VIDEO ART

HE SAW IT ALL

the visionary Hideo Kojima

By Riley Kuang

A visionary with glasses

Hideo Kojima once predicted that there would be a huge information system connecting the world in the future, through which people would be connected to each other, but that in the end people with ulterior motives would use it to control access to information. People scoffed at this, until today. Kojima once made a prediction that in the future, wars would become a business, and the system built by wars would only maintain the existence of that system. People scoffed at this, until today.  Kojima once predicted a not-too-distant future in which people would huddle in separate worlds and rely solely on couriers to keep them connected. People scoffed at this, until today.

At this moment, when we look back at the works of Kojima—Metal Gear, Death Stranding, will we have a deeper understanding from these games as well? Death Stranding, a 2019 action game from Kojima Productions, his first game since leaving the legendary Konami studio is a post-apocalyptic adventure, only instead of zombies or nuclear war bringing about our end, it comes by way of an event known as… well, the Death Stranding.

The aptly named Death Standing

The Death Stranding is a cataclysmic event in which ghostly “Beached Things,” or BTs, suddenly appear in the world of the living, triggering a massive amount of simultaneous explosion-like “voidouts” all over the world, leaving nothing but craters in their wake. As a result of the Death Stranding, previously undiscovered particles known as Chiralium appear, rain turned into timefall that rapidly ages whatever it touches. Ruffle enough of their feathers and eventually their attack on the living causes more voidouts, too. Naturally, this leaves the remnants of humanity huddled up inside isolated cities, creating the need for transporters, those brave enough to make the journey to deliver essentials goods from one city to another.

I believe that games are a form of artistic expression that is the result of a collaborative effort between players and designers. While we have yet to prove that we can create meaningful work through this form of expression, I believe we are in the midst of something like the Cambrian biological explosion.          

                                             Will Wright (Designer, The Sims)

Four years ago, when Death Stranding first came out, it had an IGN score of 6.8. How can a point-and-click, pick-up-and-play game be fun. Four years ago, there was a Death Stranding review that said that “the idea of Death Stranding being art was complete bullshit.” So, is this game art or not? A year ago, I played it and I put down the controller in amazement, and asked, “What the hell happened to Kojima?

For gamers, games might simply be merchandise on the shelves, but for creators, it feels like more than life itself. Let me go back in time to 2012, at the GDC developer forum in San Francisco, Califronia. A game developer asked indie game designer Phil Fish, "I'm proud of what you just said about The Legend of Zelda, Mithridates, and Mega Man inspiring you. Being Japanese, I'd like to ask you what you think about Japanese games these days." Phil Fish replied, "It sucks."

Telling the truth at panels

The room erupted in laughter as he added, "I'm sorry, but you have to accept that, please upgrade your outdated Japanese technology." His companion beside him chimed in, "With the exception of the “Souls” like games, Japanese games are the ones that treat players like idiots. Those teaching boxes that insult the player's IQ can never be clicked enough." Until then Japanese video games had dominated the world, such as Mario, Final Fantasy, and Resident Evil. Japanese games pretty much were the foundation of today's gaming industry. That is, until 2009, when Keiji Inafune, the character designer of Rockman, publicly nailed the situation when he said that Japanese games were dead.

Even I was surprised to find myself complaining about Japanese games on social media. What happened to the Japanese game industry? Sony's PS3 set a record for the worst sales of the series, and Nintendo's new console, the Wii U, failed miserably, but Micro's XBOX 360 series, which never touched the hardware, surpassed 80 million units sold worldwide, directly equaling the PS3. It was during this period that the numerous began to take over the market. Nintendo of Japan, which is known for its innovation, had nothing to offer despite a company full of legendary producers.

The scary thing is that at the same time as the video game recession, there were are two companies, one of which bought Activision Blizzard from Atari, ushered in the peak era of the global MMO. The other was Steve Jobs, who also worked at Atari, and his introduction of smartphones directly cut off the prospects of traditional handhelds. This changed the future of the entire game industry in one fell swoop. With the decline of the console, the failure of the traditional IP, and then a whole new platform and genre, the Japanese video game industry wasn’t experiencing a big bang, but was collapsing into a black hole. Why did Japanese games become so humorless? Renowned game designer and former Resident Evil producer Shinji Mikami believed that acquiring European and American development technology was the most important way to regain a foothold in the industry. He emphasized the need for Japanese game developers to learn from Hollywood in terms of budgeting and global appeal.

Another Voice

At the same time, Kojima was facing challenges within Konami during a period when the company's IPs were struggling to perform well. Despite this, Kojima's work stood out, and there were high expectations that his work might elevate the company's standing.

