“As of today, your name is Ahab”: Generic Critique as Reparative Praxis in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
by DA HallAbstract
Since its release in September 2015, Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has received international popular and critical acclaim, despite production difficulties that resulted in a split between the celebrated game director and long-time publisher Konami. The game also sparked renewed interest within game studies scholarship in the Metal Gear series and MGSV as a capstone to the 30-year old franchise. This article argues that the lack of scholarship that contends with the intricate referential structure of the game, specifically the presence of Melville’s Moby-Dick throughout, indicates a gap in game studies critical methods with regards to situating videogames within extant generic traditions. The references deployed within a given project such as MGSV simultaneously signal and constitute the project’s participation in ongoing aesthetic conversations, dialogically structuring the intervention therein. I propose generic analysis as a critical praxis capable of articulating the culturally and historically specific projects of videogames. I argue that the usefulness and importance of such a framework through an analysis of Moby-Dick as a central system of signification across MGSV. Kojima, deeply studied in the Western aesthetic canon, resituates Melville’s own critique of Western hegemonic imperialism within contemporary racialized surveillance capitalism, pointedly from the position of Japanese subjectivity. In so doing, the game articulates both the continuity of and the shift within expressions of that visual regime. It phrases that history through depictions of the profound violence produced by the failure to confront the contradictions of imperial vision.
Keywords: genre theory, intertextuality, narrative studies, satire, critical practice, carnivalesque
Introduction
Of the many powerful insights into the videogame medium Mary-Ann Buckles produced in her 1985 dissertation, perhaps the most resounding is the methodology of the document itself. Buckles is wide-ranging not just in her approach and analysis of the emerging medium, from Proppian formal analysis to reader response theory, but in her understanding and presentation of genre and art history. Throughout the work, Buckles examines Adventure in relation to art throughout culture and time. She is as comfortable bringing the text into conversation with Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV as with Dungeons and Dragons, and finds as much in Nabokov’s Lolita as she does in early prose chivalric romances. She invokes 2001: A Space Odyssey with the same confidence as The Cave of Time, a children’s choose-your-own-adventure book. This is not to say she erases or obfuscates difference. Rather, she uses difference to comprehend Adventure and its players as participating in a highly specific, nascent node of a much longer and larger cultural landscape. Her argument is not ultimately about the medium of the videogame -- instead it is about a genre. Buckles uses genre as an analytic tool to connect Adventure to other fields, other traditions of thought and study, in a mode of difference that nevertheless comprehends the present-ness of the past. For Janet Murray (1997), writing a decade later, the videogame is “continuous with older traditions but promise[s] new expressive power.” This, I argue, is a genetic understanding of the form, i.e., one that assumes that the new form inherits and iterates upon the advances made by its historical predecessors. For Buckles, however, the videogame is contemporaneous with those traditions. Games are involved in them actively and presently. The videogame does not deliver on a progressive arc of literary history through the ages, realizing the messianic impulse of art towards representational fidelity and greater affective power. Instead, the videogame is another site at which genre play happens, the particular affordances of which allows for the emergence of new forms of that play. Buckles produces what I term a generic analysis of the videogame, not in the sense of generalized or nonspecific, but rather as participating in genre. I argue that this perspective allows Buckles to advance arguments that more usefully recognize the complicated historical and aesthetic milieu into which videogames are often intervening, rather than naively inheriting.
In the intervening 40 years, there has been a gap in scholarship performing this generic mode of analysis, and as a result, the field has often failed to recognize the references by which games actively intervene into extant genre traditions. I have argued elsewhere that this gap has resulted in part from the conceptual lack of clarity around “genre” as a term within game studies (Hall, forthcoming). For the present argument, I position genre as a system of recognition -- the audience recognizes the genre of a cultural object by way of the generic markers that constitute it. We recognize a piece as high fantasy through its medievalist trappings, unpronounceable names, wondrous magics, mythical beasts, impossible quests, destined heroes, etc. Along these lines, game studies has frequently contended with ludic remediations of genre fiction, such as the longstanding conversation around the reception of horror and the Gothic in games (Krzywinska, 2002; Therrien, 2009; Kirkland, 2012; Krzywinska, 2015; Kirkland, 2021; Anderson, 2025), often producing quite valuable insights. Even these conversations, however, have a tendency to present genre as something that is inherited or received, even activated, and more rarely as an extant artistic tradition that the game enters into dialogue with.
Yet direct, sustained references to influential examples within a generic tradition are also the most obvious form of generic markers, and as such are conspicuous in their absence within these scholarly conversations. To miss those references, or to classify them as unimportant, is to misrecognize a crucial structural aspect of a given game’s artistic project as well as the broader cultural conversation in which that game participates. Of course, not all games do actively engage in this kind of genre play and therefore do not lend themselves to generic analysis. Minecraft, for instance, has elicited a variety of essays which trace its extractivist gameplay to Robinson Crusoe and beyond, insightfully analyzing the game’s complicated inheritance of colonialist subjectivities through the history of their development (Vella, 2013; Nguyen, 2016; Lobo, 2019). This article, however, focuses on a videogame that unmistakably engages in genre play through direct references: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015).
