Travelling through Twine #3: "I melt instantly"

CW: Summonr itself and some other games mentioned in this post are (at least potentially) NFSW.

Spoilers follow.

---

Summonr

Gay devils are in vogue. If queerness must be equated with evil, then why not find solace in sin? Maybe we can embrace the devil, or hell, even be the devil. Maybe we can even have sex with the devil.

But can we love the devil?

I’ve been thinking for a while, entirely motivated by the selfish desire for my particular subjectivity to be gratified, about the uneven representation between queer men and queer women in videogames. For as little as games portray queerness in general, it seems that queer women and girls are more often featured in both AAA and alternative games. As Joe Parlock writes, it appears that publishers think that a presumed audience of straight men will react more positively to romances between women than romances between men. And outside of commercial games, multiple alternative movements have been largely pioneered by queer trans women, many of their games naturally focusing on their own experiences.

I bring this up not to belittle the positive impact of well-written lesbian romances in commercial games for queer audiences in general. Nor do I wish to begrudge the real queer and trans women whose powerful games have paved the way for hundreds of artists to approach games in new, challenging ways, while those very women often remain in the margins and in relative poverty. I simply wish to establish a context of queer masculinity in games relative to other forms of queerness, while also fully aware of the abysmal under-representation of trans, non-binary, and genderqueer folks and asexual folks of all genders, particularly within commercial games.

Besides the amount of representation queers of different genders receive in games, they also frequently receive different kinds of representation. It seems that queer women more often get the earnest romances and coming of age narratives of Gone Home, Life is Strange, The Last of Us: Left Behind, and We Know the Devil, whereas queer men more often get games that focus on explicit sex and physical bodies like Robert Yang's games, Benji Bright’s Fuck That Guy and God(s), and Coming Out on Top. This is not to say that one type of representational focus is inherently more valuable than another; all genders could use more games that focus on queer physical intimacy and others that focus on emotional connection. I certainly love the complicated ideas about boundaries and pleasure in Robert Yang’s games, and Benji Bright’s interactive smut is often hilarious, hot, and occasionally poignant. But as a lonely babyqueer, I’m yearning much more for the earnest and the sentimental—games that say my romantic feelings for boys aren’t jokes and shouldn’t be boiled down to just sexual deviance. I want games about queer boys who are fucked-up and scared, and not just thirsty and twee.

With Summonr, a wonderful recent Twine by Bryce Duzan, I get both kinds of representations: a sweet game about the joys and doubts of developing romantic feelings and an explicit game about fucking Mephistopheles.

You play as Tristan Hench, an art student with a certain “fascination” with demons, a fascination so strong he unconsciously draws an undressing demon boy while daydreaming, his overwhelming thirst and loneliness materializing in his absent-minded doodles. “You need to get laid,” Tristan’s roommate Natalie says after catching him sketch the demon in the living room. “Too bad guys like that aren’t real, right?”

The next day Tristan overhears two boys in the hallway talking about “Summonr,” a sort of “Grindr for demons,” which Tris finds and downloads from a sketchy Russian website. This app, as it turns out, includes demon versions for all the notoriously pathetic, desperate, racist, and femmephobic gay men who use Grindr. “MONST FOR MONST. NO HUMANS.” In this sea of unpleasant demons and humans, how can you find someone you’d actually want to be with who’d also want to be with you? But Tris gets a mysterious personal message from someone who appears to be the demon in his dreams, of his drawings.

Summonr is pure escapist fantasy, a game that wonders, in a world where so many available queer men seem like demons (to other queers), what if one of them was actually...nice? Tris fears for his life when he first summons the demon, who forces Tris to the wall and demands to know why he was summoned, if Tris knows what forces he is dealing with, if he knows his incredible power. But it’s all in jest, meant to “break the ice.” It turns out “Meph” is an earnestly clumsy flirt with the stiff speech of a fuddy-duddy to match. Where most demons wish to devour the souls of their human hosts, Mephistopheles just wants to love and care for them. Meph calls to mind the nicer demons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: perhaps a bit scary in appearance, idiosyncratic in behavior, but ultimately good-hearted. And in this case, totally fuckable.  

Summonr gives you the option to skip the sex scenes if you wish. I’m grateful for this decision because many of the very few games featuring queer men that I’ve played seem built around the goal of getting laid. Watching or reading about your character getting fucked often seems the sole or main impetus for playing a lot of these games. Which is fine in and of itself, except when these games dominate the scant representation of queer male sexuality in games, highlighting the sexual deviance of queer men while neglecting the possibilities of developed relationships between them.

Again, this is where my selfish need for personal gratification comes into play—it’s important to represent non-standard relationships in addition to non-standard sex. But because I’m not currently cruising or looking to start, I don’t value games that resemble/centralize commitment-free cruising as much. Those games are likely to resonate more with players whose experiences fall in line with those games’ content. Of course, developing empathy for other people’s experiences is essential; one should learn to resist reading oneself in a protagonist who explores someone else’s perspective. That’s why we need not only diverse stories, but also challenging stories—stories that upset or alter our perspective, stories that show us something entirely new. Summonr is not a challenging story to me but one that reaffirms my own sense of identity and desires therein. Maybe I needed Tris’ and Meph’s vulnerability, their reciprocating touch, but I know that’s not all I need.

