About the Book
This collection, arriving in the wake of the 25th anniversary of 1998’s Metal Gear Solid, provides scholars and fans alike with a wide-ranging selection of critical essays on the franchise from diverse disciplinary and thematic perspectives.
With the conclusion of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid video game series only recently behind us, it is now both possible and essential to study this critically, commercially, and culturally resonant series as a whole. The essays contained in this volume, which are all new contributions from both established and emerging scholars, take up this crucial opportunity to consider and reconsider the cultural, historical, political, philosophical, and aesthetic impact of the Metal Gear Solid games in analyses spanning the series’ canonical entries, adding to the understanding of both well-studied installments and under- examined ones.
These contributions connect themes that emerge from the games—such as sexuality and queerness, rhetoric and ethics, and subjectivity and embodiment—while also demonstrating how the series opens up broader questions about ecology, race, gender, militarization, pedagogy, and game design, that demand continued analysis and application. Each essay develops new avenues for theoretical, rhetorical, and political exploration of the Metal Gear Solid series, for Game Studies, and for the study of Popular Culture writ large. As the first collection of critical inquiries into the Metal Gear Solid series, this volume serves as crucial exegesis of and critical companion to any future study of the series by celebrating, critiquing, and critically interrogating its entries’ rich cultural and disciplinary import.
Table of Contents:
Figures
Tables
Foreword: Twenty-Five Years of Metal Gear Solid
David Hayter (Screenwriter/Producer, USA)
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Reading and "Misreading" the Metal Gear Solid Series
Steven Kielich (University at Buffalo, USA) and Chris Hall (University of the Ozarks, USA)
Part I: “This Is a Sneaking Mission!”: Genre and Design
1. Sustained Intrusion: Embodiment, Environment and Ensconcement in Metal Gear Solid
John McLoughlin (Cardiff University, UK)
2. Metal Gaze Suture: Analyzing Metal Gear Solid through Psychoanalytic Film Theory
Andrea Andiloro (Swinburne Institute of Technology, Australia)
3. The Anti-Game: Metal Gear Solid 3 & The Stealth Genre
Steven Conway (Swinburne Institute of Technology, Australia)
Part II: Metacommentary and Ludic Rhetoric
4. Intended Play Experience
Emma Kostopolous (Valdosta State University, USA)
5. Cameo Kojima: Ludic Self-Representation in the Metal Gear Solid Franchise
Bryan Hikari Hartzheim (Waseda University, Japan)
6. Become the Warmongers: Menus & the Fiction of Neutrality in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
Evan Manzanetti (University of California Davis, USA)
Part III: Ecology and Nonhuman Perspectives
7. Greening a Green Beret: Diamond Dogs as Environmental Enforcement for Hire in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Jacob Price (Brigham Young University, USA)
8. “So, the Snake’s Finally Come Out of His Hole”: Liminal Relationships Between Humans and Nature in the Metal Gear Solid series
Morgan Pinder (Deakin University, Australia)
9. “Plant Your Roots in Me”: Rhizomatic Narratology and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Steve Nash (Leeds Beckett University, UK)
Part IV: Gender, Bodies, Desire
10. Ideologies of the Body in Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid Series
Rachael Hutchinson (University of Delaware, USA)
11. “Could You Be the One to Finally Finish Me?”: Impossible Queer Temporalities in the Metal Gear Solid Series
Jordan Youngblood (Eastern Connecticut State University, USA)
12. Embodying Bad Feminist Characters: Gendered Biosemiotics and Narrative in Metal Gear Solid’s Women
Cody Mejeur (University at Buffalo, USA)
Part V: Technologies of the Self in and Beyond Metal Gear Solid
13. “I Used to Think I Could Use Science to Help Mankind”: What Can Metal Gear Solid Teach Us about Science, Technology, and Society (STS)?
Yassine Dguidegue (Arizona State University, USA)
14. Integral Reality and Virtuality in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Madison Browne (University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA)
15. “Think Like a Soldier:” Militarized Subjects and Techniques of Self in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Mauricio Ortiz Zaragoza (University of Nevada, USA)
Notes on Contributors
Video Games Referenced
Index
About the Author :
Steven Kielich is pursuing a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, USA. He has published in Games and Culture and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
Chris Hall is Assistant Professor of English at the University of the Ozarks, USA. He works in media studies, literary studies, and critical theory and has published on immigration, COVID, and fascism, as well as on the Metal Gear Solid series and other works of popular culture.
Review :
This diverse collection of scholarly work on the Metal Gear series represents a critical area of video game studies. Hideo Kojima’s games, exemplified by the Metal Gear games, lend themselves to multiple lenses of analysis, and ask players to consider compelling and timely issues such as the impact of war, PTSD, and cyclical violence. Further still, the Metal Gear series invites consideration of video game aesthetics and a blurring of the line between video games and film. This volume covers all of these areas and more and is a compelling read.
Video games are strange machines of meaning that oscillate between the profound and nonsensical. Few series have understood games better, and what they can say about our world, than Metal Gear Solid. This great collection offers the schematics to Metal Gear’s many levels and, like the series itself, will only get more resonant with time.
Making sense of the intricate world of Metal Gear is no small feat. But with this anthology, Steven Kielich and Chris Hall expertly frame an understanding that is open, lucid, and generative. Calling upon an array of voices—ranging from visual culture and media studies to English, literature, and (of course) game studies—The Metal Gear Solid Series may well become the definitive volume for one of the longest-running series in video game history.
