Everyone grows up being told the same thing.Ĭolonel: "You're special." "Believe in yourself and you will succeed." Rose: Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Rose: Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans.Ĭolonel: Rights of criminals are given more respect than the privacy of their victims. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Rose: You're being silly! What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context.Ĭolonel: The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards the development of convenient half-truths. Rose: Raiden, you seem to think that our plan is one of censorship. VIDEO: Colonel Campbell outlines the birth of The Patriots and a new digital system of control: MGS2’s closing scenes – where player character Raiden confronts his commanding officer Colonel Campbell, and his girlfriend Rose, who have both deceived him – lift the veil on The Patriots’ plans to manipulate society via information systems, bearing uncanny resemblance to the online world of 2018. A brief recap of the Metal Gear Solid story timeline.Confusing? Sure, but obfuscation is the point, since systems of control work best when operating by stealth.
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The game’s big twist is that you, the player, are an active – but unknowing – participant in the S3 Plan, aka The Selection for Societal Sanity (camouflaged behind its trial run, the Solid Snake Simulation… look, no one said this was straightforward…), run by the game’s real villains The Patriots.
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This ‘bait and switch’ of the main character is intentional, and used to relay the game’s theme of societal control, the rise of the internet, and the nature of free will. Notionally, it’s a good vs bad tanker heist, where you play – much to many fan’s dismay – an unknown, fop-haired, soldier called Raiden and not the original game’s hero, Solid Snake. MGS2 is a dense, meta-textual, sequel to one of PlayStation’s most famous games one that took its fans years to understand. MGS2 forced you to play as new protagonist Raiden, not series' hero Solid Snake, to make a wider point about the information age and the nature of free will. This is not science fiction, but rather an uncanny prediction of the digital society in which we live today – which affects us all in subtler, more sinister, ways than Mueller’s investigation into voter manipulation – that has already changed our political landscape and capacity for debate. MGS2's 'villains' aren't an exact analogue of a social media giant like Facebook, or even a data firm like Cambridge Analytica, but more a system of control in which we are active, if unwitting, participants. Hideo Kojima’s misunderstood MGS2 foretold of a shadowy organisation called The Patriots who aimed to control society through digital manipulation, using social profiling, targeted memes and stealthy pervasion. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution.” Rose and Colonel Campbell, MGS2 All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander. “In the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. The irony is that MGS2 had warned us how memes were hindering the transmission of worthwhile information by cluttering the world with trivial data. The meme became the story, distracting us from closer inspection of Kojima's work. The topic is currently making headlines via a firm called Cambridge Analytica, who harvested over 57m Facebook user profiles to create targeted advertising aimed at influencing voting intentions. Amusing as it was, the meme was shared and forgotten within 24 hours, with few pausing to consider the accuracy of MGS2's predictions of a digital society where personal data held the key to behavioural manipulation.
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