"dreaming in an empty room"
by Tim Rogers, 30.07.2004

Ico is a boy placed in an empty room. He is a videogame character that doesn't know he's a videogame character. We're not supposed to think of him as a videogame character. He's Ico.

The game absorbs us. I've heard lots of people say, "I forgot I was playing a game."

Well!

Metal Gear Solid 2 reflects on itself so much we start thinking, "This is fucking ridiculous!"

Ever had a weird dream? Like, a really weird dream?

Ever dream you're on an elevator creeping up the side of a skyscraper, and wake up when a helicopter shoots out the glass, and you jump, and plummet toward the street?

I say you always wake up before you fall because your mind has no memories of death, so you can't recreate it. Our dreams use pieces of cognition we don't know they're using.

Just Metal Gear Solid 2 uses spy-thriller clichés, action-movie scenes, and ripped-from-the-headlines terrorist activities to tell you a story.

"Well, it's not a story I want to hear!" you may exclaim.

Okay. How interesting do you want your spy-thriller to be?

" Metal Gear Solid 2 is an abomination!" some people said.

What did you want, "surprising twists"? You wanted "secrets"?

Well, you got a whole hell of a lot of secrets, didn't you?

Recall Otacon's "confession" scene. Recall the parrot. And then think:

Do you ever dream you're a cowboy/gas station attendant in a futuristic desert, who ends up getting sexually harassed in a job interview and forced to have sex with the female CEO, who luckily happens to be Michelle Yeoh?

Do you ever dream that you cry, and run away from Michelle Yeoh when she asks you to have sex with her?

Well, sometimes the postmodern shows us stuff we don't want -- or aren't ready -- to see.

Like Otacon crying over his little step-sister's dead body because he had sex with her mom. Right in the middle of a terrorist-hostage-nuclear weapon-situation.

Art imitates life, they say? Maybe it does.

Someone tell me "Sleepless in Seattle" imitates their life.

Someone else tell me "Sleepless in Seattle" is art.

The postmodern is concerned with something different. It's not logic. Leave logic to Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Cross [that was a joke]. Postmodernity doesn't care for logic. It cares for something else.

I could explain it. However, that would involve my letting out the big secret.

Okay, so I don't really know what postmodernity cares for. That's not the point, though. The point is that this entire theory of "Dreaming in an Empty Room" might seem like pure conjecture to a lot of people. Most people, I gather, will brush this theory off. They'll say, "I still think it was an abomination. The story sucked. It could have been so much better. 'Literary'? It wasn't supposed to be literary; it was supposed to be a game."

I've come across these people in person, and I've tried to explain things to them. These are the people who say the "story" was "an abomination," and then say that it wasn't "supposed to be literary." These are also the people who are still talking today about Zack and Cloud's relationship in Final Fantasy VII . These are the people who work long and hard to try to get their loved ones or friends to understand that gaming is a legitimate form of entertainment.

I'm confused, fellow gamers, that you want games to get recognition as legitimate entertainment, yet can't accept that they can also have artistic aspirations. Doesn't this run counter to man's tendency to hail as art what he doesn't understand? What would Mark Twain have to say about all this? Anyone remember "The King's Camelopard" from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ?

Hell, if Mark Twain were around today, he'd probably be making games that make money. That people flame other people about on message boards. That everyone plays, and no one really, truly understands.

With the current wave of consoles, we're going to see a lot more games made by a lot more people, many of them in Japan, many of them elsewhere. We haven't yet seen the first Mark Twain of videogames -- though Mother 2 and Metal Gear Solid 2 come close. Sadly, a lot of people are not particularly waiting for this genius designer's arrival.

Do you think people in Murasaki Shikibu's time complained to her about the world's "first novel," The Tale of Genji , saying "Books are supposed to be fun, not making all these subtle comments about the politics of the Heian court!"

Games are a young form of entertainment. The children who grew up with games are now adults. Many of them are as blind to the idea of the artistic videogame as our parents are to Eminem, as our parents' parents were to The Beatles, as The Beatles' fans were blind to the conceptuality of Yoko Ono. God bless the children of today, for seeing the genius of Pokémon . One of them is the first Tolstoy of videogames.

That, however, is for another day's installment.

Here, at the end of this ridiculous, postmodern "editorial," I'd like to take a stance: I am a strong advocate of New School Gaming. Yes, I can beat Gradius III in one life. Yes, my favorite game is Super Mario Bros. 3 . Yes, I do play Street Fighter II Turbo Hyperfighting and Gunstar Heroes at least twice a week. Yes, I like Landstalker more than Final Fantasy X . That doesn't matter. I have hope for the future. Maybe more hope than you have.

Or maybe I just have a thing for the Colonel.

TURN THE GAME CONSOLE OFF NOW!

Since writing this article, I have endured many long adventures, played a demo of Metal Gear Solid 3 , and met Hideo Kojima. I interviewed him for an article in Wired , a fine and noble magazine. The interview will be published within a few months of your reading or rereading this. Around the time of my interview with Mr. Kojima, I took this article down, fearing that he might read it. Maybe I was fearing having made a mistake of some sort. Well, I was able to present my ideas to Kojima, who confirmed that I am pretty much right about why he made Metal Gear Solid 2 . His goal was, as he explained to me, "To make a videogame that told a story that could only be told in a videogame." His first and foremost goal, he claims, was to "Use the medium," which is, as he put it, "inherently postmodern." The goal of the story the game sought to tell was to tell that story to the people of today, with no illusions of its surviving decades or centuries to leave an impact on a distant society. Even so, the gameplay, as he explains, becomes increasingly more challenging in such a way as to make the experience something round and fulfilling even to the player who skips all of the long, drawn-out dialogue sequences. The gameplay, says the man, was engaging merely because it could not be not engaging under his supervision. Kojima shared a few philosophies with me on what kinds of people make good game developers, and under his rubric, I am one of those people, which made me feel kind of nice.

Hideo Kojima claims to have never read Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World , though Japanese filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura has been suggesting the book to Kojima since Metal Gear Solid 2 went on sale. Kojima himself likes to think that the game's was more inspired by Kobo Abe's Kangaroo Notebook than anything else. Which is funny, because I also mentioned a Japanese work of postmodern . . . artistic integrity with the word "Kangaroo" in its title in my original writing.

Thanks again.

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