Kojima's perspective on the decline of Japanese games revolves around the lack of innovation in technology, gameplay, and worldview. He highlighted the importance of offering free game experiences, embracing open-world concepts (rare in Japanese games at the time), and focusing on global appeal rather than just domestic sales. The comparison between Western and Japanese game development methods, with the former emphasizing innovation through technology, while the latter focused more on graphic effects and art, speaks to their different approaches to game creation. It's evident that these industry figures, including Yamayama and Kojima, recognize the need for Japanese game developers to adapt to global trends, innovate in gameplay, and create more universal gaming experiences rather than niche, Japan-centric content.

The incredible fox engine

After Kojima realized these problems, he began to try to solve them with Konami. The first thing Kojima did was to develop his own game engine. Developing a game engine is expensive, difficult, and risky, but once completed a game engine allows the development team to achieve higher quality and faster development. Taking Capcom as an example, the ability to continuously release game products is to develop a topflight RE Engine. But even earlier than the RE Engine, Kojima had already developed his own self-created FOX Engine, which was so advanced that it’s still advanced today.

This investment in major infrastructure helped Japanese games improve their outdated technology. In addition to tools, game design talent is also a priority. In order to nurture more, Kojima also started mentoring young artists. His first release was Metal Gear Rising, a brand-new series that was a perfect game for the company’s second coming.

Metal Gear Rising uses a new engine to create the core gameplay, changing the practice of stacking fun with systems. The core gameplay is the CUT, which realizes the battle gameplay and can cut anything through technology, which is not only innovative but also interesting. People are passionate about it even now. After the latest sequel, Metal Gear Phantom Pain, Kojima directly challenges the open-world by redesigning a more suitable open-world sneaking gameplay. That includes a one-take game narrative and handheld photography and he did this way before the new God of War. During this period, he also announced the establishment of an overseas studio, Kojima Los Angeles, to recruit global talent.

Los Angeles is the best place to recruit

Kojima has continued to strengthen his links to the world in his online community, planting many opportunities for the company to link up with other well-known IP's in the future. Finally, Kojima used his global popularity and his knack for staged promotions to release the latest sequel to Silent Hill. The game looks like a collection of all of Kojima's hard work, and its demo shows off the amazing graphics and atmosphere of the Fox Engine. In the trailer, he even announced that he was teaming up with Guillermo del Toro, the writer of The Hobbit and the director of Pacific Rim to produce this new Silent Hill.

More Silent Hill

The climax of the demo is the appearance of Norman Reedus, the protagonist of The Walking Dead. Kojima's personal Hollywood connections have injected Konami with an international perspective and talent base. Not only did this create a global gamer sensation, but also its demo version was hailed as redefining horror gaming. These moves managed to bring Silent Hill, the company's old IP, back from the dead. Kojima is like a porter, carrying the company and its partners to a higher level of production and artistry.

Times are changing, and the "game production" that I'm climbing is also undergoing crustal movement and is constantly changing. Even so, I continue to climb. It's not because "it's there". Rather, from now on, I will continue to climb because it is not there.  

                                                                              Hideo Kojima, 2012

Falling is the most important element in Death Stranding, and it's not often that games in the world design "falling" into their gameplay. We don't fall when we play League of Legends, and we don't fall when we go zone to zone in PUBG. But Kojima, always pushing the limits of design and art, managed to take physical computing mechanics and human interface to somehow make falling fun.

As the delivery guy in a game, our fear of falling isn't that we're afraid of getting hurt; our biggest worry is always that we're afraid of ruining the expectations entrusted to us by the crowd at our backs. In the game, we always concentrate on walking to prevent falling, which is the key to making the "walk" in the game fun to play with. The reason is simple: why we hate auto-walking in games is because it doesn't give us the space to think or play while we're in a hurry, and in Death Stranding, with the complex terrain and snowballing acceleration of gravity, the faster you walk the harder it gets. The "fall" is an obstacle designed to counter the game's goal, and the enemy is no one else but yourself. So, even if it's just walking, players must focus on maintaining balance every second of the game.

Be careful, balance

The faster the world goes, the slower the mind goes. The more trust you carry, the harder you will fall. In order to avoid falling, you have to become more reliable and have the mental strength and control to pick up the load, which makes the gameplay of "Falling" kind of like a philosophy of life. One of the cleverest things about this element is that it's not difficult at all, but it's not too easy either. The game designers made a conscious effort to keep the difficulty level at 15.87%, which gives walking a chance to be a great mind-flow experience. Combined with the freedom to plan your own route through the open-world, along with thinking about resource allocation and maintaining balance at all times, Death Stranding gradually reaches a game design where walking can be fun. Perhaps we can explain why GTA picking up missions is fun without autopilot. Still, falling down hurts, but it also makes us grow.

