freedom is founded on limitless immiseration and coercion:

Naomi: “But the moment the System stopped, all the pain, and fury, and sorrow, all the trauma and stress, all the hatred, regret, guilt, all the sensations that had been suppressed were unleashed within their hearts. Their memories, unlike their senses, weren't erased. Each enemy soldier they'd killed, each lost comrade, each threat of violence against the innocent, every act of war they'd committed was etched firmly in their hearts. In suppressing the user's mind, the nanomachines exact a heavy burden on his heart.

The user's body rejects the nanomachines; this reaction must then be suppressed with drugs. Before the user knows it, his mind is in complete shambles. Snake, remember Frank?”

Snake: “Frank Jaeger... Grey Fox.” Screen shows images of Grey Fox from MGS1.

Naomi: “They twisted his body for their experiments and nullified his broken heart with

nanomachines. SOP has taken it even further and applied it to living human beings. The sins of war these soldiers carried inside them returned to assault them in the form of unimaginable shell shock.” Screen subdivides into tiny screenshots from MGS1 and fades into blurry static. Naomi continues: “The meaning and the system may have changed, but the battlefield hasn't. Until that point, war was like a game to them.” Screen shows the cross-media bar interface used by players to access menu items on the Playstation 3. The interface scrolls down a vertical series of icons, showing Kojima's past Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid videogames.

Naomi: “And then, suddenly, reality came crashing down.” The interface halts on icon of MGS4.

Two blank icons beneath MGS4 are labeled “Under Construction”. Fade to black.

If the Nomad symbolizes the space of the videogame studio, and if Sunny's kitchen symbolizes the non-commercial media networks structurally linked to those studios, then Naomi

occupies the structural position of the videogame designer, i.e. the real-life media-workers who construct digital representations of bodies.

One of the perennial conundrums of these digital representations is their structural ambivalence. They can be used as tools of coercion and commodification, but they can also be tools of emancipation and solidarity. MGS4 acknowledges this contradiction in the form of its boss battles (these are key showdowns with powerful antagonists, a common feature of action-based videogames).

Much of the credit for these boss battles is due to Yoji Shinkawa, the main character designer and artist of the MGS franchise. One of the challenges facing Shinkawa was that each boss battle had to be different enough from standard opponents to be memorable, but not so different that players would be forced to adopt a completely different style of game-play.

Shinkawa's solution to this contradiction was to humanize the antagonists of the storyline.

Each boss has a unique personality, a unique background story, and a unique set of abilities tied to that story. Additionally, each boss has its own specific visual appearance as well as unique onscreen movements, gestures and animations. In one of KojiPro's English-language podcasts to fans, Konami employees Sean Eyestone and Christine Kogure responded to a fan's question about how Shinkawa managed to design such creative boss battles and boss characters with this vignette of KojiPro's internal production-process:

Sean: “You have to pay attention to the stage, and use the environment to your advantage, pay really close attention to everything, things like that. It's really a process where everybody works together, at the same time, to come up with the final concept. Once the concept is done, then of course we start making it. This will be a prototype, a rough version of the boss battle. It doesn't look good, but it has the gameplay in there. We test that out, and test out the concept and see is this really fun, if it's not as fun as we imagined, then why not, what can we do to make it fun, you know, toss things back and forth. Once we have something that stands up and feels fun, then we go back and go over our original concept again, and say okay, we got something now that's fun,

does it fit in with our story, how does it compare, is there anything we can adjust. If so, we make the adjustments, kind of go back and forth. In the final product, we have something that's fun, that fits in the story, and that everybody hopefully can enjoy.”

Christine: “I see. So we're showing that Mr. Shinkawa first creates a character and after that the concepts are developed. Are there times the character changes to match up with the concept? If there's a special attack, would the drawing [or] illustration change to accommodate that?”

Sean: “The thing is, it's always evolving. Sometimes the original concept may change, so the drawings change with it. Another thing that's kind of interesting about Shinkawa-san is that he doesn't always work only with drawings. He's a very, very talented artist. He works in three dimensions in his head, he has this amazing ability to create things. He actually does a lot of sculptures. Rather than sketching things and handing that off to 3D artists to convert to 3D, he would rather work in 3D himself many times. So he'll actually create sculptures out of clay and guajir and all these things. He has these really nice sculptures where you can see every single detail in 3D. That really helps out the modelers as well, because when 3D artists get the designs it's in 3D, a physical 3D object, so it's a lot easier for them to take reference pictures and create their in-game version off of that. They don't have to imagine the details, because they have it, the physical thing in front of them.”

Christine: “I've seen those sculptures but I wasn't aware that he himself made them, I wasn't aware of that.”

Sean: “If you go into Shinkawa-san's office and look at the sculptures above his desk, most of those he made himself. That's the process, how it goes.”¹⁷⁷

Every single boss battle in MGS4 delivers characterization through superlative character-design. Laughing Octopus is a biomechanical octopus with bullet-proof tentacles; Raging Raven, as her name implies, flies through the air on a hoverpak; Crying Wolf runs on four legs like a cybernetic wolf; Vamp has nanotechnological healing abilities eerily reminiscent of a vampire;

and Screaming Mantis hovers like an electronic preying mantis, turning the nanotechnological networks of soldiers against themselves. In addition to their animal signifiers, each the four Beauty and the Beast bosses are also linked to a specific emotional condition. Laughing Octopus laughs hysterically, Crying Wolf weeps, Raging Raven rages, and Screaming Mantis screams.

To defeat each boss, players must “read” the corporeality of the boss in question, by listening to dialogue and movement cues. Players must find creative game-play solutions appropriate to each boss, rather than relying on sheer firepower. Equally important is the task of reading the environment of these boss battles, which take place in cluttered spaces or outdoor

areas which offer cover and useful hiding-places.