Monomaniacal Critique of Metal Gear Solid V
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (MGSV) is renowned game director Hideo Kojima’s final, and to some extent unfinished, entry into the long running and deeply complicated Metal Gear Solid series. Much has been written over the years on the series and the various entries that comprise it (e.g., Gallagher, 2012; Stamenković, Jaćević, & Wildfeuer, 2017; Kielich & Hall, 2024). More recently, a flurry of articles and chapters have been released on the capstone game, Metal Gear Solid V (MGSV) and its companion demo game Ground Zeroes (e.g., Green, 2017; Murray, 2018; Girina, 2018; Hall, 2018; Hammer, 2019). I have read many of these in the ten years since the game’s release, having myself a critical and personal interest in the game, and was surprised to find a deep and resounding absence: other than in a brief aside within Amy Green’s 2017 monograph on MGSV and an article published during the writing of this piece (Khorshidpour, 2025), no argument that I have consulted mentions, let alone discusses, Moby-Dick.
The game opens with a first-person visual perspective on a hospital, the body of the player-character having been brutalized by a massive explosion. After some medical scenes and a character creation menu, the doctor evokes Moby-Dick and the doomed captain’s hunt when he tells the player-character that “as of today, your name is Ahab,” at which point he is murdered by an unknown assailant. Just before the assailant completes her objective of killing the player-character, the patient in the neighboring bed saves the player-character’s life by leaping onto the would-be assassin’s back and successfully fighting her off. Face obscured by heavy bandages, the mysterious figure introduces himself when questioned: “Who am I? You’re talking to yourself. Been watching over you for nine years, and call me Ishmael.” This line, directly quoting the famous opening words of Moby-Dick, is spoken within the first 20 minutes of the game and primes the player to recognize the further references to Melville’s novel that accumulate throughout the game. From the helicopter pilot called Pequod (the name of Ahab’s whaling ship) to the player-character’s prosthetic limb replacement (a mechanical hand rather than Ahab’s ivory leg) to the flaming whale soaring through the sky near the end of the first mission, Moby-Dick is an inescapable and central presence.
Anahita Khorshidpour’s essay “The Revival of the White Whale” offers a longer account of the specific connections between the game and the novel, as well as further references made within Kojima’s more recent project Death Stranding (2019). Picking up on earlier critiques of the post-colonial project of the Metal Gear Solid series (Roth, 2017; Hutchinson, 2019; Whaley, 2023), Khorshidpour argues that the game extends Moby-Dick’s own critique of American imperialism through the unique historical perspective of Japan. Though a number of authors have discussed the anti-war and anti-imperial project outlined across the Metal Gear series (Higgin, 2009; Youngblood, 2017; Dyer-Witherford & Noon, 2018), most have focused on other games in the series. Of those that do consider MGSV, Khorshidpour’s piece is just the second in the ten years since the game’s release to recognize the presence of Melville’s novel, and it is the only piece that analyzes its centrality to the project and structure of the game.
Take for instance, one of the most influential essays on the game, Soraya Murray’s article “Landscapes of Empire in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.” Included as a flagship game studies piece in a special edition of Critical Inquiry (2018) that was designed to forge a connection with literary studies, the article nevertheless makes no mention at all of the influential novel. Originally published as a chapter in Murray’s monograph On Video Games (2017), the article persuasively argues for an understanding of the composition of space in relationship to the player-character as possessing a powerful ideological function, wherein the “gamespace” represents a “worldview.” To be clear, I think this argument is essentially correct, and articulates a necessary mode of analysis for games and the worlds they instantiate. In a telling moment in the conclusion, however, Murray writes:
It behoves game designers to fully understand the nuanced cultural references they invoke, as well as the reality that space is more than an immersive setting. It is also constitutive of the value systems set forth, and delimits possible worlds. Likewise, critically activated game players will likely demand more of game worlds than the incessant repetition of narratives of conquest, and logics of bureaucracy. (Murray, 2017, p. 182)
What surprised me in this moment was the unexpected conclusion that MGSV was in fact the target of the argument. Where I had assumed Murray was articulating the ways in which the game itself was critiquing the “violent predatory gaze” of Western imperialism, in fact the game is used as an example of that gaze. In contrast to games and developers that “show awareness” of such violence, Murray argues that Hideo Kojima and his team do not “understand the nuanced cultural references they invoke” in their essentially naive deployment of these visual and mechanical languages within MGSV (Murray, 2017, p. 181). I found this conclusion unexpected because Murray makes repeated reference throughout the preceding argument not only to the “quintessentially satirical” nature of Kojima’s work, but to the well-established fact of his deep knowledge of American media representations, particularly in film. Murray goes so far as to quote Noon and Dyer-Witherford’s analysis (2018, p. 172) of earlier Metal Gear games, discussing the series’ ability to “[articulate]... the schizophrenia within warrior masculinity…and also… the pleasure of virtual war play, and the horror of the system in which such play is implicated” (Dyer-Witherford and Noon, 2010, p. 92). More to the point, Murray acknowledges that “it is hard not to see the stinging critique present in The Phantom Pain,” and yet by the end of the argument, Kojima is returned to the position of, at best, a naive auteur engaged in “the incessant repetition of narratives of conquest, and logics of bureaucracy” (2017, p. 182). At worst he is actively malicious, engaged in a project of making “predatory seeing, mapping, claiming, and managing… seem deceptively given and inevitable” (Murray, 2018, p. 198).