While other gay erotica games usually ask the player’s consent to view explicit content at the start, Summonr asks for consent at particular moments. Because Tris and Meph fuck regardless of whether you read the details or not, sex remains essential to the narrative. But this decision implies that the explicit depiction of sex isn’t essential to the player’s enjoyment of said narrative. I did not, uh, skip the sex scenes, but the game respected that I might not have been there for them and is confident that its own story is compelling enough to carry me through to the end.

And even though they are optional, the sex scenes aren’t just steamy; they further characterize Tris and Meph’s relationship. Tris is incredibly nervous and awkward the first time for obvious reasons, and Meph does his best to make Tris feel comfortable by smiling at his faux pas and accommodating his hesitant wish for him to wear a condom. Burning bright red text fixes the player’s and Tris’ gazes on Meph’s demon features, such as a “single pointed claw” that tears Tris’ shirt open. Tris wonders if running his hands through Meph’s horns turns him on—wonders if the phenomenology of sex for Meph is at all comparable to his own—before his own experience overwhelms these thoughts.

But Tris hesitates to let the dream sweep him off his feet so completely. Throughout his time with Meph, which includes several dates, he sometimes wonders if he’s actually real and searches for a logic to the events that have led to his appearance. He also questions Meph about his own vastly different experiences of the world, including Hell. Tris learns that Meph had another relationship with a human in the 1950s that ended because the man wished to die, refusing to let Meph take him to Hell (which apparently isn’t that bad). Meph’s story raises a bunch of questions about mortality, love, and satisfaction: is “eternal” love an ideal anyone should strive for when our deaths can only disappoint our surviving partners—when our short lives might be good enough? Though Meph is the desired object of this dream, he has his own trauma and desires too, breaking down in front of Tris before putting his past behind him.

Tris almost ruins his burgeoning relationship with Meph at the end of the game. He starts worrying about the future. Bringing a boy home to the parents might not be a big deal for Tris and his family, but a demon? What if Meph gets bored of him? This dream has been wonderful, but maybe it’s too scary, maybe it’ll go so wrong. As Tris cries at Meph, upset that he won’t let himself be happy, Meph tells him to focus on the present, that they’ll “take it one day at a time.” The game ends with the two in each other’s arms, content yet uncertain whether their relationship will last the weekend or a lifetime. The game doesn’t deny that something could go wrong, that Tristan wasn’t meant to summon Mephistopheles into his bed, but it doesn’t necessitate these tragic possibilities either.  

It is with a loud, Romantic, babyqueer boy’s self-indulgence that I say Summonr is one of my favorite Twine games, a game about summoning the boy of your dreams into your life. It’s a game that dreams of more queer possibilities than many stories (TW), and dreams of satisfying more than just queer men’s needs for physical titillation. But dreams are just that—dreams.

But maybe…

Just maybe.

Travelling through Twine #2: "Your Name is Now Excuse Me"

No one working retail has a story. They have ten stories. They have twenty. For all the mundane tasks it requires, high stress it imparts, and low pay it offers, retail labor exposes you to the myriad faces of the subjects of late capitalism. A spot behind the cash register is the place for surreal encounters with strangers, exchanges with both the frustrated and the friendly. I can only think of a thousand stories between myself and my retail-working friends. There are some common experiences. Couples simultaneously shoving credit cards in your face, their competing expressions of love inevitably leading to an argument with you in the middle. The blood-curling screams of children whose parents can’t afford the stuffed koala. The bardic customers sharing their life stories while you nod politely and anxiously eye your growing queue. Favorite regulars who actually know you by name. Tears and gossip in the break room. And that’s not even scratching the surface.

“Your Name Is Now Excuse Me” is a Twine by Jacob Gooch, based on his and his friends’ experiences in retail, submitted in My First Game Jam earlier this year. It’s a game that explicitly sets out, in “empathy game” rhetoric, to show how retail workers are often mistreated and dehumanized by customers and a system that requires them to act (and react) in specific ways. But instead of simply portraying negative experiences between customers and workers, the game portrays a range of interactions, including helping grateful customers, comforting or arguing with co-workers, and getting reprimanded by a supervisor.

You start the game by entering your name, which, in accordance with the title, the game denies before rechristening you “Excuse Me.” The sequence is unfortunately too obvious and heavy-handed, as your new “retail name” is explicitly mandated by an abstract narrator. Since we easily get the joke from the title itself, the game shouldn’t have to explain it to us. The game could have retained its ironic power by jumping right into scenarios of customers addressing you as “Excuse Me” right after entering your name. But I do like that your co-workers address you by the name you entered in the beginning. A lot of times fellow co-workers seem like the only people who’ll treat you like a human being at retail jobs, shared experience helping with the empathy.

