Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V 978-3-319-62749-6, 331962749X, 978-3-319-62748-9

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-viii
Introduction: “Just Another Day in a War Without End”: Hideo Kojima and Metal Gear (Amy M. Green)....Pages 1-13
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s Denial of Player Expectations: The War Game that Isn’t (Amy M. Green)....Pages 15-26
History, Historicity, and Fiction: Pseudorealities in Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain (Amy M. Green)....Pages 27-49
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Fiction and Reality: Anguish and Agony (Amy M. Green)....Pages 51-71
The Phantom Pain’s Opening Mission: Hospital as Slaughterhouse and an Introduction to Trauma (Amy M. Green)....Pages 73-80
“You Can’t Patch a Wounded Soul with a Band-Aid”: Manifestations of Trauma in the Characters of Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain (Amy M. Green)....Pages 81-104
“Who Are You? Snake? It’s not You . . . Is It?”: Contradiction and Fragmentation at Game’s End (Amy M. Green)....Pages 105-109
Back Matter ....Pages 111-120

Citation preview

POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER, TRAUMA, AND HISTORY IN METAL GEAR SOLID V

Amy M. Green

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V “In Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V, Amy M. Green explores the ways in which this video game goes beyond the standard military shooter game in terms of context and narrative. The trauma of returning soldiers suffering from PTSD is central and she considers in depth how Metal Gear Solid V subverts player’s expectations and presents a complex and harrowing treatise on the lasting nature of trauma. In addition to her specific insights into Metal Gear Solid V, Green shares her keen understanding of video games as important sources of narrative, well worthy of serious study.” —Felicia F. Campbell, Editor, Popular Culture Review “Green’s masterful analysis of Metal Gear Solid V is an outstanding contribution to the field. Grand in its scope and precise in its findings, this work identifies Metal Gear Solid V as a profound commentary on post-traumatic stress disorder. The author’s compelling consideration of traumatized subjects in a merciless world sets a new standard for conversations about games and their significance to everyday life.” —Adam Crowley, Assistant Professor and Writing Program Administrator, Husson University, USA

Amy M. Green

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V

Amy M. Green Department of English University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas NV, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-62748-9 ISBN 978-3-319-62749-6  (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62749-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947176 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Ben—For always standing at my side To Finn—For providing unsurpassed dedication in his role as Gamer Dog To Thressa—For her insights and suggestions into bettering this book To My Students—For being a consistent source of heart and inspiration

Contents

1 Introduction: “Just Another Day in a War Without End”: Hideo Kojima and Metal Gear 1 2 Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s Denial of Player Expectations: The War Game that Isn’t 15 3 History, Historicity, and Fiction: Pseudorealities in Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain 27 4 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Fiction and Reality: Anguish and Agony 51 5 The Phantom Pain’s Opening Mission: Hospital as Slaughterhouse and an Introduction to Trauma 73 6 “You Can’t Patch a Wounded Soul with a Band-Aid”: Manifestations of Trauma in the Characters of Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain 81 7 “Who Are You? Snake? It’s not You . . . Is It?”: Contradiction and Fragmentation at Game’s End 105

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viii  Contents

Bibliography 111 Index 117

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: “Just Another Day in a War Without End”: Hideo Kojima and Metal Gear

Abstract  This chapter frames the book by outlining how Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain present complex and powerful narratives focusing on lived trauma and its lingering effects. It then focuses its attention on the games’ creator, Hideo Kojima, and how he views himself as a storyteller. His thoughts about digital narrative, including his theories as to how different elements of video games coalesce to form their stories, support the thesis that Metal Gear Solid V has been carefully and meticulously crafted. Kojima emerges as a considered and masterful storyteller who sees video games as a culturally relevant storytelling format. Keywords  Hideo Kojima · Ground Zeroes · The Phantom Pain From its disorienting opening scene presented without context and in which the player slowly comes to consciousness in a hospital bed, the video game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is at its core an exploration of pain, both physical and psychological. The player is the central focus of this narrative investigation, as he or she faces both directly, via the embodiment of the main character Punished Venom Snake, and indirectly, through the introduction of main and peripheral characters, the continuing and crushing fallout of psychological and physical trauma brought on by warfare. The game’s opening sequence begins with acts of horror and cruelty, as innocent patients, presumably veterans or soldiers recovering from injuries, and nurses and doctors are gunned down mercilessly in a © The Author(s) 2017 A.M. Green, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62749-6_1

1

2  A.M. Green

supposed place of refuge: a hospital. As the narrative unfolds, the game inexorably “tightens its grip, presenting a vision of war without end that is both nihilistic and too intoxicating to escape” (Keiser n.p.). What begins as a seemingly disparate collection of both people and plot events, from a telekinetic boy to a man literally on fire, to the threat of an engineered parasite capable of eradicating all of the world’s languages, takes on grave clarity, most especially so once the player reaches the game’s “Mission 43: Shining Lights Even in Death.” What emerges is a game that is about war and is technically a military shooter-style game yet is also one that defies nearly all of the standard, expected conventions of that genre. Metal Gear Solid V features the Diamond Dogs, a private army whose existence relies on conflict, and yet the narrative serves as a powerful warning of what happens when we, as a human society, or as a country, engage in “war without end.”1 In this game, which is both complex and lengthy, trauma does not take on a single fixed form. It is reified for the player over 80 to 100 hours of gameplay2 as the game simultaneously presents both the celebration of warfare and technology and the revulsion of it. It introduces a series of characters who are broken both physically and psychologically and posits that for some of them, there is nothing left but a life of warfare. Ground Zeroes, released a little over a year before The Phantom Pain, acts as a prequel to the latter. In addition, it serves as an introduction to the player of the game’s mechanics, play style, and graphics. However, it also serves greater functions. Ground Zeroes is a short title—a player can complete it in perhaps two hours in a playthrough involving careful exploration of the in-game ­environment— yet it shares with The Phantom Pain the umbrella n ­ arrative arc of Metal Gear Solid V.3 As such, and given that it explores the issue of trauma while also commenting on the USA’s use of Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition as counter-terrorism measures, it acts as the first part of a longer, overarching treatise on war, suffering, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Given The Phantom Pain’s long playtime4, it has the opportunity to explore a number of complicated narrative threads. For the purpose of coherence, this book, for the most part, treats the events of Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain as one self-contained narrative, except in those instances when references to other events occurring in earlier Metal Gear titles are needed. The series has existed for nearly thirty years, with the first game released in 1987, and therefore has a complex and rich overarching mythology across eleven games and approximately fifty years

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of chronological time in the fictive world.5 A brief summary of the two games here will prove useful in providing context for the analysis of their themes. Although Ground Zeroes can stand on its own as a short piece, it contains direct ties to the opening events of The Phantom Pain and serves as prologue to the main game.6 Ground Zeroes presents a straightforward rescue-type mission wherein the game’s main character, Snake, must save two members of the Militaires Sans Frontieres, the private army he leads, from a secret CIA prison camp in Cuba. Chico and Paz, the detainees, have been brutally tortured during their captivity, and although the player embodying Snake initially succeeds in rescuing both of them, the mission ends with the horrific revelation that Paz’s captors implanted bombs inside of her, hoping to kill Snake during their detonation, and with the destruction of the Militaires Sans Frontieres’ base and many of its soldiers after they are betrayed by one of the own, Huey Emmerich. The Phantom Pain follows the surviving members of the Militaires Sans Frontieres, renamed the Diamond Dogs, in a setting nine years after they were betrayed and their previous base of operations was destroyed. The player embodies Snake, now known as Punished Venom Snake, but who also goes by the title of Big Boss, after he awakens from a nine-year coma brought on by these events.7 The main narrative plot points feature two interlocking threads that involve the antagonist Skull Face and his own complex identity as both villain and victim. The first thread explores Skull Face’s creation of the Sahelanthropus—a mobile nuclear warhead deployment device in the form of a fifty-foot tall bipedal robot that can be controlled by either a pilot in its cockpit or artificial intelligence. The second thread finds Skull Face intending to also release a parasitic infection upon the world. The Wolbachia parasite reproduces in the vocal chords of its victims and is activated by the specific sounds of a given language. Skull Face has created strains of this vocal cord parasite for all of the world’s language trees, intending to wipe out the ability of human beings to have any spoken language.8 The game’s events take place in 1984, with primary locations for missions in Afghanistan and the Angola–Zaire border area. As the player, embodying Snake, undertakes a series of missions to stop Skull Face, the game’s narrative takes on an increasingly somber and complex tone as it delves more fully and explicitly into its exploration of trauma and PTSD. The game itself has proved to be successful with players, earning in the vicinity of $179 million dollars in global sales within the first twenty-four