There is a contradiction even within these two sets of quotes: Kojima is somehow both “utterly purposeful” and without “awareness” in the construction of the game; the game is somehow both “quintessentially satirical” and engaged in “naturalistic and historical realism,” i.e. not satirical at all. The problem, ultimately, is that Murray positions the game as the passive receptor of a generic tradition with which it is unable to engage critically. Ironically, Murray thereby performs the very dominating gaze critiqued within MGSV, the hegemonic gaze of Western imperialism “which reconfigures the land as something to be exploited and disciplined by Snake and his Diamond Dogs” (2017, p. 181). Murray as critic reconfigures the game as something to be exploited and disciplined, and the videogame medium as its own “hostile wilderness” to be “dominated and domesticated through aggressive, intellectual, controlled and well-disciplined manipulation” (2017, p. 176). The game does indeed represent the imperial violences in question, and in so doing performs the very critique Murray brings against it. That critique is phrased from a distinctly Japanese perspective that is “embedded within the colonial matrix of power,” and historically situated as both the object and perpetrator of the violences of the imperial gaze. The game resituates Melville’s distinctly Western perspective, utilizing both the radical power and historical failure of Melville’s project to generate a critique adequate to the contemporary moment. It does so from beginning to end via continuous reference to Moby-Dick and the novel’s critique of Western imperialism.
Genre Play as Immanent Critique in Moby-Dick
In so doing, MGSV re-performs the genre play of Moby-Dick itself. Published in 1851, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale formally reproduces logics of bourgeois individualism and modes of being in order to emphasize their contradictions and violences (Spanos, 1995). In this way, Moby-Dick critiques the British Romantic novel from within. It reveals the failure of the monological perspective in order to chart a dispersed model of authoritative discourse that emerges dialogically from a multiplicity of narrative perspectives. When MGSV opens with a reference to Moby-Dick, it does so not merely by way of analogy, not merely as a gesture toward the vendetta narrative to come, but as the assertive first word in the ensuing dialogue with Moby-Dick and the spiraling network of signs that such a reference engages. As such, it is worth examining the methods by which the earlier work satirically engages with its own generic predecessors.
In Moby-Dick, Ahab’s determination to “strike through the mask,” to pierce the false surface of the world into its deep truth via the power of individuality itself -- his single-minded pursuit of truth and whale as single object -- is not just destructive but inadequate to the task itself. At the crucial moment of the white whale’s attack, “Ahab could discover no sign in the sea” -- the birds can see, and Ahab’s crew through the birds can see, but Ahab is unable to read precisely that which he has set his whole mind and will toward (Melville, 1851, p. 446). The whale can certainly read Ahab, undoing the mad captain’s attempts to gain some advantage over the animal in an instant, “as if perceiving this stratagem” (Melville, 1851, p. 446). And indeed, the reader can read Ahab, not primarily through Ahab himself but through every perspective on Ahab, especially that of the narrator: “Call me Ishmael,” the narrator says, introducing himself as the first son of Abraham, exiled and disinherited after the birth of Isaac and in some sense the first outsider to the covenant between the Jews and God. Ahab, himself named for the Biblical king that had “sold [himself] to work evil in the sight of the Lord,” (KJV, Kings 21:20) is the powerfully centered center, whose sight is so individual that it both projects itself onto the things it perceives and overrides the sight of those closest to that center. As he advances closer and closer to his fatal moment, Ahab supersedes more and more the will of his crew: “Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me” (Melville, 1851, p. 455). Even past his death, the “pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea,” acting as Ahab’s eyes as he is pulled to the bottom of the ocean by his own harpoon (Melville, 1851, p. 459).
Ishmael, on the other hand, exists on the fringe, the boundary. He only survives the sinking of the Pequod by virtue of his distance from the ship. Everything and everyone is sucked into the vortex left by its sinking, but by the time Ishmael reaches the all-consuming center, the energy has already dissipated. He constitutes himself not as a “single I” but in his communication of every other character to the “thou” of the audience (Spanos, 1995). In other words, Ishmael is not able to communicate the circumstances of the novel to the audience as a result of his survival, but rather his survival is contingent on his ability to communicate those circumstances by addressing himself to and through every other in question. Ahab’s obliteration at the bottom of the sea is the inverse, the profound “separation, dissociation, and enclosure within the self” that ultimately results in “the loss of one’s self” (Bakhtin, 1986). Even so, Ahab is wrested from annihilation by the memory of Ishmael, or rather, by the confession of Ishmael. Ishmael does not see with divine sight, as he is an outsider to God’s covenant, nor does he see with the Captain’s single-minded fervor, nor does he see simply from his own particular vantage. His sight is the novel itself, scattered and polyphonous, particular in its multiplicity. His vision is mobile, tied neither to the great Nothing of God nor to the specificity of the embodied self. His perspective is promiscuous, moving from character to character, mind to mind, genre to genre, reference to reference, in order to create conversation between them. Ishmael does not possess any special access to truth or meaning, to authoritative vision; as confessor, he can only give particular perspectives from within the multiplicity of perspectives, including but not limited to his own. Authoritative discourse is thus called into question, both as a way of writing and as a way of reading -- even further, as a way of being. That critique is continuously expounded through the incredible proliferation of polyphonic voices the text produces through reference to biblical exegesis, historical figures, contemporary sermons, cetological treatise, travel narratives, epic poetry, Shakespearean tragedy, various philosophical traditions and Melville’s own considerable oeuvre at the time of Moby-Dick’s publication.