“Your Name is Now Excuse Me” doesn’t have much in the way of in-depth characterization but instead structures itself through simplistic vignettes of the different kinds of interactions one might face working for a department store chain. The game features a diverse group of people regarding race, gender, and religion both working and shopping in the store, even depicting the specific struggles certain marginalized people might face there. For instance, a woman worker is poked in the chest by an irate customer, and a Muslim worker is insulted by customer who speaks in Urdu about her dress.

The game offers choices regarding how to behave to customers and co-workers, and though these choices don’t present particularly difficult moral dilemmas, you’ll want to see the different repercussions. A customer might be angry regardless of how sincerely you try to help her. You might get in trouble with your boss for comforting a downtrodden co-worker in the break room when you’re supposed to be back on the clock. None of the choices have consequence beyond the isolated incidents within the game, and you can’t get fired. The game does a good job of portraying the stress of specific moments in retail but misses an opportunity to show how anxiety about dismissal hangs over your head after multiple infractions.

The best thing about “Your Name is Now Excuse Me” is how it balances out the poor experiences working retail with a few heartwarming interactions. The game ends with a mother buying Star Wars merchandise for her daughter, who, if you ask, will tell you how Rey is her favorite and that she’s so excited to dress up as her. It’s in these rare occasions when customers open up some part of their humanity to you that retail work can be rewarding in its small way. Growing up with social anxiety, finding myself able to help people at my first job gave me a lot more confidence in interacting with strangers. Certainly, “Your Name is Now Excuse Me” could have included many more kinds of horrible situations, but it could have some more pleasant ones too.

“Your Name is Now Excuse Me” is admirably earnest but to a fault, leaning too hard into “empathy game” rhetoric in a needless epilogue. The plain expression of its vignettes should be able to speak for itself, evoking empathy because it’s a game not because it’s framed to do so. But for its simplicity and its faults, “Your Name is Now Excuse Me” is pretty impressive for a first Twine game that succinctly captures the turbulent world of retail.

For further reading about retail labor, I highly recommend J Bearhat’s zine "Corporate Interiors."  

Travelling through Twine #1: "it is better to know"

Hello and welcome! This is the first post in a (hopefully biweekly) series of short reviews and reflections on works in Twine. I’ll be taking a look at any game new or old in Twine that I come across on Twitter or itch.io, whether it be serious or silly, or simple or complex. Each post will feature 1-3 works of Twine.

---

i want to make games for people who read

Lana Polansky’s latest Twine poem is in part a response to an eye-rolling statement made by popular indie game “genius” Jonathan Blow. In an interview with the Guardian, he said, “I want to make games for people who like to read [Thomas Pynchon’s] Gravity’s Rainbow.” In context, Blow means that he wants to bring the influence of other forms of art to videogames, after suggesting that game narratives are weak because their only reference points are too often other games instead of a wider range of art and media. Which is largely true and echoed throughout games spaces ad nauseum! But that’s what a lot of folks are already working towards in the margins, with Twine, with Unity, with #altgames. But Blow represents something different--a perfectionist approach to artful games that requires a massive budget and wide visibility to sustain such high-gloss projects that would take 7 years to complete, the outcome of which certain critics find dubious at best and stupid at worst. Blow’s quote about games and Gravity’s Rainbow is tinged with an anti-populist intellectual elitism and a latent classism that ignores the artistic experimentation in videogames made by the poor and the marginalized, diverse work that ranges from accessible to esoteric.

“i want to make games for people who read” starts by taking the first part of Blow’s statement and swapping his choice of the complex, supposedly “high art” novel Gravity’s Rainbow for objects associated with everyday commercialism: “the backs of shampoo bottles,” “the labels on their pre-packaged health food,” “the ads on bustops." The poem dissociates reading from its conception as just an intellectual activity. It conjures an audience of average people navigating late capitalism rather than the specificity of stodgy lit professors that Blow’s quote might bring to mind. In fact, though this imagined audience represents a likely broader group of people than Blow’s Gravity’s Rainbow-readers, they’re always embodied in some specific way in the poem. The audience is defined not just by what they read but also by where or how or why they read. The people reading the shampoo bottles are in their bathrooms, perhaps looking at the labels during their showers. The people reading the food labels do so with a “cynical curiosity,” probably about the food industry’s (in)ability to deliver healthy nutrition while being sustainable, ethical, affordable. And the people reading the ads on bustops do so to distract themselves from a long wait and perhaps the possibility of an irate boss at their late arrival to work.

The poem then expands “reading” to include not just of written text but also the mundane yet intimate ways we interact with others and the world through our interpretations. The speaker wants to make games for people who read the “gestures of strangers,” inevitably inventing a personality or past that might explain their behaviors or mannerisms, regardless of their imagination’s accuracy. I think of seeing someone with her arms crossed, backed against a wall at a party and thinking about how she might have social anxiety or that she might have just broken up with her boyfriend or had an argument with a friend. But maybe she’s just cold. Polansky particularly emphasizes people who read faces and eyes, looking to see if another’s words match their physical expressions, trying to get inside another’s head, to see their thoughts, their motives, their souls.

