Patreon Letter: 22nd September 2019

Hi folks, 

Jackson here with another Patreon Letter, and today we're gonna be talking about the man himself, Hideo Kojima, because he's been On One this month with the promotion of Death Stranding and has left a whole bunch of discourse in his wake. And I just want to talk a little bit about that. So let's dive into the mess.

somebody please take this man's phone away from him

In a combination of tweets and interviews around TGS this month, Kojima has been promoting Death Stranding by going all the way in on his own mythmaking, even by Kojima's lofty standards. It started with him talking about Death Stranding as a brand new genre that nobody has ever seen before, which is up there but not unexpected from the words and deeds guy. Guy says wild shit about the game he directs, always has and always will. But it's spilled further into tweets like the one above, or the one that everyone is talking about today, where he explains: "A HIDEO KOJIMA GAME means the declaration of me doing concept, produce, original story, script, setting, game design, casting, dealing, directing, difficulty adjustments, promoting, visual design, editing, supervising the merch." Which - as a lot of people have pointed out online today - is a list of jobs that take on an AAA game such as Death Stranding, take tens if not hundreds of people.

Anyway there's been a lot of discussion about that tweet today, people saying about how he only means he's involved with all aspects, or debating whether taking credit means taking responsiblity for the failures (this one's very funny because you just have to look at all the people still working under awful conditions at Konami to understand how off base it is), but on the whole it's a lot of missing the forest for the trees. The specifics of any of the posts aren't as important as the fact that this is arguably the single most successful video game developer of all time posting his own tweets about how important and clever he is, and turning his success built by his immense access to resources and labour as some kind of scrappy underdog story. 

The important question about these recent Kojima tweets and quotes isn't "is this bad and is he cancelled now?" It is the specifics of "what does the public persona of Kojima, the things he chooses to say and the culture that has built up around him, do to his art?" Because it would be disingenuous to act like it does nothing. His work does not come out in a vacuum, and every Metal Gear Solid game has leaned hard into metatext for its themes. MGSV is basically a game about how hard it is to be the boss of a massive company, and how tragic it is that your beautiful vision and ideology gets diluted by hours of managing dehumaning spreadsheets until you see people as numbers on a board. The War Economy is not subtle. Capitalism destroys human lives for profit and the bosses are all complicit. Big Boss tries to make a home outside of that system, and only ends up replicating it and causing further suffering. He is the bad guy. Now what does it mean that the man who did concept, produce, original story, script, setting, game design, casting, dealing, directing, difficulty adjustments, promoting, visual design, editing, supervising the merch on that game is tweeting about how he "Had dream and connection that's all." 

Each person will come to their own answer, but for me I think it sucks. It sucked when he was tweeting about words and deeds, it sucked when he was writing film essays in Rolling Stone where he would only analyse movies through the lens of Metal Gear, and it sucks now in the lead up to the release of a game that I think looks pretty good! And it sucks not just because of the things he says, but because how much the narrative of his auteur genius is reified by games culture at large. He's just a man who directs video games, just one has a lot more power and access than almost everyone else who gets to do that.

And it's frustrating because my feelings on Death Stranding are that it looks surprisingly good. I hated the early trailers, I don't like the stunt casting or grim realistic aesthetic, and I still think the story looks bad, but learning that the gameplay is this weird fiddly mix of inventory management, survival mechanics and learning routes through delicate spaces I was all the way back on board. It sounds like a mix of Resident Evil 4's briefcase management combined with Dead Rising Escort Missions. Which is a game for no one but me. It seems awkward and full of bullshit that appeals to my sensibilities but not neccesarily a mass audience. Honestly? With the focus on ritualistic spatial navigation, enemy avoidance and inventory management heavy survival, it looks a lot like Metal Gear Survive (which I like!)

Which, if Death Stranding was just a random game coming out, that'd be fine, I'd play it, it'd get mixed reviews and become a cult hit and we'd all go about our business. But it's not. It's a game that Kojima himself is promoting as a brand new genre, with headlines about how you might not even enjoy it til the half way mark... because it's so experimental and out there. Which just isn't true. There's lots of oppressive, friction heavy games interested in exploring very similar ideas. They just don't have the budget that Kojima gets, the industry connections, or the cultural cache. And gamers usually fucking hate them. 

So my interest in Death Stranding as a video game that looks appealing to me exists in opposition to my interest in Death Stranding as a marketed idea and brand, and the role that Kojima himself has in his own ludicrous mythmaking. More than anything it's just gauche. It's not going to bring anyone to your side, all it does is detract from your work. Imagine David Lynch yelling for months before Twin Peaks The Return about how it's a brand new genre of television. 

As a wise man once said, one does not need to proclaim your own genius, one just needs to let Geoff Keighly do it for you.

-Jackson