Melville occupies the Victorian Romantic novel genre and detonates it from within by tightly braiding “the imperial motif,” which simultaneously connects and separates the United States from the British Empire, with the aesthetic history of the genre itself (Said, 2000). MGSV re-engages this project by occupying the American spy thriller from an imprecisely inverted position to that of Melville: Japan displaces Britain as the island nation with an imperial history, and from that position recognizes and breaks with the received generic tradition of the United States. The game also recognizes, however, that in its contemporary moment the forms of authority and monologizing vision have shifted. As Steven Kielich and Chris Hall point out, Metal Gear investigates the possibilities of agency and subjectivity in a world that considers “life as the terrain of political being” (2025, p. 900). The opening act of the game helpfully signals many of the productive tensions produced by the 175-year gap between the two works. Furthermore, the sequence functions as both an initial framing device and, at the conclusion, a revelatory return; it therefore illustrates the structural significance of Moby-Dick to MGSV’s generic critique. The following section draws on the reading of Moby-Dick presented above in order to examine how the game engages in genre play through its references to the novel.
Ishmael-Ahab and the Bakhtinian Mask
A careful reader may have noted certain oddities and contradictions in the brief description of the opening sequence provided at the beginning of this essay. Why, for instance, is the player given the ability to customize their in-game face only for it to be immediately rejected by the game? When I first played MGSV, I spent (as I always do) an inordinate amount of time carefully designing a face for the game to come, only to be confused and disappointed by its exclusion. I was immediately suspicious; besides the ambient distrust in the narrative unreliability that is a hallmark of Kojima’s style, the slippages in time and perspective were disorienting enough that I was convinced something was being obfuscated from me. This feeling grew as I was presented with more and more masks: the bandaged man, the gas-masked child, the man wreathed in flames, all implying an identity behind the identity being presented. And of course, my own carefully designed face was absent, replaced by the familiar face of Snake. Even this is a somewhat misleading statement, as the face in question is a face shared by four different men: the original belonging to Snake or Big Boss, which is replicated across his three genetic clones -- Solid Snake, Liquid Snake and Solidus Snake. And even then, the face originally belongs to Snake Plissken in Escape from New York, played by Kurt Russell.
The player is immediately involved in the play between sight and identity, signified by the mediating role that masks perform in that relationship. For Bakhtin, (1984, p. 40) the mask “contains the playful element of life; it is based on a peculiar interrelation of reality and image,” and as such “it would be impossible to exhaust the intricate multiform symbolism of the mask.” The mask does not simply obfuscate identity, it performs identity, i.e., there is no identity underneath. That being said, Bakhtin argues (1984, p. 40) that the Romantic “mask hides something, keeps a secret, deceives,” as opposed to the “regenerating and renewing” function it possesses in the folk carnival. The presence of masks in MGSV initially takes on this second meaning, alerting the player to deception without revealing the negation of that deception, i.e., the truth behind the mask. The first mask, and the mask to which this argument leads, is the player-character as mask for player. When I enter into the character creation screen, what else am I doing besides crafting a perfect mask for myself? The game, however, immediately tosses this mask away in favor of a second mask that I did not create for myself: the mask of Snake, shown to me in a mirror held to my (Snake’s) face. Both the game and this argument will return to that first mask, but it is to this second mask I must now attend. In order to do so, I employ a technique of self-narration, using my own personal experience to illustrate the ways in which the game plays with and confronts the tension between the various selves engaged in the actual play of the game.
As I played, I quickly forgot the initial discomfort I had felt as a result of the changing face in the mirror. The frenetic action and dire, world-altering consequences that confronted me at every turn were more pressing than the confusion and doubt of those early moments. And as I continued to perform this Snake, as friends and allies proclaimed me the only person capable of such feats, as I developed a history for Snake over the 150 hours of the game, there was no reason to return to those doubts -- that is, until I saw Mission 46: Truth: The Man Who Sold the World. The title of the mission references the song that played during the introductory sequence, and the accompanying mission description (“Escape the hospital”) replicates that of the first mission. I was immediately reminded of those initial doubts and wondered how I had forgotten them in the first place. The mission itself is a replication of the first mission, and the player must perform all of the same actions, with two notable exceptions: the player does not enter their name, nor do they design their mask. Instead, it is revealed that the name and face players designed in the character creator belong to a medic who was with Snake on the helicopter destroyed at the end of the prequel game Ground Zeroes. Phantom Pain begins nine years after this event, as the player-character emerges from the coma caused by the crash. In fact, the player has not been playing Snake at all; not a clone, not a child, not the man himself, but rather a common soldier whose face and memory had been overwritten by Snake’s. Snake, the real Big Boss, is Ishmael, the bandaged man who guides the player-character through the hospital. With the world’s eyes and weapons trained on the player-character with Snake’s face, the original secrets himself into the shadows to manipulate the geopolitical game free from scrutiny. The player-character, Ahab, is just a patsy in this convoluted scheme, a friend and soldier who Big Boss rewards with the destruction of memory and free will. The revelation that Snake so thoroughly betrayed the trust and loyalty of the now-lost medic reconfigures many of the events that have occurred over the long course of the game. Strange moments -- indecipherable statements or actions both by the player-character and those around him -- suddenly become legible as expressions of the dissonance between man and mask.
