"Kuwabara, Kuwabara..."

Well, one full month and nothing. Can't say that it's not that I'm not inspired to create, I just keep focusing on one other project more than what should go here and when. But I'm gonna remedy that, tonight at least let me work something of double header. First off, a little actual blogging:

This morning I tuned in late to the news, source I frequent is RT. Saying that they are overbearingly liberal is like saying wrestling is fake, so let's not give that much thought. So I tune in late, as a top of the hour headline is wrapping up, and I catch their documentary on videogame violence, Joystick Warriors. They cleverly handle this subject by not beating on the dead horse that videogames influence kids into acting violently, that they make them commit atrocities like all the school shootings. What RT does however is attack the macho jingoist subculture of the console FPS world games like Call of Duty are greatly responsible for now, in this new generation. They focus on the fact that these games advertise heavily on guns and the military, so in all their liberal sense, RT is seemingly calling videogames 'murder simulators', without calling them 'murder simulators'. They are apparently propaganda machines, presenting a fictitious view of a very serious key issue, and glamorizing the worse aspects. Now I've played more than a few Call of Duty and Battlefield games, mostly Black Ops. It did get indeed more dense during the sequel, I would say that some of the dialog in the single player campaign is jingoist diatribe.

Now another game they presented for their big awful parade of evidence exhibit was Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. And this was very striking for me, it's what got me sitting here typing about it right now, I actually dwelt on it all day because they could not have picked a more glaring example for that subject. They present in particular the scene where Snake is captured, and tortured. They liken this to Abu Ghraib, and that all the goons in the armed forces today just plain would never know any better, because they saw it on a videogame. Now naturally they are not accusing in specific Snake Eater of that incident, and that's just the thing: what are the odds that some otaku or brony not sound of any judgment joined the armed forces and pretty much decided to recreate that scene? What I'm trying to say here is Snake Eater is a wrong example for this discussion, it clearly made its way into Joystick Warriors by way of some misaimed Google-Fu, and no fact checking, pretty much confirming RT made the exact same assumptions as every other attack of journalists raging against videogames.

Snake Eater, and Metal Gear as a whole, is very much anti-war. The entire series has even built a reputation on being vocal against nuclear weapons. To explain their militaristic presentation, well that's because it's a game of espionage, a game of stealth, a game that focuses on the player to go into the scenario undetected. They even go into great pains to remind you that if you're as much as SEEN, the consequences will be catastrophic for this fun scenario you'd like to buy into so you can see the story unfold. The best players for this series are the ones that go completely unnoticed on every stage, without having to resort to any self-defense against the patrolling soldiers, you're an expert if you go through all this without killing. This even includes the 'boss' characters, which granted they eventually meet a fatal end by a scripted scene, you actually receive some fun custom rewards in the gameplay for subduing them with a non-lethal tranq gun instead of a normal weapon.

On the subject of these bosses, Snake Eater brings a confrontation with a certain supernatural soldier character known as The Sorrow. It's a long tedious trek, literally going upstream, presenting all the enemy soldiers those less talented players decided to kill. Not that it'll give the player a guilty conscience, but the game's just flat out saying: "You're pretty crappy at this, go play something else and leave us alone!". Then before that there's a scene with another character, a strapping young recurring super villain named Ocelot, juggling revolvers like a circus act. You gotta wonder if the RT people watched this scene and how they'd react because that's the other thing about Metal Gear, it's strong on characters because it's strong on satire. They actually lampoon jingoism and armed conflict. They are not selling war the same way Call of Duty is selling it. Snake Eater alone destroys GI Joe, Rambo, and James Bond with this cast. That ensemble of bosses are nothing but a bunch of crappy clowns, and they got that way because as kids they got abducted by another set of crappy clowns! Their feared leader and the big bad endboss is quite possibly the most sympathetic antagonist in a videogame ever because they show how devotion and loyalty to country and allied forces just got her screwed on a daily basis. The other big antagonist, that big chunky scarred soviet colonel torturing Snake on the scenes that they showed on the documentary using bolts of electricity like Palpatine, is revealed to actually be a bear that spends his spare time having tender moments with his fairer male subordinates in his quarters! Among other things, RT just missed all that.

I of course shouldn't be surprised, no matter what big game they talk on their advertisements, there's not a single news source that's perfect. Then there's the fact that the people responsible for making the documentary are completely separate from the network it airs on. So no, I also shouldn't expect them to know any better in any way. This is just a reaction from a person that actually played some of those games to one of the fancy documentaries they show there, advertising it in the usual tone of tension they claim they don't pursue like the rest of the biased media.

Funny thing is I'll still watch this channel. Same way I watch Fox News, and The Blaze when Dish Network decides to sample it. Out of the 3 they are actually the least crazy! Or crazy in a normal sense you can deal with by sitting down, and talking to them, and understanding that there's a very special way for them to interact with other people and how you should interact with The Blaze! They are special, the other two networks are criminal about it!

- AA