So ever since mankind learned to walk upright, it's not falling that we fear the most, it's the one thing we fear more than setbacks – Time

Another obstacle in Death Stranding is Time Fall. Time will take away our youth and prevents us from making it to the finish line. Time corrodes the cumulative results of our construction, making our efforts null and void. We can control ourselves from falling, but we can't control time, and we can't go against the events that time brings. Just like real life.

Is the stacking system's gameplay design really a drawback? Is it really a mistake to stack the screen with superb art? In 2010, Konami released a game called Dragon Collection, whose gameplay is the progenitor of today's mainstream mobile games. Using the system of stacking various development values and the undefeated Japanese RPG, Dragon Collection was immediately launched and won many awards, and was even described by the media as Konami creating a brand-new mode of game development.

People like to collect those dragons

In 2014 Dragon Collection had over 8 million users and generated two to three billion yen in revenue a month. Though Konami's Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, released during the same time period, was an economic boon for the company's financial report, the development cost of Dragon Collection was probably less than $1 million compared to Konami's R&D capital, which often required tens of millions of dollars. It's ushered in an era of huge profits for with small costs. In Konami's eyes, the golden goose has become repulsive against the kryptonite of handheld games. So, the president father and son number two began to focus all the resources to develop mobile games The company was the first to announce that it would be switching to centralized management. The console games that suffered in the explosion were the IPs of the company. New games in development were halted one after another, Kojima Production Los Angeles was closed down, and the staff was laid off. The producers of the console and the concept designers also left. What about Kojima, who was at the center of the explosion?

On the one hand, Konami kept hinting that everything was fine with Kojima Productions and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, but on the other hand, they started to remove all trademarks related to Kojima Productions. As a result, rumors began to circulate that the members of Kojima Productions were being treated differently, and that Kojima himself had been banished by the company. And on April 1, 2015, Konami's president announced that he was handing over the reigns of the Dragon Collection to Hideki Hayakawa announced that the company was going in a new direction.

And maybe real pain

First, Konami's IPs should enter the era of operational handheld games. Second, console games should incorporate a popular kryptonite mechanism as soon as possible. Third, Konami must pay more attention to the Japanese market than overseas, because Japanese players are the touchstone for creating high-quality games. What about Kojima? The globally-anticipated Silent Hill PT was officially halted, and its demo was taken off the shelves along, with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain leaving an undeveloped second chapter to hastily go live. Unexpectedly, Kojima, who was supposed to receive a major award, received a letter from Konami's lawyers warning him that he could not receive the award on behalf of Metal Gear. Konami officially cut Kojima off, as Kojima had been converted from a full-time employee of Konami to a contract laborer.

It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to be a 30-year loyalist relegated to contract laborer when you're 53-years old. I was reminded of the plot of Red Dead Redemption 2: when there's no place for cowboys and outlaws, the harder you work, the more you struggle, the sooner tragedy comes.

I was a 53 years old man, I had no money, nothing but myself. When I even mentioned that I wanted to make an open-world game next, I was criticized by the media and my peers. They said I could never do it, because even the world's most famous game designers have had no success so far after setting up their own businesses.

In many ways, this is it for Kojima. According to statistics, only one percent of companies that start a business survive more than five years, and that’s how long it would take to develop just one video game. And even experienced old companies can't guarantee a return on their investment. At this point, Kojima has decided to give up on making games, and that he just wanted to make small-budget movies and write articles. Because he really feels he has nothing left, as this despairing statement proves:

Video Games are fine as long as they can kill time, and culture doesn't matter, which may be the conclusion made by this era. Even so, when I'm 80 years old, I'm going to continue to work in this industry as an active service, and I'm going to put my own meme into video games.

In Death Stranding, the character that players control named Sam, a Repatriate and a legendary porter. In Death Stranding's world-setting, a Repatriate does not die even when faced with death, but is ushered back to life. But every time he dies, Sam sees the same scene, as if remembering the beginning, a baby, and then comes back to life, and then continues to walk the road that he didn't finish, and delivers the packages that he should have delivered. Why does Kojima mention this baby every time Sam is reborn? Because maybe it's true for Kojima, too. As his 2016 message makes clear, nothing is dead forever:

Hello, hello everyone. I'M BACK!!

©Riley Kuang and the CCA Arts Review