The revelation of identity also forces players to reconsider the initial naming that happens in the game: “As of today, your name is Ahab,” declares the doomed doctor. “Call me Ishmael,” declares the real Big Boss. It would be simple enough to understand the player-character as Snake-Ahab, whose white whale is the XOF agency that took his limb, the hunt for which ultimately costs him everything. As it turns out, of course, we are not Snake -- but are we Ahab? And of course, is Snake in fact Ishmael? The face designed by the player is presented as a mask to hide the player-character from his enemies. Rather than the character creator existing non-diegetically and atemporally, the face the player produces within has a diegetic function and exists in the present moment. There is no assumed history behind the face that the player designs, and no sense in which the mask existed before the player. This subversion lays bare how all character creators engage in this manner of obfuscation. The game then introduces the second mask, Snake’s face, which the player has had no part in designing -- and at this precise moment, narrative and visual logic break down as the face in the mirror oscillates between the player-designed mask and the Snake mask. This instability is resolved by the supposed realness of the Snake mask, in contrast to the artifice of the player-designed mask. At the end of the game, however, that resolution is shattered by the revelation of the reverse being true. That reversal is not itself a resolution, but rather a dissolution; the first face was still designed by the player, and therefore retains its artifice. The artifice of the second face almost literally mirrors the artifice of the first, and the player is left with two masks. Snake’s full declaration then is not a lie: “Who am I? You’re talking to yourself. Been watching over you for nine years, and call me Ishmael.” The player-character is neither Ahab nor Ishmael -- he is both: he is Ishmael-called-Ahab, Ahab-called-Ishmael.
In other words, the player must reconsider the mask not as veil but as performance; though the mission in question titles itself “Truth,” it begins with a destabilizing Nietszche quote: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Already, the game unsettles this revelatory moment as providing special access to truth or depth -- it is one interpretation of many, one that profoundly destabilizes the first and structuring interpretation of the opening mission. The new interpretation does not, however, replace the old. The events of the first mission did happen, because the player performed and experienced them as such. The first and last mission share the same claim to experiential truth through the literal mechanism of the game world. To quote Nietzsche again, this time through Butler:
But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed -- the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect. (1999, p. 33)
This doubling action is fictional, misleading and produces a gap between self and action. It is in this gap that reaction as a way of being flourishes, reducing the ability of the person to act according to their will. In other words, the gap emerges precisely from the misidentification of a difference between person and action. The mask is not a deception, hides no contemplative subject who chooses in the moment to conceal their true self; the mask is a particular kind of being in the world, a particular enactment of self that is playful and fleeting and gives lie to the illusion of an unmasked self. The liberatory potential of the mask, then, is in its ability to illustrate mask-ness as such, which is an inherently anti-authoritarian process. The mask of the king is as much a fiction as the mask of the peasant; hence why Bakhtin (1981, p. 124) places so much importance on the ritual decrowning of the king as “the very core of the carnival sense of the world.” By performing the mask of the king, and in so doing revealing its mask-ness, “the joyful relativity of all structure and order, of all authority and all (hierarchical) position” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 107) is demonstrated and in fact performed.
This ritual is performed (inadvertently) by Snake and the nameless peasant-soldier who takes his face; the legendary Big Boss thereby crowns this player-character as replacement king and passes him the title and role of Big Boss. And in his performance as Big Boss, the player-character demonstrates how irrelevant Snake is to the title itself; even further, it is in fact the player’s performance that demonstrates this. The player-character is specific to the player who has designed him -- they, the player, have designed his face, named him, given him a date of birth. And of course, every other player also performed this function. Snake has one face that spreads itself virulently across clones and body doubles; the player-character has infinite faces, a new face for every single player of the game. The multiplicity of this player-created specificity negates any particularity of the player-character as hero -- he is one of any number of foot-soldiers in Big Boss’ company, illustrated by the infinite number of faces he could have had. There is no sense in which he was born better than anyone else, no aristocratic explanation for his power and influence. And, as the player-character loses his particularity, Big Boss also loses particularity: Snake’s authority, theoretically stemming from his unmatched proficiency as warrior and leader, is undone in the face of the player-character, i.e. any-soldier-whatever, who is capable of occupying that role.
