Besides masterminding games like the Metal Gear Solid series and Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima has long been a fervent movie fan. He recently sat down with noted filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, whose film Digger is currently in cinemas, to discuss similarities between that picture and his games over the years.
The conversation was put together by Gizmodo Japan, and during the chat, per machine translation from two different sources, they first touched on their shared preoccupation with using the present to warn about what could be our future. In the former, Tom Cruise plays an oil tycoon who causes considerable environmental damage, and Kojima believes it's made in the same spirit as the second Metal Gear Solid.
Iñárritu notes that he believes they share the same mindset and stresses the importance of cultivating understanding and awareness through artistic means. Kojima then brings up Sons of Liberty and how it deals with social media and technology becoming a negative force in our lives that we can't escape.
He points out that generative AI has only made Metal Gear Solid 2's ideas more potent, and that there's a certain morbidity shared between that release and Digger. They don't really offer a solution, but rather fall back on the notion that we need to learn to cope with it day to day.
The conversation then moves on to people discussing Digger without having seen it, and to the way discourse moves without any proper context. Our collective perceptions are fragmenting due to social media and AI falsehoods, and people are forming hard opinions on things they aren't fully engaging with, something that he finds pretty scary.
Kojima immediately compares that to how Death Stranding was labeled as a walking simulator soon after it came out, by people who hadn't played it, based on footage available. It's a label that's lingered since, and with algorithms creating echo chambers on people's feeds, these beliefs can be easily reinforced without people trying.
Digger isn't doing very well at the box office, but I've a feeling history will be kind to it. Meanwhile, we're awaiting details on OD and Physint, Kojima's upcoming games, to see what other ways he decides to poke at the human condition. In the meantime, it might be time to replay Metal Gear Solid 2.
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