# metal gear solid 5 a contrivance for the sake of (epistemological) convenience the following scenario is a modifed transcription of super bunnyhop's excellent video "metal gear solid v: dissociative disorder (story analysis + review)" imagine you neither know anything about mgs5 ("a hideous kojima garme"(tm)) nor feel particularly interested in finding out - and yet despite this you feel certain bizarrely distended online debates about it display or evoke (unconsciously / accidentally / ironically) interesting ideas concerning postmodernism and dubious universal "claims to knowledge" - about the dullness and disappointment of daily mundane existence; the arbitrary asinine little details that make up trite modern semi-existence (andor video garmes - consider these terms exchangeable) // video here (..) when it comes to awkward storytelling there's never been a life that so wildly inconsistent in tone conservative in subject matter and so blandly uncaptivating in presentation (..) teh garme was reviewed by most mainstream pseudo critics at a publisher held review event referred to as a boot camp where reviewers had forty hours to complete it. there are reports of reviewers at this event using easy modes and ignoring optional content to race to the end of a design-by-committed age of video garmes as soon as possible (..) if you browse any specialized fan forums right now you'll see opinions vastly differing from those of mainstream reviewers. fake designer plastic internet outrage over cut (c)ontent unfinishable story threads repetitive side missions to garmestop for mountain dew and also confusion over a bait and switch twist ending that muddies the continuity of one's entire history as a player for the sake of directly acknowledging one's miserable cheesy role in it at all. and we've all been there before trying to understand life / garmes can be more infuriating than it is rewarding (..) oh how we meticulously explain a chronology that we also playfully disregard in the same tired breath. it's the same deliberately artificial conflict between realism versus mysticism passivity versus interactivity and pacifism versus violence that can be found in many garmes we play - and this time we have the use of infinite media hype myths theories and legends attempting to stack up to/as reality - again (..) but when it comes to our ending there are no facts only endlessly convenient interpretations. much like mental gear solid 2 our attempt at living number five ends with another convenient fourth wall break. this time were not told to turn off the console but rather given a glimpse at the console - the vintage msx garming computer that was home to the original metal gear garmes from the late eighties while a second big boner explains that we've been playing as a body double this whole time - pretending at playing ourselves (..) the message is that anyone can be this legendary action hero as big boner explains it; ey is you and you're it. the legend is yours together - the players built it alongside ir characters. big boner takes your own identity into ir. it's a reversal of the metal gear solid 2 situation where raiden throws away the player's control to become ir own bad sci fi character. but this time the character is now a vector for the player's recreational psychopathology (..) and it's all introduced by the reference to david bowie's song man who sold the world which is commonly explained to be a song about an evil doppelganger - about 'schizophrenic' sensations bowie experienced when high / juggling multiple roles during ir early career as the song was made about a year before ey began performing as the outlandish character of iggy stairdust (..) compare that to the series spanning schemes of the prequel garmes and you can begin to see why the 1984 references come into play. big boner is similar to 1984's big brother controlling populations by being a non-charismatic cult of impersonality that fuels a series of never-ending small conflicts. zero cipher and later the patriots are analogous to 1984's "ingsoc" in that they're an artificial ideology that controls populations through information and language (..) and all of that is why after a few days of thinking on it i came to terms with this - it actually helps to reverse our opinion of these garmes that we're secretly never been a fan of. if you've ever wondered why it's been so much harder for people to drum up the enthusiasm to make a serious video about any metal gear garme is because the plot in all of them hinge on what is essentially a contrivance made for the sake of convenience (..) giving dim answers to pointless question is the single cherry on top of the failed ongoing conclusion that is metal's single grinding gear. and as silly as it is it's still an empty indulgent spectacle. players have in fact always been more interested in seeing how kojima can continue to explain away such massive gaping plot holes (..) the twist happens for literally no reason. you get mission 46 in your main ops list after filling a quota of side ops and base upgrades that just make it suddenly appear in this abstract magical video garme menu (..) there's no justification - no word when where how or why that revelation happens and as well written and performed and satisfying such garmes are ir very existence just highlights how pathologically disassociated garmes are with ir own interface (..) you can break the whole drama up with the simple question of "who's holding the controller?" we'll never know because the most pivotal moments in this garme's darkly