We all do this--we’re always reading people--often unconsciously. We’re constantly trying to make, or find, meaning in others and ourselves. We read because we’re human. The poem imagines a desired audience who reads because they are humans, because they must, while Blow’s statement implicitly points towards an audience who reads Gravity’s Rainbow because it is an intellectual object, for the cachet of reading a complicated book. Blow’s statement neglects to question how one might read Gravity’s Rainbow and why one might like it, beyond that it is a book that doesn’t “hold your hand.” The important thing is that this audience has read it, has marked it off their lists of Smart Things To Read. I would say that Jon Blow might as well make games for robots who read Gravity’s Rainbow, but he perhaps deserves at least a little slack for what was likely a quick, undercooked interview response (plus, robots might be good readers too!).

“i want to make games for people who read” doesn’t simply replace an anti-populism with an anti-intellectualism. It seeks an audience of people who read “slowly, deliberately”--people who want to engage and be engaged. It seeks members of an audience with their own indulgent idiosyncrasies, like reading under the dim light of a candle “because it’s sometimes comforting to feel like an anachronism.” Each line of the poem includes bright green text that, when clicked on, reveals the rest of the words in its line and a new neon green phrase to tease the next line. The phrase “it is better to know” glows thrice in a row at the poem’s end, in lines invoking those who read a variety of things--both what they love and what they hate--to better know the world. This audience, finally, reads their own reflections because “it is better to know thyself.” This reference to an ancient Greek maxim establishes this act of reading as timeless, universal, an act that tends to improve us.

The poem’s final line reads, highlighted in a pale pink: “This passage does not exist: The True Ending.” The pseudo-error message recalls an ending to another of Polansky’s Twines, .error404. In “i want to make games for people who read,” the “error” suggests that we never stop reading nor do we ever stop needing to read, to make meaning and to make sense of the world and ourselves. The poem not only establishes reading as a continuous personal process but also implies that reading is a continuous social process that transcends history. “i want to make games for people who read” constructs an audience through warm imaginings of real people, contrasting to the cold hollowness of Blow’s stated ideal audience. But even without the context of his frankly goofy quote, the poem stands on its own as a remarkably evocative reflection of what it means to read and how to make art with an audience in mind.

Metal Gear Villains #2: FOXHOUND Pt 2

Kept you waiting, huh?

If you’re unfamiliar with this blog series on the villains and bosses of the Metal Gear Solid series, check out this introduction. You can also check out my words on the other villains of Shadow Moses. .

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Part 2 of our look at the members of FOXHOUND, we find a lot of villains poorly dressed for the Alaskan climate!

Vulcan Raven

"The raven on my head thirsts for his blood."     metalgear.wikia.com

Vulcan Raven leans into the animal motifs more than any villain in Metal Gear Solid. When Snake first meets him in the snowy canyon, he emerges from the M1 tank’s hatch sans shirt to taunt Snake: “This is ravens’ territory. Snakes don’t belong in Alaska.” Of course, Raven means that not only does his bird namesake find habitat in Alaska, but that he’s an Alaskan native himself. His portrayal probably relies on racist assumptions that exotify Native American spiritualism and the concept of “spirit animals.” He’s also a shaman, and like Psycho Mantis, is a kind of predictor, but Raven’s predictions and abilities are more spiritual in nature. Vulcan Raven’s deep, booming voice and slow rhythm of his speech further characterize his animal metaphors as cryptic and sublime. Warning Liquid and Ocelot not to underestimate Snake, Raven tells them “In the language of the Sioux people, ‘Sioux’ means ‘Snake;’ it is known as an animal to be feared.” This awkward, passive, long-winded phrasing needlessly mystifies Raven’s character and his culture (not to mention that this line leans into viewing Native Americans as monolithic).

The first fight with Vulcan Raven in the tank is the first of three silly and ridiculous battles in which Snake, a one-man army, fights giant weaponized machines. Snake runs around the tank (almost comically) chucking grenades in the open hatch. His victory should be impossible, but Raven’s tank is only meant to test Snake! Raven notes that “in battle, it is as if he [Snake] is possessed by a demon.” Raven may be the first character in the game to acknowledge Snake’s moral ambiguity as well as his “magic” that Psycho Mantis proves to be the player. This interpretation, then, has Raven equate the player’s control of Snake to demonic possession, further developing the player as a corrupting force over Snake and necessitating the gradual separation between the two.