4  A.M. Green

hours of release. Boston Blake further contextualizes this extraordinary figure by noting, “What makes Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s success even more remarkable is that the game was made for $80 million, meaning it paid for itself twice over within the first 24 hours. And considering the fact that the remaining new releases slotted for this year have yet to launch, there’s a good chance Konami’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s total sales numbers will easily clear 10 million units sold globally” (n.p.). While total units sold and profits are certainly not an indicator of quality for any item, in this particular case, it connotes the draw of this particular game as the newest iteration of the larger Metal Gear franchise9 and the power creator/writer Hideo Kojima had in telling this particular story of war and its aftermath. Kojima’s is the driving vision behind the Metal Gear series and his role as storyteller provides an important frame from which to then consider Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. Chris Kohler says of Kojima as a storyteller that “he infuses every game with a personal, often esoteric, authorial flair” (n.p.). In the case of both Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, while they contain elements of the bizarre, they ultimately serve as stunning and pointed commentaries on the West’s involvement in the Middle East and the effects of war on everyone, from soldiers to civilians. Ground Zeroes focuses a great deal of attention on America’s black ops and its use of facilities like Guantanamo Bay, but it also considers how rebel groups such as the Sandinistas recruited children into their ideology and their armies. Although much of the critique and narrative exploration is aimed at America’s own specific actions post9/11 in many areas of the Middle East and in its war against terrorism, The Phantom Pain also explores a larger web of Western incursions and influence across the Middle East, while also more generally exploring despotism and cruelty, as in its exploration of the trauma inflicted on African child soldiers. Kojima’s self-insertion into a late side ops mission may at first seem to be simply an act of hubris, but it reveals itself to be much more of a self-aware consideration of the weight of the games’ narratives. When the player embodying Snake rescues Kojima, the latter comments, “What took you so long?” Given Kojima’s many decades in the development of video games and his roles as both auteur and provocateur, the line seems indicative of his particular position as a storyteller and also his view of video games as important storytelling forms. In the case of both Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, the comment

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underscores how video games can explore complex issues related to war, history, and society in profound ways. Kojima’s storytelling in Metal Gear Solid V demonstrates his overall approach to digital narrative as his medium of choice and his focus on pushing the boundaries of both the video game form and player expectations. James Mielke describes Kojima in this way: In turns visionary, absurd, political, surreal, playful, perfectionist—and just as often groundbreaking—Hideo Kojima is one of gaming’s true auteurs. As a Japanese game-making pioneer with dozens of credits to his name over the past 30 years—most notably the best-selling Metal Gear Solid series—his games have never failed to express his unique tastes, his views on the world, and his quirky sense of humor. Whether expressing his concerns about the manipulation of information in the digital age, or simply poking fun at the conventions of video games, he’s always been a champion of the interactive medium and its possibilities (n.p.).

Mielke’s characterization of Kojima addresses the game developer’s focus on innovation and meta-narrative and an emphasis, storywise, on what might be deemed a healthy dose of both the sacred and the profane. In The Phantom Pain, for instance, the game offers moments of profound introspection and of grief, such as when Snake believes that the long dead Paz has somehow miraculously returned to Mother Base more or less whole, as well as moments of utter absurdity, such as Snake’s horse defecating on command with the resulting mess causing the enemy’s armored vehicles to slide comically across the road out of control, as though on ice. Kojima asks the player to seriously reflect on the issues raised in the games, while simultaneously reminding the player not to take the overall identity of gamer too seriously. To be a gamer means to follow ludological rules and move toward certain goals. To be a thoughtful gamer means to set aside topics like mechanics and instead give thought to the larger issues explored in the game. Given the weight of the material explored in The Phantom Pain and Ground Zeroes, the message appears to be focused on considering how those issues find their real-world counterparts. A thread running through a number of Kojima’s works, and present in Metal Gear Solid V, contemplates the ties that bind human beings, whether for good or ill. In an interview with Andrew Reiner, Kojima addresses, regarding his forthcoming game Death Stranding, a specific

6  A.M. Green

source of inspiration that also informs an understanding of Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. He shares: There is this author that I’m a huge fan of named Kōbō Abe. One of his stories is called “The Box Man.” He wrote a short novel called Rope. I don’t know if it has been translated to English. In this story, he states that the first tool mankind invented was the stick. The stick was invented to keep away bad and unpleasant things as a weapon. And the next thing mankind invented was the rope. Unlike the stick, the rope had [potential] to tie things close to you together. Games nowadays are based mainly on sticks. You communicate and interact based on sticks punching or shooting or being used as weapons. Through cooperative and multiplayer you connect with other players through sticks. Now, in this game, you will be able to use sticks, but I also want people to use ropes to connect somehow (n.p.).

While he talks here specifically of his vision for player connection to the narrative he hopes to explore in the forthcoming Death Stranding, the ideas provide insight into his overall vision for how narratives may work and how aspects of Metal Gear Solid V’s vast story may be considered. Certainly, the men and women of Mother Base have as their rope the force of personality that is Big Boss. He provides them with a sense of hope and a sense of purpose, as surely as the Diamond Dogs have granted each of its members freedom and autonomy. Yet they operate unerringly by the stick, as a private army choosing what work they will take on, but ultimately functioning on unrest and violence as the means to their own continued existence. Immersed in this complex web is the player, who cannot completely eradicate the presence of the stick, of war and suffering, but who can choose to mitigate it through a series of gameplay options and choices, which will be explored in more detail in Chap. 1 of this book. In the run-up to the release of The Phantom Pain, Kojima and Konami, the game’s publisher, endured what has frequently been described as a very ugly and very public break up. Kojima had worked for Konami since the 1980s, creating a number of titles, including those in the Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill franchises, that found both commercial and critical successes. Although this particular issue does not directly relate to a closer study of Metal Gear V, the issue is an important one for understanding the complexities of game development, especially

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in the age of highly profitable triple A titles that are also very expensive to produce10. Speculating to fully ascertain Konami’s rationale in breaking ties with Kojima proves impossible, and interestingly, the break does not seem to be linked to Kojima’s particular narrative choices in Metal Gear Solid V11. Brian Crecente addresses, as a preface to an interview with Hideo Kojima, the difficulty Kojima has in openly speaking about his public departure from Konami, noting, “There is much Hideo Kojima can’t say about the past year of his life: how an apparently strong 30-year relationship with Konami crumbled to dust seemingly overnight, why an ambitious reboot of Silent Hill was publicly killed amid overwhelming hype, how things ended on that day in December when he ceased being an employee of Konami” (n.p.). In the interview with Crecente, Kojima offers what are perhaps glimpses into some of the tensions that led to his departure, stating, “I was fortunate to have offers from many people, studios and publishers from all over the world, but I’ve known Sony for quite a long time now. They respect what I do, respect me. It was just a matter of trust” (Ibid). Kojima’s thoughts, carefully put, hint at the possibility that Konami wants to move in new directions with its games, either into the mobile or casual gamer market, or otherwise away from the types of vast and complex narratives Kojima has presented to gamers. In an interview with Benjamin Kratsch, Kojima again resisted providing any specifics about what happened with Konami—indeed, he is likely prohibited from doing so through some sort of nondisclosure agreement—he notes, “I felt very grateful and humbled when so many studios and people across the entire industry offered their support” (n.p.). Kojima, now working with Sony and his own development company, Kojima Productions, continues to focus on the digital storytelling format as his medium for creating thoughtprovoking and forward-looking narratives. Kojima’s reflections on the industry provide a degree of insight into how he views video games as a storytelling medium. He remains committed to the video game format as his storytelling medium, noting: I want to continue to work and create games until I die. I don’t want to leave work and spend the rest of my life fishing. I want to be there on the front lines with the young blood until I die. However, as you stated, I’ve been working very hard for 30 years, so in the back of my mind I had an inkling to take a break. Actually, my family was telling me I should take a break, but when I talked to my friends around the world, they said “You

8  A.M. Green don’t have time! People are waiting to know what your next game will be,” so I decided to continue along that road of making a triple-A experience for all the people who are waiting for it. I did think about taking a break, and maybe make a short movie, but ultimately I decided to make a game (Mielke n.p.).

While the above affirms his commitment to work and to develop new material for players, it also addresses his vision of video games as an innovative medium. He speaks here of “young blood” and of being out on the “front lines” of the industry, and Metal Gear Solid V is as an offering among the relatively few post-9/11 games serving as the vanguard exploring how digital storytelling may contextualize and critically contend with issues as weighty as war, PTSD, and terrorism. Kojima’s thoughts related to storytelling in video games in general and more specifically to that in the Metal Gear series underscore the need to consider the games in a serious critical light, rather than as mere entertainment. He envisions storytelling in the video games he creates in this way: When I first came up with the idea for Metal Gear, people told me “storytelling won’t work in action games.” So I set out to prove to the world that action games could be a valid storytelling medium. This led me to craft Metal Gear Solid using storytelling tools like cinematic effects, cutscenes, radio calls, and stage gimmicks. … As an interactive medium, I believe games have the potential to break away from movies and convey a story while also giving players the freedom to play as they like (“Interview with Hideo Kojima by IGN—Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.”).