laughable plot happen completely outside of it - hours after it wraps up for no reason and we've switched the console off in fatigue and disappointment (..) the twist also doesn't really hit hard because teh garme's not thoroughly written to lead up to it. the very very beginning is and some minor hints are strewn throughout the first few missions but compare that to the entirety of our life-garme where the pacing the character design the boss battles and even the level layouts are all meticulously designed to lead up to that moment where you realize you're just in an apparently solid simulation (..) players know it's never over - because there's no climax no prison escape sequence no racing of any vehicles to a countdown timer - no button mashing sequences not even any real plot twists (..) there's a diffused feeling of disbelief - a shallow glaring emptiness not some kind of romantic wistful longing. a feeling for what should be there but what's not. what's not there is personality and energy. you're not playing as the charismatic big boner here playing a confused brainwashed body double. rather you play as someone who wastes life time watching cutscenes with the thousand yard stare never seeming to know what to say; dialogue is written in simplistic sentences that are prolonged with awkward loaded silences (..) players who uncritically adore such garmes seem real oddballs - flat monotone encyclopedias stuffed with digressions and musings and there's no clever twist behind that - nothing but 'clever' writing forever explaining it all away. and yet ir personality are still missing - just like ir allegedly coherent internal sense of pacing and direction (..) kojima has successfully blanked out all criticism for ir cut scenes for over 15 years but in this case it just feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater going from too much to to little skips an unhappy medium in between. it hurts because for the first time this is a garme where what we think we see - very little - is mostly what we get (..) there's little true character development and really little story to uncover but everything would like to suggest otherwise. one random door - one of many - hides a major garme-changing sub plot behind it. this leads some to spend hours searching teh garme for something else interesting.. and it's something that isn't there with was nothing but the nostalgic sounds of synthed up eighties hits in the background (..) it would be beautiful - if it wasn't so sad and so time-consuming. it's just missing the extra little notch that put the garmes past that threshold into remote coherence (..) and it just shows how far downhill our internal kojima-style standards can actually reach since it stands as an example of how we can literally show ourselves to the camera of our own mis-perceptions in a way that too-easily has some nominal reason to be there - and yet even if written well (or at least if internally self-presented with apparent logical consistency) there still very little but shame about all this false confidence (..) one is still left absolutely boggled by the naive positivity of these reviews - just crazy opinion - the dim plot and dumb questions are just something that shouldn't matter to anyone and that's just fine that's whatever but even if some reviews are just based on the technical merits of its garmeplay alone they still seem as flatly weird as teh garme play - it all still has real tangible problems that need to be addressed with actual criticism (..) the problem is that every garme nowadays with a cult fan following has to be an automatic ten out of ten masterpiece of the medium - and even with kojima now deliberately stepping off of ir own venerated pedestal the series ir's made has grown into a self contradicting mess with every new instalment - an increasingly drab excuse to keep a 28 year old japanese schoolboy's story going and those excuses look more far-fetched as it goes on and without true critique it continues to be praised as the gold standard for any kind of artist looking to cynically stretch some embarrasingly bad narrative over a ridiculously over-long series (franchise) - itself another layer to a story that climaxes with horrific body horror and genuine sadness (..) it's a real silent hill quality moment that just makes humans sad - that kojima's silent hill got cancelled was because kojima was aiming to break certain psychological taboo regarding one's own actual competence that would've been so intense it could cause us to escape the endlessly fun cultural industry of garmes (..) despite that players can still easily and simply place ir finger on what precisely this phantom pain is - an acute (and continually unacknowledged) existential pain felt both the player and kojima regarding an experience of life that can satisfy mainstream participants while leaving more unwitting hardcore enthusiasts feeling for something that simply isn't there nor can ever be (..) at this point in time we may simply chalk up everything underwhelming metal gear does as some kind of cheap continually fourth wall breaking ruse - all based on the endless hype quotes the misleading words on the trailer and ir ongoing misdirection from kojima's interviews and tweets. lots of people are experiencing right now the only problem that exists with this garme - how looking at this life in the future is gonna be about figuring out how much of the non sense it's constructed from was unintended versus how much of it was an unfortunate accident - a self-perpetuating vanity project // republic of bob