In fact, Snake only becomes Big Boss in the climax of Metal Gear Solid 3 at the moment he kills his mentor The Boss, an act that both fulfills her will and also chains him to that will through his inheritance of her title and role. That being the case, Snake’s original statement “call me Ishmael,” is in fact more truthful than intended. Snake, believing himself to be Ahab, purposefully misidentifies himself as Ishmael and in so doing reveals himself to in fact be Ishmael. Snake, acting as the observer and enactor of The Boss’ death, was thereby remade as Big Boss. Her story overtakes his own, just as Ahab’s story overtakes Ishmael. Even as Ishmael’s distributed and flexible vision serves as a foil to Ahab’s monomaniacal vision, he remains chained to that vision, having inherited it at the moment of Ahab’s death. The young Ishmael could leave neither the ship nor the side of his captain, and the old Ishmael can only exist through his retellings of Ahab’s story. Ishmael is ultimately a passive character, but so too is Ahab -- the monomaniacal captain is just as reactive as Ishmael, bound as tightly to the movement of the White Whale as Ishmael is to the movements of the Pequod.
The player-character functions as the Ishmael-Ahab conflux at the center of MGSV. He is a spectral palimpsest, possessed by the phantom of the still-alive Snake and haunted by both the inherited will of The Boss and the erased self of the unnamed soldier. Venom Snake, as he comes to be known, is a point of instability that manifests on the one hand as madness and on the other hand as the player themself. In other words, the act of playing as the player-character is itself a negotiation of that instability; if Snake had succeeded in producing a genuine copy of himself, there would be no room for play. The failure of Snake’s project is evidenced by the ability of the player, not Snake, to control the player-character. Carried further, the instability and potentiality of the Ishmael-Ahab conflux is evidenced by the multiplicity of players that stand in relation to the player-character and, through him, to each other; as “direct participants in carnivalistic acts,” the players of the game reconstitute “the communal performance on the public square” that is at the heart of Bakhtin’s sense of the authentic carnivalesque (1981, p. 131). It is within and through the instability of this communal carnivalesque that the game levies its critique of the hegemonic gaze of Western imperialism as realized in the military-industrial complex. Specifically, the distanced, rational, techno-bureaucratic ways of looking, knowing and acting that mediate the player’s relationship to MGSV’s gamespace are all ridiculous and tragic failures for the player-character. As a result, the visual regime that structures those mediations, specifically as deployed in videogames and videogame genres, is revealed to not only be cruel and destructive but logically incoherent; more to the point, the incoherency of the imperial gaze is precisely what produces the cruelty and destruction that it inflicts upon the world.
“Staff member, has died” or, the Affective Dimension of Satire
The visual regime of contemporary Western imperialism is usefully expressed in the form of the Int-Scope, short for Intel Scope: common in stealth videogames, it is a device that extends the sight of the player not only via magnification but also through its ability to read and mark the gamescape for the player. When focusing on an entity (human or otherwise) within the game, the Int-Scope provides relevant data about that entity and places a marker on it within the gamespace. This allows the player to keep track of where things are. The Int-Scope augments limited human vision with computerized analyses and data, allowing for complete mastery over the environment as well as the various soldiers that occupy that environment. For example, focusing on a soldier provides the player with a readout of characteristics that make the soldier more or less valuable, with grades assigned from E to S++. If a soldier has high grades, the player might decide to capture them, at which point they (the soldier) will be hired and trained into Snake’s mercenary group. The Int-Scope facilitates the bureaucratic management of the gamescape through its mediation of both the fictional Afghanistan and the mercenary group that the player-character leads. In its differentiating and evaluating function, the Int-Scope is the perfected tool of racialized surveillance capitalism, visualizing every person, place and thing in the world as property for the user. It is the miniaturized and mobile “imperial screen” described by Nicholas Mirzoeff, the transparent wall through which the “white English viewer… could shoot whatever there was to be seen with the impunity and clear conscience of separation” (Mirzoeff, 2023).
The comfort and ease provided by this digital augmentation leads in turn to one of the most horrifying sequences I have ever experienced in a game, the brutality of which results largely from the absolute failure of the Int-Scope in the face of human connection and suffering.
After a given soldier has been kidnapped and hired, they are given a callsign and can be assigned to perform various tasks, accruing experience and accolades as they do so. The player-character can also interact directly with the soldiers wandering around Mother Base, the hub of all activities in the game. If approached, they express a loving admiration for the player-character, requesting training sessions and excitedly whispering his praises to each other. Near the end of the game, a building in the player-character’s base is quarantined as a result of a game-recurring bioengineered parasitic virus. The player-character volunteers himself to go in alone to determine the cause, having decided that he is unwilling to sacrifice more of his crew to the disease that has already claimed so many. As he enters the quarantined building, it quickly becomes clear that this is not like any other mission in the game; the flickering lights barely illuminate the bodies that fill the blood-covered hallways, while barely alive crew members claw at their throats to gouge the parasite out. Many have clearly killed each other, including some that do so in front of the player-character. As each crew member dies, a small indicator pops up on the screen: “Staff Died [Heroism -30].” At the same time, the feminine voice of a virtual assistant says in repetitive monotone: “Staff member, has died.” The comma is meant to illustrate the pause between the two halves of the phrase, the pause indicating the audible inhumanity with which various syllables and phrases are combined in the simulated voices of the increasingly common virtual assistants. That cold, unfeeling and robotic phrase is lodged indelibly in my mind, almost ten years after my first playthrough: “Staff member, has died.”
