How a 2001 video game warned us about the dangers of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering
More than just a game: the video game character Psycho Mantis breaks the fourth wall by speaking directly to the player. Similar to writer Kurt Vonnegut’s addressing of the reader him/herself in “Breakfast of Champions,” it serves to remind us the limits of video game technology in disseminating information: no matter what, we’re still players in a game. Long before the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a Japanese video game predicted society’s issues of truth and reality. Over a decade before my posts on post-truth aphorisms and our struggles in constructing narratives, Hideo Kojima would create a game in which the archenemy was none other than the American government itself in 2001. In what would become the first postmodern video game, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty warns the player about the dark side of science and technology through stealth in an action-packed journey. In today’s discussion of ethical issues surrounding gene editing techniques (like CRISPR-Cas9) as well as the growing power of artificial intelligence, the message holds true to today. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty for the Playstation 2 continues to be among the best messages about the dangers of our Information Age.
Video games as media, though not frequently seen as forms of art, can be analyzed to understand ourselves in simulated universes. Much the same way a fiction such as Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” can teach us higher truths about society through devices such as irony and satire, video games do so but give the player a goal to achieve. Playing Pac-Man to eat pellets and run away from ghosts is a simple goal. But, for the philosophically conscious Sons of Liberty, the player must uncover a conspiracy about “The Patriots”, a group who manipulated information to control all three branches of the American government. Later in the game, though, the Patriots become encoded onto data itself. They are then manufactured into a form of artificial intelligence that control information to, therefore, control human behavior. The way genetic information is replaced by ideas of digital information sheds light on current concerns surrounding artificial intelligence and genetic engineering hand in hand. As the player progresses through the game, similarly, finding the truths about these stories and uncovering the secrets presents the player with the control and power to make the right decisions. The game’s other post-modern elements, such as breaking the fourth wall by deceiving the player into thinking they’ve los and introducing anachronistic characters like vampires set the stage of distrust and avant-garde as well. However, the central themes hint at the importance of anyone in society to understand the ethical concerns (from philosophy to science itself) of this dual (genetic-digital) antagonist of the Patriots.
To introduce the premise of the game, I first look at the end. As with cyclical, non-linear narratives of the postmodern genre, the protagonist Solid Snake proclaims a dramatic monologue to the player him/herself at the end of the game. Throughout the game, Solid Snake, a genetically engineered soldier must hunt down the bioterrorism of the Patriots. At the end, however, it’s revealed that this entire purpose was part of a simulation to test human behavior in a society of manipulated information. In his gritty, serious, yet determined voice, Solid Snake declares:
Life isn’t just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA. Through speech, music, literature and movies… what we’ve seen, heard, felt… anger, joy and sorrow… these are the things I will pass on. That’s what I live for. We need to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light. We have all the magic of the digital age to do that with. The human race will probably come to an end some time, and new species may rule over this planet. Earth may not be forever, but we still have the responsibility to leave what traces of life we can. Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.
Though we face a grim, dismal future, with dire fears of climate change, nuclear war, and terrorism, we look at society for all its flaws. If we don’t live forever, then it makes no difference for us to build a better future. We keep the past alive, as Snake emphasizes, through history and philosophy. It’s important to realize this history preserves the immortality, even if life and humans themselves are ephemeral.
To exemplify the trial man must uncover, the player continuously discovers true allegiances, backgrounds, and motives of characters, such as Solid Snake himself. In crafting a narrative about the power of technology, there are two tragedies that illustrate different flaws of the human condition. The first is the President George Sears (a genetically modified clone) becoming a terrorist, the game’s primary antagonist. This tragic fall is similar to the Roman Emperor Nero’s road to tyranny (though the truth of that is questioned). The fall happens as the Patriots (who control all branches of the government, as well as businesses and hospitals), attempt to murder Sears, who wants to fight for the freedom of information, to preserve their power. They do this through the GW System, which announces the tragic themes such as: “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.”