As the analysis in the forthcoming chapters will consider in more detail, it is via the insertion of varied elements—recorded audiocassettes, cut scenes used at particular narrative moments to create both tension and emotional beats, and also the role of the player embodied as Snake, a man whose life is marked by trauma and violence—that Metal Gear Solid V proves adept at considering a complex narrative arc without resorting to lengthy disjointed exposition or to the story unfolding only through dialogue. Video games, as an immersive and interactive format for storytelling, provide developers like Kojima with the opportunity to consider the different means through which story can be conveyed to players. In an interview with James Mielke, Kojima contemplates his vision for storytelling in video games and the importance of telling relevant stories as he stresses:

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I believe you should make something that matches the times, because the world changes every day. There’s new news every day, the people in the world change all the time. Sometimes film directors come up with an idea when they’re a child, and then they make the film when they’re an adult. I don’t think that’s something you should do, because it’s no longer topical. . .. Of course I’m interested in what is happening in the world right now. Talking about the present is a way of talking about the past and the future. It’s important to talk about the world we’re in now, so you can show your children what kind of world awaits you, or what kind of world we should make. I’m definitely interested in what’s happening in politics now, especially in America. With politics moving to the right, I’m afraid of this kind of movement in America (n.p.).

Exactly what Kojima thinks of all the actions the American government has taken since 9/11 remains elusive within Metal Gear Solid V, although obvious areas of critique—such as the creation and use of the prison at Guantanamo Bay—appear to be clear points of contention. That being said, Hideo Kojima resists creating works that easily lend themselves to surface interpretations or interpretations that come easily to the player. He relates: Art lives off its interpretation. When I stand in front of a painting, I might end up seeing totally different things in it than another person. That’s what is fascinating for me, and I sort of try to implement these techniques from painters in the creation of a trailer,” Kojima once explained at the famous Smithsonian Art Museum. “It’s fine when it’s a little bit confusing. Looking at Twitter and Reddit, people love to do their very own interpretations. Not all of that is correct, but that’s the fun part. Personally, I’m not a big fan of movie or game trailers that give away all their secrets within a couple minutes (qtd. in Kratsch n.p.).

It is against this complex backdrop and portrait of Kojima-as-creator that the complexities of Metal Gear Solid V emerge. This book seeks to explore how Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain provide a compelling, powerful, and often wrenching view of the lasting effect of war on soldiers and civilians alike. Although the games are also specifically commenting on post-9/11 realities, especially America’s campaigns against terrorism, they function more broadly than that. Each title demonstrates that what initially seems new or novel—incursions and war in the Middle East, the operation of CIA black sites, the exploitations

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of soldiers, and the use of children in war—is really nothing of the sort. Instead, the locations and those in charge of these events are changed, as are the victors and the defeated, but the actions continue to cycle with frightening regularity. The games consider in detail what media reports and government narratives about war often fail to capture or even address: that wars of any kind produce indelible trauma both on those who are participants and those who are unwilling spectators and that such trauma cannot simply be wiped away with time or the awarding of medals. Instead, trauma and PTSD reshape personalities, sometimes permanently and beyond recognition of who that person once was. Although both games, but especially The Phantom Pain, are military-style shooters, each provides the player with mechanical, or play style, choices, defying the expectations many players likely hold. Chapter 1 explores this issue, examining why what is essentially in many ways a “war game” may be better thought of as a “game about war,” consistently keeping the player off balance and forced to witness or participate in atrocity and its aftermath. Chapter 2 considers how each of the games explores history and historicity, the real and the fictive, as a means to contextualize post-9/11 fears and realities. Chapter 3 addresses the evolution of PTSD as a diagnosis and how The Phantom Pain, especially, presents numerous iterations of trauma, rather than a simple, more stereotypical representation of the deep psychological wounds war can leave. Chapter 4 expands The Phantom Pain’s consideration of PTSD by offering a sustained analysis of the game’s opening mission, entitled “Flashback Prologue: Awakening,” and its claustrophobic hospital setting. Chapter 5 provides in-depth analyses examining the manifestations of trauma and PTSD across the diverse and broad range of characters appearing in Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. The final chapter concludes with an examination of identities transformed by trauma within both the fictional world of Metal Gear Solid V and the real world. What emerges across this close consideration of Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain is a challenging, complex, and compelling narrative about never-ending cycles of war and violence that is at once specifically situated in a post-9/11 world and yet also universal in its scrutiny of culpability and suffering. In an interview with Chris Kohler, Hideo Kojima states: Back when I started making games, technology was very limited, so I couldn’t show players what was in my head. There were specific rules we had to follow, and that was game design. It was like the game of chess,

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where you have a piece that represents a knight and he’s limited to a specific movement. Today, we could render an actual horse with all the freedom a real horse would allow. Game design has changed a lot. With current technology, we don’t need to be limited. Marketing-wise, you have to set a genre for your game, because people will ask if it’s horror or sci-fi, action or RPG12. You need to put a tag on it. But it isn’t that limited anymore (n.p.).

Of note here are Kojima’s ideas regarding how genre and form continue to open up as video games, as a narrative form, advance. Certainly, the gaming public appreciates being provided with information useful for allowing them to decide whether to invest in a specific game, with obvious information to include the genre and form, that is, whether the game is shooter-style, RPG, and so forth. However, technological advances now also allow for the imagination to guide the narrative in ways that do not easily fit into such categories and that open up complex modes of storytelling, such as those found in Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain.

Notes



1. The Metal Gear Solid series as a whole explores the idea of a private army, which is seen by the game’s engineers as an idyllic place for soldiers, and the concept of a “war without end,” on which its existence would necessarily hinge. In the case of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the game’s “Mission 41: Proxy War without End” explores the concept with added weight. While it maintains the thesis of never-ending war, it also investigates the idea that war is oftentimes wrought upon people— soldiers or civilians—by those who do not themselves ever enter the fray directly or place themselves at the risk of bodily harm. 2.  The game has a series of main missions, side missions, and missions that must be unlocked through other actions, which means that the player could miss them entirely. There are technically thirty-one missions that comprise what this book calls the game’s primary narrative thread. Mission 31 finds Snake defeating the antagonist Skull Face, stopping Skull Face from releasing a parasitic infection upon the world and destroying his portable nuclear war machine, dubbed the Sahelanthropus. However, this is only the most straightforward ending to the narrative, and one which does not represent the entirety of the story. The game, at this point, will open up other missions and a series of replays of earlier missions that must be completed at higher degrees of difficulty. The game

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does not clearly indicate to the player how many missions really exist or how to unlock them. The player is not necessarily required to repeat missions. As long as the player completes several more of the game’s side quests, called “side ops” in the game—these include missions such as retrieving lost soldiers or extracting “highly skilled” soldiers to strengthen Snake’s own forces—the remaining story missions will eventually unlock, save for “Mission 45: A Quiet Exit,” which can be skipped, meaning it will not even show up as a playable mission if the player uses Quiet’s symbol, the butterfly, as his or her base flag. Quiet is discussed in more detail later. “Mission 46: Truth—The Man Who Sold the World” represents the last of the narrative missions. This gradual unlocking of the final narrative missions of the game underscores the singular importance of the player to the narrative: the player must be willing to be a full participant in the game, as opposed to doing the bare minimum needed to complete it, otherwise a good portion of the story will be lost. 3. This book will refer to each individual game by its subtitle, that is, Ground Zeroes or The Phantom Pain, and will use the blanket main title Metal Gear Solid V to refer to issues relating to or relevant to both titles. 4. The game can easily take in excess of eighty hours for the player to complete. Although the main missions can be completed in less time than that, the game’s narrative unfolds across its many side quests or side ops. For the player to appreciate the full scope of the game’s story, he or she must invest in doing more than what is strictly needed to complete the main story line. 5. Although this is a long span of fictive history, it does not take into account some game remasters, such as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Definitive Edition or ancillary titles, but rather only the main series of games. 6. Ground Zeroes is a very short game. It involves two specific rescue missions wherein Snake is needed to extract both Chico and Paz from a US military base where they are being tortured and held captive by the XOF. While it is technically possible to complete the game in perhaps twenty to thirty minutes, if the player knew or correctly guessed exactly where both were being held on the base, a more realistic and average playtime for the main story is approximately two hours. There are a few additional side ops available after the completion of the main game as well. Ground Zeroes is not narrative heavy, save for its specific and brutal resolution of Paz’s and Chico’s story lines. The game’s events take place in 1975 in Cuba, and the game ends with the destruction of the Militaires Sans Frontieres’ base of operations. 7. In the game, the appellations Punished Venom Snake and Big Boss are usually shortened to Snake and Boss, respectively, and he will be referred

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to as Snake in this analysis, unless it is imperative to refer to one of his full names. A major plot point, which will be explored in greater detail, involves the revelation that this Snake is really a doppelganger, one of the real Snake’s men who was injured during the attack and who has had surgery and mental programming so that he believes he really is Snake. 8. The specific reasons behind Skull Face’s motivations are discussed further in the text as they become more specifically relevant. 9. Unfortunately, given that Konami Games and the series creator and writer Hideo Kojima had a bitter parting of ways shortly before the game’s release, it seems unlikely that the series will continue to have the power of storytelling it has enjoyed under Kojima’s guidance. Indeed, Konami appears to be trying to quickly cash in on The Phantom Pain’s popularity with the creation of Metal Gear: Survive, whose first trailers make it out to be little more than a multiplayer shooter game with players facing off against zombie-like hordes. Although Konami may well intend to create more narrative-driven Metal Gear titles, for the time being, however, it appears that they are abandoning the deeper storytelling tradition ushered in by Kojima. 10. The term “triple A,” or “AAA,” is used widely to refer to video games developed with feature film-level budgets and massive promotional efforts upon release. As a recent example, Bioware’s Mass Effect: Andromeda has been rumored to have cost some 40 million dollars in development alone. 11. Certainly, the majority of The Phantom Pain was completed by the time Kojima left Konami and Ground Zeroes had already been released. If there is one aspect of The Phantom Pain that I can point to that may speak to Kojima’s feelings on the matter, it is the framing of each of the game’s missions with beginning and ending credits. In those credits, he consistently emphasis that the story was created by him. Given that Konami went so far as to remove Hideo Kojima’s name from the video game’s promotional materials and case, Kojima would logically want to remind both players and Konami that he was the game’s creative heart. 12. Role-playing game.