Because the hallways are dark, the player-character must use his very narrow flashlight to illuminate his surroundings; in order to aim the flashlight, the player must press the aim button, which of course also aims the currently equipped gun. The result of this combination of actions and systems means that as the player-character looks at and illuminates any member of their dying or pleading crew, the Int-Scope activates and tags the crew member with their callsign. What is crucial to remember here is that these callsigns are how the player knows these individuals: very rarely will the player be able to distinguish between the faces displayed in miniature within the game’s bureaucratic management interface. But the callsigns are recognizable, tied as they are to each soldier’s grade and mission record, and each moment of recognition carries with it a specific kind of stomach-sickening cruelty. As I aim my gun at a woman pleading for her life, knowing I will almost certainly not be able to save her, I get a ping and realize that this is one of my favorite soldiers, who I have sent out on many missions not because she is better than the others but because I have developed a kind of trust and preference for her -- and as I recognize her, she falls over dead: “Staff member, has died.”
As the player-character reaches the far end of the compound, it is revealed that there has been a mutation causing the infected to violently seek out the open air and thereby spread the infection to migratory seabirds and initiate a global pandemic. There is hope, however, in the form of a piece of scanning equipment -- a single scope set in the middle of goggles -- that highlights any parasites with a faint golden glow. At this point, the player-character is assaulted by a number of infected crew members, some of whom he is forced to kill. Those who make it past him to the exit are immediately struck by a missile fired from a circling helicopter and return screaming in pain as they burn alive in front of him. The mission now changes -- the player-character must make his way back through the horrific compound to try and find any potentially uninfected soldiers as well as execute any infected soldiers to spare them from the agony of the purging flames that await them otherwise. Walking from room to room, the player must look at every soldier in turn and experience the building horror of the realization that there is no saving the crew -- your crew, each hand-picked and bearing the custom emblem and group name you gave them. Some members you recognize, some are less familiar, but all crew members recognize you as their beloved leader. Each soldier has a different response to your arrival, from hope, to fear, to pleading, to resignation -- and you must execute each of them in turn: “Staff member, has died.” Their deaths now coming at your hands, the visual indicator changes from “Staff Died [Heroism -30]” to “Staff Died [Heroism -60].” Furthermore, the player will likely find themself aiming for their heads, as each missed shot produces more suffering for the doomed individual and prompts another familiar indicator: “Headshots 1.” This counter exists for every mission, tracking how many headshots -- the classic indicator of skill -- a player has performed across the mission. In this case, however, it is rendered more absurd and disgusting with each shot: “Staff member, has died. Staff member, has died. Staff member, has died.”
Finally, the player-character arrives at the final room, where two crew members are facing each other down, guns drawn, while several other crew members look on in fear and confusion. As the player-character enters, the two crew members put down their guns and tell him to decide: “Hey let’s let the Boss decide. We live and die by your order, Boss.” They all go into a salute as the heroic swelling of the Metal Gear Solid 4 soundtrack plays not in the background but the foreground, coming out of a cassette player on the floor. They all begin to hum along to the most recognizable of all Metal Gear music, a discordant accompaniment to the sweeping martial strings as the player-character makes his decision. Except the decision has already been made: they are all infected. As the player goes down the line executing each staff member, they do not stop saluting, they do not stop humming, and their bleak music is drowned out by the virtual assistant talking over herself due to the speed of the deaths: “Staff member, has d -- Staff mem -- Staff member -- Staff member, has died.” Finally, there is one crew member left, slumped against the wall but miraculously uninfected. The player-character carries the lone survivor on his shoulders to the nearby exit as he weakly gasps out a thank you. As the player interacts with the door to leave, the soldier stops them: “Wait. I… I don’t think I made it after all.” The player-character sets him on the floor, and reactivates the goggles. The infection has awakened within the soldier’s throat, now glowing golden beneath the player’s gaze. The exhausted soldier stares at the floor: “Maybe it got in through my wounds. They’re waiting now. All of them. Do it.” He turns with arms outstretched towards the player-character: “Staff member, has died.”
Once the player attempts to leave, control is removed as a cut-scene plays. The player-character turns away from the door and walks through the bloody hallways, and as the lights flicker, the player-character is transformed. His shrapnel grown into a horn, his body drenched in blood, flies buzzing around him -- he assumes a demonic form to match the self-perception of the otherwise unknowable player-character. This mission is crucial for articulating the tragic element of the game’s satirical project, and it is the point of total incoherency toward which the rest of the game builds. The Int-Scope, which analyzes and grades professional soldiers in blatantly ludic language, is ridiculous on its own terms; at the moment that the player’s detached participation in this absurdity is confronted with the human reality of connection and death, what had been laughable becomes deeply sickening -- what have I been laughing at? The initially comic depersonalization is carried to its logical conclusion, converted into tragedy and horror.