Before Snake’s second fight with Vulcan Raven in the underground warehouse, Raven spiritually reads that “blood from the East flows within [Snake’s] veins” (which the canon hints at but is unclear about where this heritage comes from). He compares how their lineages both include ancestors from Mongolia, claiming that “Inuit and Japanese are cousins to each other.” When Snake downplays their shared ancestry with a quip, Raven concludes that “[i]ndeed, ravens and snakes are not the best of friends.” Raven calls into question the relationship between war and ethnicity, but it’s hard to determine the game’s position. Metal Gear Solid might champion an erasure of cultural distinctions between different peoples (a view often expressed in the West within white liberalism) by characterizing Raven’s distinction between “raven” and “snake” as his fatal flaw as a villain. But the game might point to a more nuanced understanding. Raven reflects on the basic fact that, if you look back far enough, many different peoples come from the same origins. But the present distinction between “raven” and “snake” remains, and the first fight between the two characters starts when Snake encroaches on “Raven’s territory.” The game perhaps hints at a necessary dual-resistance to the similarities and differences of our genes. The game might imply a need on one hand to remember what human beings share as a species and a need to respect differences to prevent conflict. This idea goes hand in hand with Metal Gear Solid 3’s primarily neutral portrayal of capitalism and communism during the Cold War. Metal Gear deserves a much closer analysis of how these ideas manifest within the series and how they can or cannot be reconciled with the series’ noted pacifism. I will say, however, that in my experiences of Metal Gear Solid 1-4, the series is almost radio silent about racism.

Raven compares their upcoming battle with the Ear Pull contest of the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, in which two opponents pull each other’s ears in the bitter cold to test spiritual and physical strength. This comparison offends Snake--the stakes in this battle are between life and death, not pride and humiliation. “Violence isn’t a sport!” says Snake. Replace “sport” with “game,” and you’ve got yourself a more characteristically unsubtle form of Metal Gear commentary about videogame violence. But Metal Gear Solid came out in 1998, and other parts of this blog series so far have shown that this game has far more than surface-level metatextual finger-wagging like, say, Hotline Miami, a game that came out in 2012.

After judging Snake to be a true warrior, he uses the raven marking on his forehead to curse Snake with the “mark of death.” Besides showing off Raven’s supernatural powers, it’s unclear what this curse is actually meant to do. Is Snake marked for death at the hands of Raven--a curse that Snake defies? Or is Snake marked for a future of bloodshed and murder, as Raven predicts after the battle:

“Snake! In the natural world there is no such thing as boundless slaughter. There is always an end to it. But you are different [...] The path you walk on has no end. Each step you take is paved with the corpses of your enemies. Their souls will haunt you forever… you shall have no peace...“   

At the end of the game, Snake seems to defy this prediction, with plans to live a new life with a new purpose. But the series as a whole seems to confirm Raven’s prediction, as he returns to the battlefield time and again until he’s old and withering. Of course, Raven’s prediction is not merely about Snake as a clone born to be the perfect soldier, but about Snake as a videogame protagonist. In the real world, violence causes death, a permanent end. But Snake has infinite lives in a videogame that players can reload and experience an infinite number of times, massacring virtual bodies again and again to their hearts’ content. But videogame players may fail to acknowledge that engaging with combat mechanics they can comfortably enjoy takes a traumatic toll on Snake, who views those enemies as a part of his real world.

When Vulcan Raven says that Snake and Liquid are “from another world [...] that [he] does not wish to know,” he means that he does not want to know a world where one’s existence is determined by someone else’s will. Snake and Liquid live because the government wanted to create the perfect soldiers, tools for their agendas and operations, just as Snake lives as a tool for the player’s entertainment. Raven talks of death as “returning to the natural world that which is not needed.” His death by consumption of his ravens is seen as transcendent, a “return to Mother Earth” in both body and spirit, but it’s a death that would be denied to Snake and Liquid as long as they are controlled by outside parties, their genetic fates, and the player. It’s a death most explicitly denied to Gray Fox, as the government sustains his tortured life just to create the Genome Army. In fact, Raven foreshadows Gray Fox’s heroic sacrifice that would grant him his long-overdue rest. When he tells Snake about the role of ravens as scavengers in the circle of life, he says “[ravens] even attack wounded foxes.” Of course, an understanding of Raven’s death as “natural” is complicated by the fact that he dies because the narrative no longer needs him, a death contrived entirely by an outside force.

Sniper Wolf

"Okay, hero. Set me free."       metalgearinformer.com

Sniper Wolf appears at the point when Meryl decides that she does not make a good soldier. Her genetic fate as passed on by her “father” may suggest that a career on a battlefield is her path, but she finds herself increasingly frustrated as a rookie and a liability to Snake’s mission. Sniper Wolf shoots her down without killing her to draw out her true prey: Snake. Of course, with so few women presented as soldiers in the media, it’s easy to guess that the game swaps a genetic fate for a gendered one--that Meryl’s status as the child of a soldier means nothing, yet her gender precludes her from being a good soldier. She wants to be Snake but can only be a love interest and a damsel. Yet right after Meryl is shot down, and Snake finds a sniper rifle to retaliate, you meet Sniper Wolf. One of the first things she tells Snake is that two-thirds of the world’s greatest assassins are women. Later, during the second fight with Wolf in the Snowfield, she says that women are naturally better soldiers. She explicitly contradicts everything the narrative implies about gender with Meryl’s character. She’s the great misandrist villain, an accomplished sniper who complains about the men who “never finish what [they] start.” The game implies that her extraordinary patience, which allows her to wait for weeks to line up the perfect shot (provided she stocks up on diazepam), is attributed to her gender. But of course, the game concludes that Wolf’s belief is its own form of “genetic” determinism, so the narrative punishes her. Snake inevitably defeats and kills Wolf with her own tactics--sniping from afar while popping the diazepam. Snake disproves her view that women make better soldiers by defeating her with the very tactics she has developed for much of her life.