CHAPTER 2

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s Denial of Player Expectations: The War Game that Isn’t

Abstract  This chapter explores the means by which The Phantom Pain initially appears poised to be another offering in the military-style shooter genre, exemplified in the game’s marketing materials, only to present players with a much different and unexpected set of realities. While the game contains the hallmarks of the shooter genre, including the ability to obtain an arsenal of sophisticated weapons and having the option to use lethal force to overcome all enemy forces, it instead privileges a stealth, or non-lethal playthrough. Indeed, excessive violence on the part of the player eventually alters the main character Snake’s physical appearance, making him look like something akin to a demon. The Phantom Pain, through its denial of expectations, instead compels the player to consider the ramifications of violence and bloodshed rather than allowing him or her to revel in them. Keywords  Military-style shooter · Non-lethal · Violence · Trauma · PTSD Metal Gear Solid V, as with all of the games in the Metal Gear series, presents many of the features of the military-style shooter that most gamers would expect, whether or not they are fans of or knowledgeable about the series at the outset. Like other military shooters, Metal Gear Solid V features combat, including gun battles and options to move through enemy territories using stealth, hand-to-hand combat, military-style © The Author(s) 2017 A.M. Green, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62749-6_2

15

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vehicles such as tanks and weaponized helicopters, and other aspects associated with warfare like open combat. Snake wears tactical gear, and, at least in Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, his adversaries have a military appearance. He fights XOF1 guards at Camp Omega2 in Ground Zeroes and a combination, primarily, of Soviet and XOF soldiers in The Phantom Pain. The game provides the player with specific missions to complete, each with clear tactical goals usually involving the infiltration of military strongholds and bases. Yet for all of its approximation of combat as it might appear in real-world wars and skirmishes, Metal Gear Solid V also presents a compelling dichotomy, a chasm between the performance of violence in the game, via the player embodying Snake, and the fallout of those actions in the fictive space. Moreover, the game’s main characters, including Snake, enter the narrative already bearing the burden of past trauma, from physical to psychological wounds. As such, the game is less of a celebration of all-out violence or of defeating the enemy always and only by killing them all. Certainly, the player can choose to play the game in this fashion, sparing no one encountered. However, the in-game penalties for such actions dovetail with the ramifications on the characters themselves of living under the perpetual threat of violence. The marketing campaigns for Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain follow a style that most people likely consider typical for a military-style shooter. For example, the first teaser for Ground Zeroes focuses exclusively on Snake, armed in his tactical gear, preparing to make his way into Camp Omega. The official trailer for The Phantom Pain showcases it as a game about and set in war. Some of the featured scenes include explosions, Snake aiming a gun at an enemy, and a Demon Snake briefly roaring in apparent fury3. Certainly, the games highlighted in the trailers appear to be filled with excitement, danger, and, importantly, the possibility of player-controlled bloodshed. Matthew Thomas Payne analyzes the marketing of most military-style shooter games in this way: Thus, the marketing campaigns for post-9/11 military shooters are overwhelmingly concerned with selling only select elements of military realisticness: sophisticated enemy artificial intelligence, military weapons and vehicles that function and look like the real thing, and combat that unfolds in authentic theaters of war, both historic and those “ripped from today’s headlines.” The games industry promises its dedicated and would- be consumers a near-real combat experience, irrespective of the gamer’s personal play context. Said differently, a game that promises military realism

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purports to tell one all they need to know about war with the goal of inoculating game play pleasures from the threats of simulation fever (“Military Realism” 310).

The Phantom Pain’s marketing campaign in some ways follows this sort of prescribed structure only to defy it in the gameplay and narrative. Metal Gear Solid V certainly features forward-looking and compelling technology, such that it would have been incredibly advanced for the decades in which the games take place and that even today offers interesting iterations on modern technology. However, while the games are placed in largely familiar locations—especially The Phantom Pain’s extended campaign in Afghanistan—the narrative again defies expectations by setting the story in the 1980s and deliberately focusing on Soviet actions in the region rather than on nameless, faceless “terrorists” of Middle Eastern origin. The setting is at once as foreign as it is seemingly familiar. Soraya Murray notes of the overall expectations one generally has of a military game, “Within the shooter genre, the so-called military shooter subgenre typically consists of weapon-based combat from a first- or third-person perspective, tactical use of a squad, stealth, and a cover system” (38). Her definition is a good starting point, but many other categories of games may use all of these elements and yet not conform to the category of military shooter. An example of this is the Mass Effect series, which allows the player embodying Shepherd to direct at least two squad members to take specific actions, and more members of his or her team during the game’s “Suicide Mission.” The player, embodying Shepherd, uses tactics, weapons, and use of cover to overcome enemies and in many instances, the player must defeat all enemies in order to move to the next section of the game. Perhaps an expansion of this definition would take into account that these specific types of military shooter games also specifically attempt to create or re-create the experience of the player being in military service, to give the player a pseudo-experience of being a soldier. In the case of Metal Gear Solid V, the combat experiences are at once akin to, yet disconnected from, actual military service. Given that the Diamond Dogs espouse the philosophy that governments exploit their military servicemen and servicewomen, the narrative sets up a disconnect between the player and what true military service might really mean. Murray’s definition provides an overarching set of traits by which to categorize games as military shooters, yet games like Metal Gear Solid V

18  A.M. Green

also deliberately subvert the format by presenting the player with all of the tools necessary to kill while privileging non-lethality instead. Even though Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain contain violent and gruesome sequences, such as those concerning the rescue of Paz in Ground Zeroes, an event considered in detail later in the book, both games privilege a player using non-lethal means for every mission, such as knocking out opponents, putting opponents to sleep with tranquilizer bullets, or ghosting, meaning the player sneaks through enemy compounds and areas without detection. Despite offering the player non-lethal options, Hideo Kojima’s narratives leave it up to the individual player to determine the shape of his or her in-game fictive space. However, The Phantom Pain, in particular, does not allow a player with a non-lethal play style to avoid the narrative’s larger exploration of issues involving violence, trauma, and atrocity. Indeed, the game’s most violent and uncomfortable sequences— found especially in the Prologue, in “Mission 31: Sahelanthropus,” and in “Mission 43: Shining Lights, Even in Death”4—are specifically designed to be so, to manipulate the player into the position of having to examine both the causality and ramifications of violence. If the player chooses to embark on a more deliberately lethal playthrough, with the consequence that Snake’s body count becomes high, then the shrapnel that has remained embedded in his head grows outward like a devil’s horn and his face is covered in blood that cannot be washed away.5 What players would have no reason to realize on an initial playthrough or without additional information provided in advance is that the game secretly tallies all of the player’s casualties through the accumulation of Demon Points. The game’s status screen never reveals to the player how many Demon Points have been accumulated. The only clue that this tally is occurring is a change in Snake’s appearance as he moves from one stage to the next.6 Granted, it takes 20,000 points to reach each of the two Demon tiers. The first tier finds Snake’s shrapnel “horn” growing longer, and the second finds it longer still and with Snake covered in blood that remains even after he showers. Finally, there is an option in the game for Snake to develop a nuclear weapon. That action alone awards 50,000 Demon Points, the highest total related to any single action in the game, and thus moves the player to the worst Demon Points level, one that would take a great deal of concerted effort on the part of the player to reverse. Despite Snake’s attitude regarding the development of a nuclear weapon indicating that having such a weapon would serve as a deterrent, the narrative concludes that such an intention

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is hard to uphold, and anyone—even the Diamond Dogs—might easily turn despotic with such a weapon in their control. Such a contradiction—that of the intersection between good intent and the corrupting possibilities of power, especially martial might—finds expression in military shooters more generally. Matthew Thomas Payne considers how traditional military shooters, especially those centered on multilayer campaigns, deal in conflicted ways with violence, noting: Combat video games wherein one can shoot their friends and be shot at, however fantastic and absurd the depiction of violence, is mediated play that threatens to force gamers into a consideration of actual shooting and actual dying. Thinking about taking another’s life demands deep and personal introspection—an activity that is most certainly not within the commercial purview of military shooters. It is this experiential externality that the marketers of combat games must guard against, lest their products be seen as raising unpleasant, complicated, and ultimately less profitable questions or feelings for their audiences (“Military Realism” 309).