Another protagonist, Raiden, a rookie who idolizes Solid Snake and works for the Patriots to kill Sears. The second tragedy, Raiden’s existential tragedy, on the other hand, comes as he realizes his own military support are not humans, but programmed computers. Only at the end, as he throws away his dog tags that have the player’s name on them, does he find freedom from the information that controlled him.
Sears believes life predetermined by genetic information and must murder to re-write history as he becomes a terrorist. Nietzsche (as he wrote in “The Birth of a Tragedy”) would describe it as a Dionysian view of freedom that breaks from common notions of the way a president would act. As Snake proclaimed, we need to develop these new ideas of thinking to address the tyranny of those who control information. These could be interpreted as our fears of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Sears’ discovery, as though he were only a pawn in a game, forces him to realize old-fashioned ways of thinking lead to sort of obsolescence of information. Similar to today’s news sources and forms of journalism preserving truth and justice in an era of fake news and preservation as well as bots on social media pretending to be human, our existential tragedies. The GW system’s name itself references George Washington. Sears solidifies this allusion by declaring independence of a new nation on the day (April 30th) George Washington took office.
Raiden, on the other hand, represents the player, as he’s guided through the story by others. He relies solely on what’s being told to him the same way we, consumers of information, make sense of a twisted, confusing world. Raiden loves war games, as the player of Sons of Liberty would, and thinks he knows what to do because of this, much the same way the player thinks he/she knows what to do because the game tells them to.
“I’m just a man who’s good at what he does: killing,” Solid Snake explains. He recognizes that he’s forced to kill as a result destiny itself, a necessary evil, and still believes there’s never a right part in murder. In a deconstruction of the video game genre itself (by taking apart this goal we’re given), we’re left questioning the virtual reality that video games themselves create. Deconstruction, in the literary sense, as argued by philosopher Jacques Derrida in Limited Inc, would serve to argue re-establishment of the relationship between fiction and non-fiction itself. The same way we evaluate truth from fake news and post-truth politics, Derrida argued that the essential question we must ask is “What is nonfiction?” Taking Solid Snake’s speech for granted, Raiden asks this question to free himself. I believe that, if the player finds this existential freedom from their own voids of truth and reality, then, they too have won. Coming to terms with the truth of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, in the ways we may control our destinies and life itself, we too may find freedom. Even as modern computers generate art the same way composers create music and the current trends of genetic engineering push the limits of our precision, those truths are only there insofar as we create them. Solid Snake continues this theme in another monologue by adding:
The memories you have and the role you were assigned are burdens you have to carry. It doesn’t matter if they were real or not. That’s never the point. … There’s no such thing in the world as absolute reality. Most of what they call real is actually fiction. What you think you see is only as real as your brain tells you it is. … Listen, don’t obsess over words so much. Find the meaning behind the words, then decide.
At the time of game’s release, these events paralleled the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the creation of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in the real world. Given the realistic themes of the game, it’s difficult to not draw comparisons of society through them. With increasing dissatisfaction towards the government involvement in those issues, one might argue about the game’s theme is criticism of the U.S. government at the time. For today’s issues, however, I believe Son’s of Liberty illustrates modern fears of the privacy and technology as a whole. We find meaning behind words the same way we uncover our destinies, even if they’re predetermined by genetic engineering the same way Solid Snake and George Sears are. Similarly, Raiden’s decision to choose his own destiny parallels this, as a genetic-digital duality would.
Postmodern art, as Solid Snake explains, views reality with a smug smirk invites the audience find the meaning of words, language, and art themselves. Questioning everything, the player is left to wonder what sort of dark monsters lurk in what’s real and what isn’t. Truth in the Information Age may be elusive, as exemplified with the scandals of Facebook-Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections. Solid Snake may be pessimistic and cynical with his world views, but, for the fictional tragedies of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, we can at least take solace in that we can meander through the difficulties of truth itself.
Originally published at www.hussainather.com on November 17, 2018.