Metal Gear Solid could have easily decided to dismantle the widespread and materially damaging view that men naturally make better soldiers, but instead, the game sees misandry as the Real Threat. Sniper Wolf’s character may suggest that Meryl’s deficiency as a soldier has nothing to do with her gender, but the portrayals of both Wolf and Meryl simply recycle other gross assumptions about women--that their roles are either lover, damsel, or dead. For a series founded on a theme of resisting biological and ideological fates, Metal Gear too often assigns such fates to women that blatantly reaffirm the status quo. It’s a baffling, stupid quality of the series that severely undermines its effectiveness as a revolutionary text.

Furthermore, Sniper Wolf’s version of Metal Gear boss eroticism is her tendency to become obsessed with her targets before she kills them. She calls Snake her “special prey” as she caresses and scratches his face. After she rests her hand on Snake’s polygonal abs and calls him “handsome” in the torture room, Revolver Ocelot whistles and tells Snake that she often falls in love her with prey. Her “love letter” to Snake is a bullet in his heart. Wolf is a black widow, a vintage trope that represents fear of an aggressive feminine sexuality that the game characterizes as deadly--a fear that women afforded sexual agency will turn men’s horniness against them. Thus, Wolf’s character design aims to titillate. Wolf is a tall blonde woman with an unzipped jumper in most scenes (even her first appearance out in the cold), revealing her blurry polygonal cleavage. She looks like a low-poly version of EVA of MGS3, whose character recycles a similar understanding of women’s sexual agency as predatory. The camera focuses on shots of her chest in the torture room and follows her ass out the door. It’s a shame the game pulls this stuff because decontextualized from how the narrative’s gender politics, Sniper Wolf is a great character and one of the best villains in the game.  

Then there’s Otacon’s nonsensical love for Sniper Wolf. Otacon tells Snake that when the terrorists took over Shadow Moses, Wolf prevented the soldiers from shooting all the wolf-dogs around the facility. Wolf lets Otacon feed her dogs while he’s being held prisoner. Her mercy and dedication to her “family” wins over Otacon, to which Snake dismisses as Stockholm Syndrome. Otacon’s love is just a nerdboy obsession, but it’s unclear if that portrayal was intentional or not. Otacon concludes Wolf “must be a good person” and implores Snake not to hurt her, and while Wolf’s acts of mercy humanize her character, Otacon fails to understand the moral complexity of Wolf. He can’t understand that Wolf, an elite operative involved in a terrorist plot, could both protect the innocent and viciously attack Snake. Then of course, neither can Snake. While Otacon can only see Wolf’s acts of kindness, Snake can only see her acts of violence. The fight in the Snowfield complicates both of the male characters’ understandings of her. Otacon tries to intervene in the fight, but Wolf tells him to stay out of her way. And after the fight, Snake learns Wolf’s backstory and that she spared Meryl because she doesn’t kill for sport. Her death initiates the Otacon Fridge Saga throughout the series, in which women Otacon love die to develop his character. At Wolf’s death, Snake returns her handkerchief that helped him escape the torture room because he “[doesn’t] have any more tears to shed.” Such a tragic death is commonplace for Snake, but Otacon’s whole perspective is shaken up. He yells after Snake, desperately asking him what she was fighting for, what Snake is fighting for, and what he himself is fighting for. Otacon resolves to search for a new purpose, one that doesn’t compromise his morals as Wolf’s were in Liquid’s revolt.

Like many villains throughout the series, Sniper Wolf was born on the battlefield. She is a Kurd who grew up with the sounds of war as her lullabies. Wolf describes her early life full of displacement and violence, while world governments ignored her people’s suffering. Big Boss eventually saved her, and she became a sniper. From the distanced perspective of her scope, she saw the horror and futility of war, the worst of mankind. She joined Liquid to take her revenge on the world and its governments for perpetuating this meaningless violence but in doing so becomes a monster herself. Sniper Wolf is swallowed up in Big Boss’s vision: a world where soldiers have a place in society, uncontrolled by the arbitrary wills of governments. She reveres Big Boss so much that she refers to him as Saladin, the famous Kurdish Muslim sultan of the Crusades. Her explanations humanize not only herself but also Big Boss, who in the MSX games is mostly a cartoon villain. Clearly Big Boss rescues victims of war with the intention of saving them from the system, but his form of resistance produces more violence that, instead of healing victims of war from their pasts, subsumes them in a cycle of terror. Metal Gear Solid establishes a series staple theme of the difficulty and complexity of resisting the system, revealing that not all alternatives are necessarily good ones.