Certainly, the image of a Demon Snake covered in blood and an ever protruding/growing shrapnel horn serves as an example of the “fantastic and the absurd” in the game. However, it need not be the case that the taking of a life contains more weight when players shoot at and kill one another in the in-game world. In the case of The Phantom Pain, the absurdity of Snake’s Demon appearance, its sheer grotesquerie, serves as a constant visual reminder on screen of the player’s choices. Snake’s appearance proves hyperbolic without also being alluring—it is off-putting and a vivid response to the player’s actions. Instead of the player killing another player and then moving on to the next mission, or the next casualty, the player embodying Snake lives with his transformed appearance and must then actively and consciously play in a non-lethal fashion, or choose other actions that are designed to be either more altruistic or peaceful in the game to affect change. Using non-lethal methods accumulates counter points to the Demon Points, that is, Heroism Points, which can eventually revert Snake to his normal appearance and thus allow the player an opportunity, if she or she so desires, to reshape Snake’s experience, and therefore his or her own. The game further incentivizes the player to use stealth and nonlethal takedowns in either all, which is possible, or most situations,7 as all subdued or knocked out enemies can be brought to Mother Base and recruited into the player’s own army.8 The player can opt to utilize

20  A.M. Green

a transportation device, known in-game as a Fulton recovery balloon, to take possession of large enemy weaponry, such as tanks, rescue animals, and send recruited enemy soldiers to Mother Base. Therefore, a careful and stealthy player can eliminate enemies and their weapons simply by removing them from the battlefield and adding them to Mother Base’s resources. This choice of recruiting and salvaging, rather than killing and destroying, leads to bonuses and power-ups, which enhance Snake’s skills and make the game easier to play. The player also receives rewards for bringing animals to Mother Base, where they are housed in an animal sanctuary and protected. Although it never makes complete narrative sense why the Diamond Dogs would want to devote part of their base to the housing of various animals, the existence of this option privileges compassion and guarding the innocent. This is further examined in the game’s use of companions who can accompany Snake on missions. The player can have one companion with him or her, and more choices for this companion unlock as the game unfolds. The player is awarded positive points for keeping that companion safe. For example, if Quiet is selected as the player’s companion, sending her into a dangerous situation but not ordering her to evacuate if she encounters enemy fire can lead to a loss of Heroism Points.9 Kojima privileges player choice and offers that in Metal Gear Solid V. However, the player’s game world consistently provides visual and gameplay feedback reflecting those choices. Regarding its exploration of the fallout of continual violence and bloodshed, Metal Gear Solid V possesses much in common with Spec Ops: The Line, much more so than it has in common with other traditional military shooters like the Call of Duty franchise. Considering some aspects of these games foregrounds a discussion of the specific narrative and gameplay choices available in Metal Gear Solid V. Matthew Thomas Payne explores a structural storytelling difference between other popular military shooter franchises, like Call of Duty and Spec Ops: The Line, arguing: Yet the key, affective difference between Spec Ops’ handling of its remote shelling and firing rounds from the safe remove of the AC-130 gunship in Call of Duty (and, indeed, other games like it) is what comes next. Instead of simply progressing to the next firefight, the player traverses the burning battlefield and witnesses first-hand the consequences of their actions. The few U.S. soldiers who are still alive scream in pain, many begging for death. The game leaves it up to the player to kill the injured or leave them to their wounds (“War Bytes” 276).

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Although Metal Gear Solid V does not offer scenes of suffering or choices parallel to those found in Spec Ops: The Line, it does share structural similarities in terms of its willingness to consider the consequences of violence and its perpetual toll over many years. Given that Metal Gear Solid V features an older cast of primary characters, with Snake in his forties during the time of Ground Zeroes and then in his late forties in The Phantom Pain, and Revolver Ocelot and Kazuhira Miller in their thirties during Ground Zeroes and their early forties during The Phantom Pain, all of them have had years to consider the weight of all of their actions. As will be explored in Chap. 5, Miller comes to have increasing and obvious psychological problems contending with the violence he has witnessed, especially with the destruction of the Militaires Sans Frontieres. The Phantom Pain utilizes player perspective to deepen the horror of the game’s opening chapter and uses a switch in perspective from the first to the third person at specific points throughout the rest of the narrative to underscore moments that especially align with the game’s exploration of trauma. The game is mostly played in the third-person perspective, save for sections such as those in the opening Prologue mission, which begins in a disorienting first-person perspective before switching to the third person.10 After that switch, the mission is punctuated by brief flashes in the first-person perspective, drawing the player’s attention to specific moments of atrocity as Snake attempts to flee the hospital. Thus, although The Phantom Pain uses perspective switches to underscore specific emotional notes in the narrative, these shifts need not markedly alter the overall manner in which a player becomes immersed in a game. Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca assert, “What is more surprising is that video games seem to work equally well in both the first- and thirdperson perspectives. Nor is there any indisputable difference between the experience of playing the two” (159-160).11 This proves to be an especially compelling point when considered against the game designers’ specific choice to switch perspectives during this one particular—and crucial, given that it is the player’s introduction to this fictive space— section of the game. Holger Pötzsch envisions shooter-style games, regardless of perspective, as having four different layers to them, which he describes as filters: “On the basis of what has been said so far, the following filters predisposing player experiences and performances at the level of both procedural and narrative rhetoric of the F/TPS12-genre can be identified: (1) the violence filter, (2) the consequence filter, (3) the

22  A.M. Green

character filter, and (4) the conflict filter” (160). Of special note here for this particular analysis of The Phantom Pain, Pötzsch’s thoughts concerning the consequence filter prove especially useful: The consequence filter determines the range of short- and long-term consequences of violence and warfare that are depicted in F/TPS-games. The genre severely de-emphasizes negative long- and short-term impacts both at an individual and collective level. As such, the consequences of severe acts of violence usually exclude such features as crippled player- or nonplayer characters, severely traumatized characters, or protagonists suffering from PTSD. Also negative effects at a societal, economic, and political level including unintended blowbacks of military endeavors are normally deemphasized this way reiterating understandings of war as efficient and surgical operations without individual or collective long-term costs (Ibid).

The Phantom Pain’s deliberate and sometimes disorienting shifts in perspective can therefore be read as important symbolic choices designed to highlight the idea of the consequence of violence on Snake, and perhaps by extension on the player him or herself as an embodied subject. The shift to the first person moves the violence in those moments closer to the player’s own field of vision, as Snake is not on screen to serve as an extra buffer. The shifting perspective can also be considered as a manifestation of Snake’s own psyche. The narrative reminds the player that certain moments, such as the horrific slaughter that takes place in the hospital during the game’s opening Prologue mission, become indelibly etched into Snake’s memory. It would be naïve to think he simply bears witness to all of this violence without also bearing a lasting mark. Soraya Murray argues of Spec Ops: The Line’s exploration of the toll of violence, “It demonstrates the erosion of American militarized masculinity through inglorious conflict, with a corresponding commentary on the use of violence within the context of shooters; in fact, these are its most discussed interventions” (39). The Phantom Pain takes a different angle on the toll of violence by focusing on and juxtaposing events against the overarching philosophy of the Boss and the Diamond Dogs, considering the concepts of a “war without end,” a free and voluntary paid private army, and the insidious cost of a life surrounded by threats and violence. In addition to the game’s particular selection of player perspective, the varying means by which the story unravels is important to consider. Narrative is revealed directly by playing through the various main and

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side missions, which are fully voiced,13 and also through an extensive catalog of cassette tapes, which contain everything from mission briefings, to insights into the larger mythology of the Metal Gear series, to more information on individual characters through recorded conversations between characters, or characters reading intelligence briefings filling in the historical context of the game. Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca explore the idea of how the player interacts with a digital story by considering how “the player experience of narrative resonates with Gordon Calleja’s more recent concept of ‘alterbiography,’ defined as the ‘active construction of an ongoing story that develops through interaction with the game world’s topography, inhabitants, objects, and game rules and simulated environmental properties.’ Calleja is also influenced by Iser and talks about how the scripted narrative inspires and becomes a part of the player’s alterbiography, creating narrative involvement” (255). Brendan Keogh asserts of his own experience playing Spec Ops: The Line: What I got out of it most were questions about the shooter genre itself— the questions that other shooters either willfully ignore or simply don’t think to ask. Is it really okay to be shooting this many people? Does it actually matter that they aren’t real? What does it say about us, the people who play shooter after shooter, the people who have a virtual murder count in the thousands of thousands, that these are the games we enjoy playing? What does it say about us, as a culture, that these are the kinds of games that make so much money? (Kindle locations 106–111.)

The questions and issues brought to Keogh’s mind by Spec Ops: The Line readily apply to Metal Gear Solid V. The player considers the idea of consequence and the idea of whether or not events matter in these games by experiencing the narrative content across a number of different forms, from dialogue to listening to audiocassettes containing mission briefings. By filling in details and providing a strong sense of narrative and historical place, Metal Gear Solid V compels the player to think about consequences both in-game and as they relate symbolically to events in the post-9/11 landscape. In The Phantom Pain, interactions with these narrative extras are requisite on the part of the player to allow him or her to experience the narrative in its entirety. Much as it might be if the events of The Phantom Pain, however farfetched, were real, someone in Snake’s position

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would not simply have situations explained to him by some omniscient participant. Instead, as he does in the game, and therefore as the player does via embodiment and agency, Snake learns about the world—one he has been absent from for nine years while he has been in a coma—not only through direct interactions with other characters but also through vast intelligence files, some of which are available at the game’s start and others that unlock as the player completes missions and obtains more context and information about Skull Face’s machinations.14 Matthew Thomas Payne argues: Contemporary video war games are typically advertised as offering players ever-increasing levels of visual and aural realism and computational verisimilitude. However, because simulation fever … is latent in all games and is of particular concern to titles that trade in simulated violence, militarythemed games must be packaged in such a way that celebrates acceptable technological or aesthetic attributes— elements like algorithmic sophistication or an attention to historical accuracy—while sidestepping issues that might spur critical reflection about war games’ inability to model the social reality that attends to worldly conflict (“Military Realism” 306).

