The best kind of people are smart and can poke fun at themselves. Turns out, it’s the same for games.
Have you ever heard of Metal Gear Solid? Broadly speaking, it’s the game series that revolutionized the cinematic possibilities of video games, and brought stealth gaming to a whole new level.
The opening of the first PS1 game was straight out of Hollywood:
The series has an anti-war message coursing through it. Some of the games in the franchise have themes: Gene (MGS1), Meme (MGS2), Scene (MGS3), Sense (MGS4), and Peace (MGS Peace Walker). They inform the overall story, and series creator Hideo Kojima tries to convey some very serious ideas through these games.
So the series has got to be really deep and meaningful, right? Well, yes and no. Because this series also has some crazy nonsense in it:
This Mad Hatter mix isn’t clearly demarcated between the serious and funny parts either, because you get comedic gameplay elements too:
And you know what? I love it. I love this insane juxtaposition. I love it so much. I dub these hi-jinks ‘stupid-cool’, because I can’t think of anything better (feel free to let me know if you have a better term!).
Here’s another example:
It’s a cyborg ninja, battling a giant robot that looks and acts like a dinosaur, with a sword known as a high-frequency blade (for visual purposes, it’s essentially a katana, which means Japanese sword), backed by an electro-metal (?) soundtrack that knows that holding back the vocal track until it kicks into the climax of the fight just makes things that much sicker, topped off with a cool sheathing-the-sword-with-my-back-to-the-explosions pose to close the scene.
(Run-on sentence? You’re goddamn right I’m using a run-on sentence. It’s the least I could do to describe… that.)
The key here is that it’s all presented straight. No nudge-nudge wink-wink “hehe it’s kinda wacky and kooky isn’t it hehe” awareness in the delivery. This allows the audience to make their own judgment call: take it straight, or choose to see the ridiculous elements.
The beauty of this is that it isn’t a mutually-exclusive choice. You can enjoy it both as a soooooo coooooool cyborg vs. giant robot fight, and as a hilarious commentary on cliched elements in Japanese pop culture narrative subtexts and you know what I’m just throwing words together but you get my point. And you can do both simultaneously.
The MGS series isn’t the only one that does this. The Devil May Cry and Yakuza series are also amazing at this balancing act.
(But I don’t agree with his review; buy Yakuza 0 and try it for yourself, I guarantee you’ll be crying at the end, the story’s great)
To me, games like these are representative of life itself – neither 100% serious nor 100% fun, an amalgamation of emotions largely out of our control.
There’s another facet to all this too: there’s a certain dignity that comes with enjoying things to the fullest, in a very innocent, 10-year-old-kid way, even if they’re really niche, somewhat weird things.
Especially if they’re really niche, somewhat weird things.
It’s a form of honesty, which is refreshing in a world that judges you for everything from your clothes to the food you eat.
Of course, it helps that these are good games. But even if they weren’t, the fact that the humour and storytelling of these games come from a pure “I just want you to enjoy yourself” kind of place, means that you can’t help but be touched.
More than anything else, it’s real. And perhaps that’s what matters the most.