As Sniper Wolf lies bleeding and dying, she says she has shamed her people for joining Liquid in the name of vengeance. She has lost her honor and purpose, now merely a dog instead of the noble “Wolf” she once was. But Snake is more forgiving of Wolf. He refers to mercenaries like them as “dogs of war,” but he tells Wolf that she’s “different--untamed, solitary” and concludes that she deserves her noble namesake. Losing her sense of reality, Wolf asks Snake if he is Saladin, not only calling attention to Snake’s physical resemblance to his father but also his charisma. But Snake is different from Big Boss; he’s the “hero” Sniper Wolf has been waiting for--the hero to kill her. Snake can save the victims of war in a way that Big Boss never could. Snake provides the villains a cathartic final fight in which they come to peace with their pasts before dying, finally free from the battlefield. But Metal Gear Solid does not simply mean that victims of war should be put out of their misery. In a broader sense, Snake is the hero Wolf’s been waiting for as long as he can follow his own path and escape destiny, liberating himself and others before they’ve been shackled to the battlefield as the members of FOXHOUND have. For FOXHOUND, the only alternative to the battlefield is death because they never engage with their past in order to meaningfully move on in their lives. War becomes a part of them, as Sniper Wolf reaches for her rifle and calls it a part of her. She dies embracing the gun, content with Snake giving her a final rest. “Everyone’s here now,” Wolf says, finally at peace. It’s the most powerful death of the game and Metal Gear Solid’s most explicit complication of villainy and heroism.

Liquid Snake

"Snake! Did you like my sunglasses?"         metalgear.wikia.com

The Big Bad of Shadow Moses is my least favorite villain in the game because his motivations to threaten the world with perpetual war boil down to “daddy didn’t notice me.” Regardless, he’s as fun and campy as the rest of the villains, if not more so for his over-the-top arrogance and famously sneering “Brotherrrrr” at Snake all the time.

Liquid Snake’s disguise as Master Miller works because “Miller’s” character seems sketchy from the start of the mission. His “support” for Snake provides nothing more than bland truisms about survival and confidence. At least Mei Ling’s proverbs were interesting and poetic. A neat bit of foreshadowing is that the only piece of advice that Miller gives that actually helps the player is during the Gray Fox fight. He tells Snake to unequip his weapon, a requirement for the fight against the only villain not a part of FOXHOUND. And Miller’s intense suspicion of Naomi Hunter is suspicious itself, considering how detached he seems from the rest of the characters before he voices his concerns to Snake. As a side note, one of the series’ only mentions of racism occurs in Liquid/Miller’s discovery of Naomi’s lie. She claims her grandfather was Japanese and part of the FBI in New York investigating the mafia. But Liquid/Miller figures out that the chief of the FBI during the time was incredibly racist, and there were no Asian investigators at the time. Not only that, but investigations of the mafia started in Chicago, not New York. It’s an effective distraction that allows Liquid to funnel Snake into finally activating REX.

Of course, Miller is not really Miller--he’s Liquid. And Liquid Snake is, naturally, Solid Snake’s evil twin and another clone of Big Boss. He’s the least sympathetic of the villains because he embodies the ridiculous genetic deterministic ideology the game rails against. He resents Solid Snake for having Big Boss’s dominant genes, while he’s stuck with his recessive genes. (I’m not a science person, but I’m 99% sure that “recessive” genes are by no means considered “inferior.” I think someone should tell Liquid this.) Liquid believes that the only reason for his existence was to enable the creation of Solid Snake, the perfect soldier and the “favorite” of Big Boss. Liquid comes to believe that he is “garbage since the day [he was] born” and that Snake stole his “birthright,” not only for having Big Boss’s dominant genes but also for killing Big Boss, robbing Liquid of revenge on his father. But at the end of the game, Revolver Ocelot reveals in his conversation with the President that Liquid held the dominant genes of Big Boss. His genes never really matter and don’t determine Snake’s victory of Liquid. The idea of his genetic fate controls Liquid’s life and decisions, including his willingness to throw the world into chaos to fulfill Big Boss’s dream and surpass his origins. Liquid is just a bratty kid who fails to realize how his motivations boil down to the same “petty revenge” he acknowledges in Naomi Hunter.  

Liquid, for all his cartoonish villainy, is a shrewd revolutionary willing to pit the superpowers of the world against each other to leverage more control over the global political climate. He wants to combine the forces of the Genome Army with Sergei Gurlukovich’s Spetznaz army to turn Shadow Moses into a new Outer Heaven. His demands to the world’s governments include handing over a recurring MacGuffin in the series--the DNA of Big Boss--as well as one million dollars to save the Genome Soldiers. The Genome Soldiers are digital progenitors of Big Boss and his “soldier genes” through technology developed through the experiments on Gray Fox and soldiers of the Gulf War. But according to Liquid, the soldiers (as well as Liquid and Snake) suffer from a disease due to genetic similitude for which Big Boss’s DNA will reveal the magic cure. Liquid teaches Snake about “Asymmetry Theory” (which I Googled and is probably fictional) which holds that nature favors genetic diversity and kills off species with too much symmetry. (Speaking of fictional Metal Gear concepts with ridiculous names, nothing beats the process that created Liquid and Snake--the Super Baby Method. Big thumbs up to the writers on that one.)