The focus of Matthew Thomas Payne’s article is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, although he applies the concept more broadly to military-style shooters. Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain both manage to avoid falling into the very problem Payne discusses: the deflection of conversation about social realities. By contrast, those social realities build to become the scaffolding on which the games’ narratives build. It is perhaps through the games’ balancing of historicity and ahistoricity and their embracing of the bizarre—elements like the appearance of the Man on Fire and the Floating Boy—that serve to anchor the narrative in a conversation about violence, trauma, and PTSD. The next chapter considers the colliding concepts of history, historicity, and fictional space as Metal Gear Solid V contends with them, presenting a sobering treatise on modern warfare and violence.

Notes

1. The XOF is a branch of Cipher’s forces. XOF is not an acronym, but is “Fox” spelled backward. FOX was a black ops branch created by the CIA only to eventually be dissolved. The Militaires Sans Frontieres included

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the FOX logo on their uniforms for a time. In The Phantom Pain, the FOX logo is one option the player can choose for Mother Base’s flags. 2.  There is a degree of ambiguity in Ground Zeroes. Camp Omega is described as an American black site, yet XOF agents, led by Skull Face, appear to freely come and go. Therefore, it is possible that the ground forces Snake must subdue, sneak past, or kill are a combination of the two. 3. The scene with Snake appears to be a bit of deliberate misdirection. It is actually a scene in which Snake has no choice but to shoot a number of Mother Base soldiers who had become infected with the Wolbachia parasite. The two trailers for the games mentioned here can be viewed at these sites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3J9_L2Tg6k and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sExY86uB3To. 4. The events in these missions are considered at length in further chapters. 5. Owing to specific narrative events that are examined later in their own right, the player will end “Mission 43: Bright Lights, Even in Death” with Snake having a devil’s horn. 6. Segment Next has an in-depth guide to Demon and Heroism points here: http://segmentnext.com/2015/09/04/mgsv-phantom-pain-heroismand-demon-snake-guide-decisions-to-get-hero-points/. PC Gamer provides additional information on the system here: http://www.pcgamer. com/metal-gear-solid-5s-hidden-karma-system/, including a link to an extensive breakdown of points related to nearly every action, lethal and non-lethal, that the player can take. 7. The incentive to play non-lethally is not something that is universally forced on the player. Because the player can accumulate a number of Demon Points before Snake’s appearance changes, and thus a visible penalty is incurred, the player does have agency to act with a combination of lethality and stealth. Some missions offer optional objectives that are necessarily lethal should the player carry them out. For example, in “Mission 6: Where Do the Bees Sleep,” the player has an optional objective of destroying a gunship, an enemy helicopter. Certainly, if the player is not interested in this, or prefers lethality, that is left open as well. In my own playthrough, I acted with just this sort of combination. Stealthy takedowns become easier as the game progresses and the player unlocks better and more accurate weaponry capable of dealing a stun bullet and better stealth gear. 8. During the game, Snake encounters specific enemies known as Skulls. They have been genetically modified and are formidable foes. Snake has the option of killing them or fleeing from them in most missions, and I think, though I have been unable to confirm, that killing Skulls does not count toward the penalty given for killing enemy soldiers.

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9. Companions cannot be killed by player inaction. Instead, after the companion has sustained a high level of damage, Ocelot angrily intervenes and evacuates the companion from the mission zone. 10. First-person perspective, as the name implies, finds the player exploring the game world as if he or she is really in it. This means that when a player wields a weapon, he or she sees a hand in front, as though it were the player’s own limb. Third-person perspective, by contrast, finds the game’s camera focused behind the player and, often, above the shoulder of the player’s avatar. This means that for the entirety of the game, the player sees, in full, the character he or she embodies in the game. The in-game camera will often enable the player to rotate perspective, meaning that he or she can pan around that avatar, affording a full 360-degree view. 11. I am a lifelong gamer and have played from both perspectives. On a personal note, I concur that my level of immersion or my sense of interest in a game’s narrative has never depended on whether I am playing in first or third person. I would argue that although first person places the player more directly within the fictive space—given that the player “sees” the world as though through his or her own eyes—this creates a different form of immersion than those games wherein the player views his or her avatar on-screen in third person. However, this does not mean that this different perspective lessens the narrative impact or even provides a ­significantly different experience. 12. First/Third Person Shooter. 13. This means that as the player moves through the world he or she hears snippets or conversations or cries for help and other immersive elements, rather than only having dialogue appear as subtitles on-screen. 14. Ground Zeroes, a much shorter game with a narrower narrative scope than The Phantom Pain, contains fewer of these extra elements, but most notably provides an encyclopedia containing entries with some background on characters, including Snake, Chico, and Paz, for those new to the series.

CHAPTER 3

History, Historicity, and Fiction: Pseudorealities in Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain

Abstract  This chapter considers how Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain both explore post-9/11 realities by using a narrative frame set in the past––in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Ground Zeroes, through its use of setting the game in a military detention facility in Cuba named Camp Omega, provides pointed and devastating commentary on America’s uses of Guantanamo Bay as a prison and the extraordinary rendition program as a tool in the War on Terror. The chapter also considers how these two games present a complex intersection of what is historically accurate and what is essentially historical fiction, utilizing this space as a place from which to comment on modern events. Keywords  Guantanamo bay · Extraordinary rendition · Cuba Sandinistas · War on terror Metal Gear Solid V places the player in a unique vantage point with regard to history. On one level, the game is entirely fictitious and contains both characters and events that exist only within the fictive space and would, in some cases, be unlikely to ever have real counterparts, as is the case with enemies like Skull Face or characters with supra-human abilities, such as the Floating Boy or Man on Fire. Other characters, including career soldiers Snake and Miller, certainly find their counterparts across the globe in the real world, in type if not as exact matches. In terms of setting, the game is careful, on one hand, to present a clear © The Author(s) 2017 A.M. Green, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62749-6_3

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sense of accurate historical context. For example, its consideration of 1980s Afghanistan, then under the control of the Soviets, leading to the Mujahedeen revolting against them, is presented in detail and with an eye toward overall historical accuracy, save for those places where the game’s narrative intersects with historical events and places. On the other hand, the game adopts a more complicated stance between history, historicity, and the completely fictional in its use of historical events of earlier decades—Metal Gear Solid V spans the 1970s and 1980s—as a means to comment on global complexities in the post-9/11 world. Specifically, Ground Zeroes explores the USA’s use of both black sites, like Guantanamo Bay, and extraordinary rendition in its efforts to combat ­terrorism, whereas The Phantom Pain takes a broad look at the wars America has fought in the Middle East since 9/11 and the psychological and physical tolls those wars have taken on American servicemen and servicewomen. Complicating matters further is the ambiguity with which Metal Gear Solid V contends with these events and its ambiguous assignation of blame or culpability. Certainly, the narrative remains universally empathetic toward the plight of soldiers who return from service with PTSD, physical injuries, or both. It appears to be condemnatory toward sites like Guantanamo Bay, given the explicit and gruesome torture suffered by Paz and Chico at Camp Omega; however, the party responsible for the torture is the XOF, even though the facility is operated by the American military. What emerges, then, is a digital narrative that through the use of both history and fiction attempts to contend in a forthright and unflinching manner with complex post-9/11 realities, and in so doing, comes to the dark conclusion that the only historical constant is war. Ground Zeroes’ very narrow mission structure, consisting of Snake’s rescue of Chico and Paz, allows the game to probe the overall concept of the black ops site in more detail because the game’s location, save for part of its end sequence, is entirely within the fictional Camp Omega in Cuba. The camp’s ties to Guantanamo Bay and the game’s commentary on America’s continued use of it as a detention facility prove undeniable and underscore that any site effectively operating outside of the law can potentially evolve, however well the initial intention, into the unspeakable. Derek Gregory summarizes the history of outside colonial interference in Cuba in noting, “Guantánamo Bay bears the marks of these ligatures between colonialism, violence, and the law. Its modern history has been shaped by military encounters between three imperial powers––Spain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—and by ­enduring

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military occupation. Cubans rose against their Spanish occupiers three times in the nineteenth century: in 1868–1878, 1879–1880 and 1895– 1898” (411). He continues, “The Bush administration has made much of the presumptive novelty of the ‘war on terror,’ but the selection of Guantánamo as a prison camp, the designation of its inmates as ‘unlawful combatants,’ and the delineation of a regime of interrogation do not depart from the historical templates that shaped the base’s colonial history and their mobilization of legal protocols” (412). By setting the fictional Camp Omega in Cuba, Ground Zeroes comments broadly, as does The Phantom Pain, through its use of Afghanistan as a primary setting, on exploitation and the effects of outsiders on a local people or nation. In the particular case of the Diamond Dogs, their emphatic belief that the world’s soldiers deserve to be free of the exploitation and tyranny placed on them by their respective governments and the contentious history of colonizers in Cuba underscore the point. Although the Diamond Dogs are concerned with recruiting soldiers who wish to fight for autonomy and freedom, Snake’s actions prove on a number of occasions that he is also concerned with how the cruelty of others affects civilian populations. Camp Omega is described ingame as “out of US legal jurisdiction,” while at the same time existing as an American military black site. Groups like XOF, itself originally a black ops unit of the CIA, appear able to operate at will in Camp Omega and freely deploy grotesque and brutal torture on its prisoners. Derek Gregory describes how one might contextualize Guantanamo Bay in the following: More particularly, it has become common to treat Guantánamo Bay as a “lawless place” that is “beyond the reach of national and international law”; a place where sovereign power has been mobilized “outside the rule of law”; a wild zone subject to “a lawless and prerogatory power,” where “the law is effectively suspended in both its national and international forms” and where sovereign power is extended “in excess of the law”; a “law-free zone”; and a legal “black hole” (408).

