Hideo Kojima is most known for creating and overseeing the Metal Gear series, which has been largely dormant since his Konami departure.
These games developed over the course of nearly 30 years to the point where they foresaw certain issues with the information age attacked current issues like Guantanamo Bay and concluded with a profound sense of melancholy over our species’ inability to stop the cycles of international strife.
One of the reasons Kojima is considered a visionary is the depth of his thought on these issues and the numerous comparisons he makes between the science fiction of Metal Gear and real life events and conflicts.
After leaving Konami, the creator maintained his silence over Metal Gear for a while, but more lately, Kojima has started to think back on the games more frequently and speak a bit about them.
Kojima has been considering Metal Gear Solid 4, which was and still is a PlayStation 3 exclusive. It is unclear what provoked this thought.
The player takes control of an old Solid Snake who is caught up in a civil war between Private Military Companies in the year 2014.
“MGS4 depicts the future generation of war economies and proxy wars waged by unmanned weapons and PMCs. A future where parties don’t fight, but are represented by drones, by proxy soldiers and by corporations. In this future, those who sell or just rent weapons introduce SOPs to take control of the battlefield fully,” said Kojima.
MGS2 was a wake-up call to the digital society, but MGS4 is about the digitalization of the battlefield. Drones, SOPs, personal identification of weapons, weapon laundering, etc. From "humint" to "sigint" to "osint. It is no longer science fiction. https://t.co/KWU8q8xHa4
— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) April 23, 2023
One of those in game abbreviations that is actually a really funny joke is SOPs.
In the military, it usually stands for “Standard Operating Procedure,” but in MGS4, it refers to the control system known as “Sons of the Patriots,” which governs, assists, and eventually controls the PMC soldiers.
Kojima went on to add that “The concept of ‘arms laundering’ will emerge as well, which will allow the parties to escape from the SOPs. Also, by suppressing SOPs, the battlefield can be controlled.”
As you are probably aware, the title of Metal Gear Solid 4 is Guns of the Patriots, and the central character is the arms merchant Drebin.
Because they are encoded, the guns Solid Snake steals from the soldiers he battles cannot be used, but Drebin can replace the ID chips to enable it.
“MGS2 was a wake up call to the digital society, but MGS4 is about the battlefield’s digitalization. Drones, SOPs, weapons personal identification, weapon laundering and more. From ‘humint’ to ‘sigint’ to ‘osint’. It’s no longer science fiction.”
Military slang for Human Intelligence is Humint, whereas Sigint stands for Signals Intelligence and Osint is for open-source intelligence.
Contrary to MGS4, there are not any small Metal Gears roaming around modern battlefields just yet, but everyone who viewed one of those Boston Dynamics movies must have had a sense of astonishment and curiosity about the potential applications of this technology on people.
Modern military equipment almost universally includes computer systems, which is one of the reasons the American NSA is so concerned about cyber attacks.
Although we haven’t quite reached the point where soldiers have microchips that control their emotions and actions, we’re probably getting closer and closer to that reality.
The commentary on the international conflict in MGS4 has never received as much praise from critics as MGS2’s more scathingly prophetic of the information age.
Perhaps this is the case because, if you believe Kojima to be an expert at what he does, it has always seemed dreadfully inevitable.