Asymmetry Theory is the game’s way of homogenizing videogame players. Players inherit the cultural “genes” of the 80’s action hero as embodied by Big Boss, but they can’t properly replicate his achievements nor can they sustain a society with the values accrued from such media objects. The Genome Army are a complete failure, and their link to videogame players is one of the game’s heaviest indictments of uncritical gamers. Snake, Liquid, the soldiers--all these characters need to choose their own paths to survive in this world. It’s an incredibly individualistic message, but Liquid’s own reasons for wanting to cure the Genome soldiers complicates the game’s relationship between individualism and collectivism, just as Psycho Mantis’ death does .

Liquid claims he wants to cure his “family” because his genes tell him to, invoking a real selfish gene theory. He warps his “altruistic feelings” for the Genome Soldiers by arguing that aligning his interests with those who share his genes only means to further replicate and pass on those genes. Liquid’s view turns communal goals into individual goals, denying any sentiment in favor for mere biological motives. Everything for Liquid boils down to a goal of passing on one’s genes, an ultimately arbitrary motive devoid of meaning or consideration of others, not to mention an impossible goal for Liquid considering he and Snake are sterile. Liquid represents the Worst Game Player, one with a crippling sense of entitlement and desire to repeat the same violent narratives without an understanding of material consequences.

But of course, Liquid turns the tables on Snake and the player, famously accusing both of “enjoy[ing] all the killing.” It’s the game’s most direct and inelegant criticism of the player, but one probably necessary for those who don’t understand how Metal Gear creates and tears down its own artifice. Liquid claims it’s the reason why Snake and the player are here, sneaking and killing through the facility. He implies that the two could hardly care about the fate of the world or its people; they just want some shooty fun. He suggests that’s why Snake and the player carry on with their orders blindly, even though the game heavily foreshadows betrayals and complications at every corner.

After Snake activates REX, Liquid inexplicably loses his shirt, and before their fist fight on top of Metal Gear REX, so does Snake. Besides being a ridiculous way to dramatize their final encounter, their toplessness highlights the “symmetry” of Snake and Liquid’s low-res bodies. The natures of both Snake’s mission and Liquid’s plan are laid bare just as they are. But for being genetically the same (which is retconned in Guns of the Patriots), Snake and Liquid are shaped into completely distinct people by circumstance. Snake’s deadpan gruffness and American accent contrast sharply with Liquid’s campy overconfidence and British accent. A lack of knowledge defines Snake’s character for most of the game, while Liquid holds all the cards and influence over Snake, the Pentagon, and Gurlukovich. As the two characters’ physical similarities are emphasized, their abstract differences represent the stakes of the fight. Though Liquid’s plans are foiled by the destruction of REX, the fight determines whose ideology will hold out. At this point, we can assume that Snake resolves to forge his own path after the betrayal of the government and his support team, and his free will defeats Liquid’s genetic determinism. But not at the end of this fight.

Liquid has a nasty habit of surviving certain death. He lives through the explosions of both the Hind D and Metal Gear REX, a fall from the top of REX, and a jeep crash. He dies neither from Snake’s punch nor his bullet; he dies from Snake’s virus. FOXDIE kills Liquid just as he aims at Snake and Meryl outside the tunnel. FOXDIE operates on no consistent logic. It kills Decoy Octopus and the ArmsTech President. Its non-effect on Psycho Mantis and Sniper Wolf are waved away by Mantis’ mask and Wolf’s diazepam addiction. And Ocelot has a vaccine as a double-agent of the President. But Liquid doesn’t fall to FOXDIE for a very long time after contact with Snake. As Austin Howe says, this conveniently robs the player of personal victory over Liquid. This narrative convenience allows the player and Snake to have a dramatic battle with Liquid but also externally punish Liquid for his deterministic ideology. Since Liquid decides his fate is controlled by his genes, then such a fate comes true! He doesn’t escape his genetic destiny of FOXDIE. But FOXDIE spares Snake, according to Naomi, as long as he has the will to live. As long as Snake resists fate and lives for his own purposes, for the willful benefit of others, his genes don’t matter. Magical virus be damned.

Metal Gear Solid jumps through a lot of nonsense narrative hoops like FOXDIE to deliver its thematic messages, but its earnestness and clever synthesis of postmodern tension between audience and text with larger political significance make the first entry and the rest of the series remarkable. And of course the nonsense is entertaining.

---

I’ve decided to suspend this blog series for the time being. My semester is heading into full swing next week, and I don’t want to be bogged down with a project of this scope. During the semester, I’d like to move on to smaller games to write about. Don’t fear though; Metal Gear Villains will return eventually!