There will be no intervention on behalf of the US government to forcibly end the detention of Chico and Paz.1 Instead, the XOF operate at will in Camp Omega. It is only via the game’s fictional narrative—the rescue attempt by Snake, himself seen as dangerous at best, outlaw at worst, in the eyes of the world’s governments—that such horrors come to an end.

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Ground Zeroes is set up narratively such that the player first rescues Chico,2 who is only thirteen at the time of the events in the game and who had attempted on his own to rescue Paz before being captured himself.3 Chico’s story creates a complex intersection between history and a fictional character placed within a historical timeline of events. Before joining the Militaires Sans Frontieres, Chico had been a Sandinista, and the game implies that he long ago had childhood stripped away from him. The “Background” section of the game4 quotes him as saying, “Everyone treats me like a child. I couldn’t stand it anymore,” and then describes him later, specifically, as a voluntary member in Snake’s army, which creates an intriguing intersection with his initial identity as a Sandinista seeking to expel American influence from Nicaragua and his choice to ally himself voluntarily with Snake. Skull Face says of Snake in Ground Zeroes that he is “a man who, with his nation at his back, made an enemy of modern capitalist society and the world.” Yet such a radical position, one built on freedom of choice and an army of free men and women under no obligation to any flag, places him at constant risk of death. Still, even with that understanding, Chico opts, once he is free of the Sandinistas, to continue to serve as a soldier and to seek a charismatic leader—Snake—in whom he can find a cause for which to fight. Snake’s attempts to actively and successfully countermand the authority of the USA prove especially perilous here, given that Chico and Paz are essentially being held—and tortured—with that nation’s tacit approval and given that the USA also allows the XOF to use the facility. But Snake is not a terrorist aiming to undermine the USA, and from a moral perspective, Chico is an innocent at Camp Omega. While Paz’s allegiance and culpability are deliberately muddied, Chico’s only fault was trying to rescue Paz out of love for her, and nothing justifies the torture the XOF inflicts on Paz. A further consideration of Chico’s identity as a Sandinista and how that interacts with history and his roles in the text as a subject of rescue and also as a young man who has continued to choose a life of war highlights the game’s complex interrogation of trauma and free will. Anupama Mande summarizes the motivations and the goals of the Sandinistas in this way: Sandinistas argued that the revolutionary state, unlike the Somoza government, connected the sovereign powers of the state directly with the economic welfare of the people. Under the Somoza regime, people were able to choose their political representatives, but this did not guarantee their

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economic welfare because the state did not act in the interests of the people. Such an argument concerning representativeness and legitimacy later produced contradictory implications for Sandinista state policy. The contradiction stemmed from the very manner in which the Sandinistas envisioned their state as the principal vehicle for the national development. For the revolutionary government, “development” implied a linear path, directed toward a series of goals. It implied the fixing of priorities between long-term and short-term goals and conscious choices between alternative paths. As a process affecting the whole of society, it was understood ­particular interests needed to be made consistent with the revolutionary interest (17–18).

Such a cause of purpose, at least at the start of their campaign for freedom, dovetails with the game’s exploration of the constant pressing in of outside forces on Snake and his allies because they refuse to bow to any government, especially one as powerful as the USA. Yet the history of the Sandinistas proves that the concept of freedom becomes problematical in that any deviation from a cause or a system of governance—whatever type and whether it is deemed “right” or “wrong” either by insiders or outsiders—ultimately hinges on control and compliance. Ground Zeroes and then The Phantom Pain explore the contested areas that inevitably assert themselves within the need for leadership and authority, personal freedom, and the constant pressure of outside threats. When these issues are centered on Chico, the player must then consider how much agency the now thirteen-year-old Chico, a child soldier in a revolutionary army who was likely groomed for that position from the time he was very small, has in making any choices for his future. Philip Bennett discusses the specific experiences of children under the Sandinista regime through his reporting on one specific Nicaraguan family, noting the following: The Dugan sisters have lived in Nicaragua since arriving from the United States days after the victory of the 1979 revolution. Like other middle-class Nicaraguan children who are coming of age under the Sandinista government, in Sandinista schools and households, they have become among the revolution’s most eloquent and earnest supporters. It is a generation that is growing up early and largely without new movies, new records, new clothes, or a regular diet of beef. It is also a generation that has grown up with the tangible threat of violent death. Most teenagers have had a friend who was sent to the front and returned in a coffin. Lariza had two.

32  A.M. Green “I have told my daughters quite simply that if there is a generalized US invasion, there’s a great possibility that we will die,” said Cuadra. “But I know that whatever happens the revolution will continue.” (1)

Their mother’s attitude, and the attitude espoused also by the girls, speaks to a life wherein violence constantly looms. In the specific case of the two girls, setting aside the rightness or wrongness of the Sandinistas’ ideology, they have been indoctrinated into it, so how much they follow out of pure choice eludes. They share much in common with Chico, who effectively moves from one ideology to another, without seeming to be able to experience life as the young teen he is or to form his own fully original sense of purpose and identity. Unfortunately, since Ground Zeroes ends with Chico’s death, he never receives the opportunity to discover his own answers to such complex problems. The influence the Sandinistas held over children born into their cause addresses how any regime or cause—regardless of whether it is morally wrong or right—can manipulate young people to its ends. Karen Kampwirth quotes Comandante Carlos Núñez Téllez, stating, “Today you are a thousand times mothers; one, because you brought on the birth that gave the fatherland so many children to defend itself and to liberate itself from the oppressive yoke of the dictator and two, because with this gesture you brought on the birth of history when your wombs contracted to give birth to the Sandinista People’s Revolution” (53). Of note for the analysis of Ground Zeroes is the emphasis on children as specific tools of the revolution, and particularly, its weaponized tools. Chico had, for a time, clearly internalized his role as a revolutionary and likely still sees himself as such, simply aligning himself to a new cause. Bradley Tatar argues: In the Nicaraguan Revolution, social memory has been a crucial site of struggle for the formation of a political language. The Sandinista popular combatants seem to have failed to create a unified system of narration capable of disarticulating the official FSLN5 discourse. Did they also fail to achieve political influence within the FSLN? Roseberry (1994: 360) reminds us that “Gramsci does not assume that subaltern groups are captured or immobilized by some sort of ideological consensus.” In the absence of an alternative form of political language, the popular combatants have been forced to frame their demands in terms of the official FSLN categories (171).

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Chico is so influenced by a rebellion that he sees the Diamond Dogs, then the Militaires Sans Frontieres, as a rebellion, and he cannot live without a cause. The type of cultural language, as Tatar considers, with which Chico has composed a sense of self-identity forever marks him as “rebel.” He finds purpose first with the Sandinistas and then under Snake’s banner. Even his attempt to rescue Paz on his own serves as an act of rebellion, one which results in his torture and imprisonment at Camp Omega. Ground Zeroes does not spare him the fate an adult might face being held under suspicion of being a threat to the USA’s security after having been labeled a terrorist. When the player embodying Snake finds Chico, he or she sees that the young man’s body bears clear signs of torture. Most explicitly, Snake learns that Chico cannot walk because bolts have been drilled through both of his Achilles tendons. Chico has been allowed to keep a Walkman with earplugs, and at some point during his captivity, depicted when he does not have the earplugs in use, he had taken the end that normally plugs into the Walkman and had bored a hole in his chest with it, keeping it there instead. His captors, led by Skull Face, have specifically allowed him to keep an audiotape of Paz being tortured.6 Although some of the sounds are indistinct, the implication is that she was raped, repeatedly, in addition to the other torture she endured. Chico has been forced into the role of a witness to atrocity, and when Snake finds him, he has apparently been listening to the tape over and over again. Chico is in such a degraded mental state that panic overwhelms him, and Snake must render him unconscious to evacuate him to safety. Chico seems to perceive Paz’s torture as a sign of his own failure to have rescued her, even though both are essentially pawns in the machinations of those far older and more powerful than they. Chico’s story ends with his death aboard the chopper carrying Snake at the end of the game, but not before he has to bear witness to one final nightmare: Paz’s last moments. Whereas Chico’s mental trauma has as its source XOF’s manipulation of him into believing that he was somehow responsible for Paz’s death, the overall symbolism of his breakdown, especially given Camp Omega’s symbolic ties to Guantanamo Bay, shares much in common with the history of that prison. Derek Gregory argues of three prisoner suicides at Guantanamo Bay in 2006: Although by presidential decree prisoners at Guantánamo are subject to indefinite detention and coercive interrogation while they are alive, when

34  A.M. Green President George W. Bush learned of the three deaths he reportedly stressed the importance of treating their dead bodies “in a humane and culturally sensitive manner.” It is in the face of contradictions such as these that many commentators have seen Guantánamo Bay as an iconic example of that paradoxical space which Giorgio Agamben describes as “the state of exception” (405).

