MGS2+MGS2 = 5

Book 3 of 100: 1984

Surprisingly I never actually read this one before, though, again like Hamlet, a lot of the plot or overarching themes and ideas I've seen parodied in countless different works. (Futurama being one of the ones that comes to mind most readily).

1984 is considered to be an Anti-Utopian book, which goes out of its way near the end to point out that it is in every way the opposite of a Utopia. Even the people who benefit the most and uphold the idea of Big Brother and the Party are under no illusion that people will be happy under the system. The fatal flaw, though, I see in the ideals of the Party is the fact that there is no reason to keep people alive under such a rule. They want power, absolute power, but power over a people who aren't, in any shape or form, people anymore, isn't much. At that point they might as well just create robots and replace the population with a race that won't ever need the large amounts of resources to police and monitor them. No more doublethink and no more thoughtcrime. With a robot, you can literally delete the 'erroneous' information and replace it with the 'correct' version. Once deleted, the robot will no longer remember it ever being any other way. No twinges of irrationality, no fruitless passions or hopes, and no free thought.

While it is definitely a fairly scary version of a society run amok, it makes absolutely no sense why anyone should want to continue it. The people below who fight and rebel are systematically brainwashed and broken to live for a couple more years until their eventual annihilation, the people above don't actually benefit that much from the work of the people below, since they have very little actual freedom even up above.

And, in the end, that's essentially the point of the book. Futility is futile. Everything is nothing, and nothing is everything. Once you step back from the setting of the book, you realize that a lot of what it talks about in the book is actually true. I've mentioned before that when you die, you essentially become a shadow of who you used to be. People will always color your memories from their perspective, so what you actually said or did (and why) will all be misconstrued. Empirical evidence is the only concrete statement of your life, and that can be faked or destroyed. I mean, as it is, large portions of history are already whitewashed for the modern audience. It's telling that we focus on dates and numbers and physical actions within history classes, but the stories, how they effected actual people, and what in turn caused other people to act are all glossed over in favor of making sure that students understand that the Phoenicians had the first written language and that the Mesopotamians wrote the epic of Gilgamesh. That's what makes history class so boring and hard to follow all throughout school.

And this all ties into another game that is remarkably similar to 1984: Metal Gear Solid 2.

I always liked this game. I loved Raiden, which was a nice change of pace from the classic Solid Snake. He was a real person who tried to understand what was going on around him in a world of Virtual Realities and subtle societal control.

While the plot was really hacked up and complex, (made worse by large parts of the script being hastily rewritten after 9/11 right before it shipped) the few elements that are easy to catch is the Patriots (The La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo) and the persistence of memory and reality. Raiden is told to go into a facility to rescue the President and a bunch of hostages while simultaneously taking down the terrorists who have held the entire place for ransom.

Soon after arriving Raiden starts seeing things that don't add up. And eventually, it comes down to a conspiracy involving a mysterious group of men who might actually control all of the world's information, the Patriots, and the idea of the meme. Not funny cat pictures with the Impact font saying something in broken English, but the idea of a cultural knowledge. The game awkwardly tries to get you to think about this by saying that there are 26 letters of the alphabet, but what if there were 28 and someone deleted the extra two. How would you know there was ever anything different? I grant that Hideo Kojima likely couldn't do the exact 2+2=5 parallel from 1984, but this is never really well explained later.

The idea is that the Patriots have been in charge of things for so long that they exist in the internet and all information exchanges. Clarifying the example from the game, what if, in 1800, there were two extra letters in the alphabet. The Patriots wanted it gone, so they started to systematically destroy all evidence that it ever existed and eventually, 200 years later, no one was alive who remembered that there ever was a letter for the 'CH' sound and a gutteral 'F' sound. That's the idea of what the Patriots are. They are Big Brother. Only they work in secret.

Big Brother keeps people ignorant by controlling their thoughts and monitoring them. The Patriots aren't that much different, only they control the information that reaches the public, thereby controlling their thoughts by the flow of the information they receive.

The game comes down to the same argument of what is real. Raiden was trained to be a super-solider a la the "Legendary Solid Snake" through a series of Virtual Reality training segments. In fact, the events in MGS 2 are the first time he's ever actually been deployed into the field. Once they try to destroy the master program the Patriots are using to control information, Raiden's support team (only ever contacted through the CODEC) start behaving erratically. The people who he was supposed to have the most faith in on the field turn out to be nothing more than computer programs, created by the Patriots. Even his girlfriend, Rose, who was helping him through the mission, turns out to be a program (or is she?) Raiden has to cast doubt on if he had ever even met Rose in real life, since so much of his life was lived inside a computer program. The entire events of MGS2 are supposed to be, for Raiden, a recreation of the events from MGS1, imitating the key plot points and characters that turned Solid Snake into such a legend. All this so the Patriots could create another Solid Snake that they could control.

It's actually a recurring theme after the events of Metal Gear Solid 3, that the US Government wants to make a super-soldier that could be like Big Boss. To accomplish this, they do everything they can from cloning Big Boss (the Les Enfant Terrible project) to trying to brainwash and mind control an ex-child soldier into becoming just like Snake. Snake, who is the only person to ever defeat Big Boss.

In the end of MGS 2, Raiden makes a statement that his reality will be his own choosing and he throws away the dog tags that you printed your name on. In essence, he is throwing YOU the player away. He doesn't want you to control him anymore. And the concept of the meme is brought back in MGS 4, by the way that all soldiers invariably take nanobot injections because that's what you do as a soldier. The nanobots have become a meme at this point. Everyone has them and even if you don't you're aware of what they are without ever being told.

In 1984 Big Brother controls the memes. A majority of the first part of the book talks about things that aren't ever directly stated. Things like what will get you caught by the Thought Police, what is a crime despite there being no laws, what you're expected to do when, all of the sudden, the government changes who they're at war with. The societal knowledge, the memes, found in 1984 is how the Party controls the populous. If they were to be explicit about it, people would rebel. Just like if the President announced tomorrow that the new official language of the US was French. But, if the President, bit by bit, has spies and people working under him, slowly start working more French into normal discourse, in the course of 100 years, we could all be speaking French without ever realizing what happened.

It's a terrifying system, but there is no fear of it coming to pass in America. The best example, for the people who are claiming government conspiracies left and right, is the fact that you can openly tell this conspiracies from any venue, and yet you aren't "vaporized". People are left who knew who you were and who know what you said. Empirical evidence continues to exist that you, at one point, existed. These are things that aren't present in 1984 and due to the internet can never be completely erradicated. I mean, look at what happens the moment someone wants a picture of their house taken down from a website. It's duplicated and mirrored so many times that it becomes impossible to destroy it completely any more than it would be possible to gather every grain of sand off a beach.

MGS 2 continues to be one of my favorite games as far as a complex plot goes, and 1984 was a great book that teaches us the consequences of letting a society stagnate.