As the player deploys back into the sun-washed, empty gamescape of Afghanistan, the intense pressure of the preceding scene’s imagery is tangible. Gazing through the Int-Scope at more S++ soldiers ready to be kidnapped and recruited, the game tauntingly reminds the player that they need to replace those who died spare minutes earlier. The player-character is a demon, inhuman by virtue of his inability to engage with the world in any way other than the visual regime within which the game places him. As the new face appears to the player, the function of “headshots taken by firearms collide with… [that of] photographic headshots” in the player’s understanding and relationship with the “imperial screen” through which the world is visualized to them (Phillips, 2018; Mirzoeff, 2023). At the same time, the accumulatory process of Mother Base gives way to the same sense of “the futility in endless accumulation” that Kate Clark ascribes to the designed boredom of No Man’s Sky -- futility here being a function not of boredom, but the trauma of loss (Clark, 2022). Along the same lines, Tim Welsh points to the “disquiet” of experiencing the inhuman violence of “technologically efficient modern warfare” perpetrated through a screen during the AC-130 sequence in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Welsh, 2016). The quarantine mission of MGSV inscribes the presence and dehumanization of that screen onto the apparatus of the player-character, extending backward and forward across the game. Through the instability inherent to the multiplicity of Snake, the actions available to the player through that apparatus are made viscerally visible. This disjunctive play brings into focus the otherwise obscure techno-visual regime of racialized surveillance capitalism.
Conclusion
MGSV is a carnivalesque Menippean satire that uses a generic immanent critique of the American spy thriller to expose not just the narcissistic assumption of a privileged access to truth, but ultimately the privileging of truth itself as the attainable, necessary and promised end of that techno-visual regime. The game does not just signal its critique, but also grounds and performs it via unstable and multiple reference, first and foremost to Moby-Dick. It does this in order to expose the supposed rationality of data as the essential form of the contemporary Western imperial visual regime. The game is also importantly self-referential, regularly revisiting, reiterating and contradicting characters and events from other games in the series -- I have described the instability produced by the game, but without reference to the fact that MGSV is a prequel. If the player has interacted with the other games, they know that the player-character becomes the first major villain of the series; without the player, the game’s instability collapses toward the inevitable tragedy of the series. The game is not naive in its representation of space -- the unreal landscapes of Afghanistan and Africa are drawn from the American cultural imaginary function in order to produce an awareness of those images as intensely mediated and the historical consequences of that mediation.
And yet, the game is often critically read in precisely the opposite manner. William Spanos, analyzing his own field’s inability to read satire in Moby-Dick, argues that:
[t]o approach Melville's fiction with such a future anterior perspective-a geometric measure, as it were-is precisely to practice the restricted (imperial) economy of the ontology and epistemology he is calling radically into question in Moby-Dick (and the fiction that follows): specifically, the monomania that impels Captain Ahab on his murderous pursuit of the ineffable white whale. (1995, p. 60)
Now, 30 years later, game studies has found itself stuck in precisely the same mode of criticism that Spanos is attempting to move beyond. In its mad vengeful hunt, game researchers often attack the very thing they proclaim to be seeking. The critic may not die in the resulting failure, but the role of criticism in reception is lessened, the already tenuous connection between academic and cultural discourse weakened further.
This essay proposes and models the generic mode of critique as a method that instead opens analysis to the presentness of history and is dialogic in the conversations it recognizes between objects. For Bakhtin, “genre is always the same and yet not the same, always old and new simultaneously… reborn and renewed… in every individual work of a given genre” (1981, p. 106). Each work is a “contemporization” that is simultaneously continuous and discontinuous (1981, p. 106). Necessarily operating within genre, the text is the moment of inheritance of the generic tradition, and therefore the moment of potential disinheritance (Ahmed, 2006; Derrida, 2012). Without recognizing fundamentally intertextual practices such as immanent critique and satire, we risk making genetic arguments that deny the instability that each work possesses, reconstituting the text as a deadened, hollowed-out simulacrum that actively closes off the potential of that instability.
This mode of generic analysis is therefore important not only to game studies scholars in their understanding of the experience and production of meaning in and around game objects, but also to literary scholars, cinema scholars, music scholars, etc. in their understanding of the same in and around their own objects, both old and new. Put simply, videogames now possess the same referential power that all art claims, both as referent and reference. Videogames are an available and powerful referent with which that art is always playing, directly or indirectly, no matter the medium. While it is certainly true that “[i]t behoves game designers to fully understand the nuanced cultural references they invoke,” it is equally true that it behoves game studies critics to fully understand the nuanced cultural references that games invoke. Even more so when the failure to do so results in the condescending indictment of non-Western game makers as naive in their reception and reproduction of the very logics that they are active and agentive in critiquing.
This article has only scratched the surface of the references made by MGSV, and only articulated one specific aspect of the project. There is much more work to be done on the game’s referential structure, from the role of language in culture as depicted by the virulent vocal cord parasites in reference to William S. Burroughs’ theorization of language as a “word-virus,” to the annihilation of difference in the wake of the unanswerable nuclear bomb, articulated in part through reference to Lord of the Flies and the overloaded image of the child. My hope is that this article has in some small way shifted the discourse toward the production of generic and reparative analyses, both in the Metal Gear series and beyond.
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