So, too, does Camp Omega prove to be an “exceptional” place, much in the same way that Gregory describes. The difference the digital narrative creates lies in its complete lack of mercy—it is the ideology of torture as an interrogation method brought to an extreme—a dark warning, perhaps, of how sites like Guantanamo Bay can easily evolve, such that even children like Chico, barely a teenager, are tortured without the veneer of possibility that they might hold any valuable information. Although Paz does not otherwise factor heavily into The Phantom Pain, and the brief scenes in which she appears are missable should the player opt not to complete the “Wandering Soldier Missions,” she is the central focus of Ground Zeroes, perhaps even more important than Chico to the narrative and to increasing Snake’s overall trauma. While Ground Zeroes stands on its own as a short piece, it also contains direct ties to the opening events of The Phantom Pain and serves as a prologue to the main game.7 During the events of Ground Zeroes, Paz is no older than perhaps her early twenties.8 However, she appears much younger than that in both Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. Her diminutive size and the higher pitch of her voice add to her vulnerability and to the overall sense of her having been a victim. In the game’s overall mythology, she functions in the nebulous space of a triple agent. Whereas Miller is hostile toward Paz from the start of the mission, and especially so in the game’s closing scenes, Snake’s attitude toward her is more ambivalent. He affirms the importance of finding and releasing her from enemy hands, but whether that is born merely out of expediency or also out of him caring about her physical fate proves ambiguous. Paz’s capture and removal to Camp Omega by the XOF parallels extraordinary rendition and the idea that, when she is deemed a threat, she is simply made to disappear, subjected both to interrogation and torture as part of that process. David Weissbrodt and Amy Bergquist describe the extraordinary rendition program and how it has changed since 9/11 in this way: “The strategy of extraordinary rendition usually involves a person who is not formally charged with any crime by the

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country conducting the abduction. Instead, the person is seized abroad and transported to a third country” (125). Paz clearly represents those who have been held in Guantanamo Bay or similar sites. These authors go on to state that “extraordinary rendition is a hybrid human rights violation, combining elements of arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, forcible transfer, torture, denial of access to consular officials, and denial of impartial tribunals” (127). In the case of Paz, the XOF certainly has reason to be suspicious of her motivations, much as Snake does. However, the idea that the XOF deliberately takes her to Camp Omega—a facility under US authority albeit outside US law, proves an intriguing tie to the extraordinary rendition program. Mark Murray provides a clear and overarching definition of extraordinary rendition: Rendition is defined simply as any time a fugitive is surrendered by one country and given to another. It should not to be confused with extradition, which is a subset of rendition characterized by a legal process and considered to be the official vehicle to transfer suspects in custody between foreign governments. Extraordinary rendition, or irregular rendition, is a policy where individuals known to be members or affiliates of terrorist organizations are seized and covertly transferred to a third country detention facility for debriefing. The process is extrajudicial, done in secret, and typically not carried out exclusively by US personnel. Targeted individuals are often seized by local authorities in a particular country at the behest of—or based on the intelligence from—personnel from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) (17).

He further posits, “In theory, extraordinary rendition is not overly controversial, but US management and execution of the policy has created strong opposition from human rights groups” (18). That Paz is diminutive in size, looks considerably younger than her early twenties, speaks in a high vocal register, and is a blue-eyed blond all call into sharp relief, by virtue of the difference, the rendition program’s capture of a nearly opposite demographic: Muslim men. This serves Kojima’s narrative point and his exploration of modern history—the player likely feels outrage over what has happened to Paz at Camp Omega but is also forced to consider whether he or she would feel the same if the appearance of the prisoner at this Guantanamo Bay surrogate was more like a “typical” terrorist.

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Ground Zeroes does not directly depict the torture of Paz, instead relaying it to the player embodying Snake via Chico’s cassette tape and then via its aftermath, when Snake finally finds Paz’s cell. Interestingly, the game avoids the player’s becoming involved in a direct confrontation with Paz’s torturers. Clearly, the implication is that they are among the many troops patrolling Camp Omega, but which ones specifically participated in her torture—which is heavily implied to have included gang raping her—are never singled out. The player, therefore, is unable to avenge Paz by choosing to kill her torturers. Jennifer Webb-Murphy and her co-authors explore the incidence of PTSD among military personnel assigned to Guantanamo Bay and note the following: Those who were at JTF-GTMO9 for more time scored significantly higher on measures of perceived stress, depression, and PTSD. Differences in scores on measures of resilience and alcohol abuse were not statistically significant. These findings suggested that the amount of time spent at JTFGTMO was positively associated with stress, presumed depression, and PTSD. As such, additional resources to deal with the numerous stressors associated with the JTF-GTMO deployments should be considered (503).

While Metal Gear Solid V explores trauma and PTSD across a number of forms and causes, it remains distinctly silent when it comes to the identity and fate of Paz’s torturers. Indeed, it is only Skull Face, whom Snake kills in The Phantom Pain, who expressly and explicitly plays a role in her detention although given his high rank within the XOF at that time, it would be doubtful that Skull Face himself would have directly participated in her torture. Webb-Murphy’s conclusions that the Guantanamo Bay personnel experience high incidents of PTSD circle back to the Militaires Sans Frontieres/The Diamond Dog’s philosophy that soldiers are always the subjects of exploitation. However, the narrative does not excuse this possibility of exploitation when the extent of Paz’s ordeal and suffering come into focus. When Snake finds Paz’s cell, she is bloodied and beaten, and the player is left to infer what has happened to her. Given the sounds heard on Chico’s cassette tape, complete with Paz’s screams and pleas, the narrative ­ implies rape, psychological torture, and physical torture. Tellingly, Snake’s pity for her broken state causes him to overlook what turns out to be the enemy’s trap. Her prisoner’s orange jumpsuit is saturated with blood, especially around her stomach, but he does not check her for

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wounds. Granted, it could be asserted that Snake does not have time to do this given the risk of encountering enemy XOF soldiers. Yet Snake is otherwise cautious and deliberate, so the omission of a more thorough check of Paz holds more weight here. Once Snake brings her back to the escape helicopter, Chico lifts up her prison shirt to determine why it is saturated with blood and discovers a crude, ragged, V-shaped incision across her stomach. Snake, realizing that the XOF has implanted a bomb inside of Paz, orders the onboard medic to cut into Paz without anesthetic—there is no time for medication. The resulting scene, which lasts for more than two minutes, unflinchingly depicts both the opening of her wound, and then the medic rummaging around inside of Paz’s body cavity while Snake and Chico attempt to hold in her guts and viscera. She screams in terrible agony, and the player is left, as is Chico, in the position of witnessing an atrocity. This particular scene is not actively playable but is presented as a cut scene. Although it might be argued that this denies player agency, it serves to trap the player in that chopper alongside the others, frozen in place by the barbarity. The particular image of Paz’s wound proves striking. It is terribly reminiscent of a crude C-section incision, underscoring that although her name implies peace—it is a pseudonym she had adopted to assert her view of the importance of world peace—through both her actions and those of others, she has only managed to bring suffering into the world. Her ideals, once lofty and selfless with an origin in the idealistic hope that global peace could be made a reality, result in her being cut open without anesthetic in a helicopter and men rooting around inside of her body for a bomb. The bodily violation of Paz occurs as she once again finds herself restrained and tormented. As the helicopter nears the base, the attack on it has already begun. In that moment of chaos, Paz awakens suddenly, having been unconscious since the rescue, and declares that a second bomb is still inside her. After Miller and a few other soldiers are able to escape the base by climbing into the helicopter, Paz sacrifices herself to save them by jumping out of the helicopter to her death. However, even that last selfless act, which asserts both her allegiance to Snake and her desire to protect him, is not allowed to simply exist without violent consequence to others. As her body detonates, the shockwave from the explosion causes Snake’s helicopter to go down, thus setting up the scenario by which he ends up in a coma for nine years.

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The unflinching nature of the content in the concluding scenes of Ground Zeroes is not without controversy. Lucy O’Brien argues the following in her critique of the final sequence with Paz: While I do appreciate these ambitions—particularly because the series has been known to veer into cartoonish territory—I found its ending, which features unusually provocative cruelty, to be awkwardly handled. I suspect Kojima was going for “heartbreaking,” but the final blow (and I really found no issue until then) felt unearned; a “look what we dared to do!” statement shoehorned in for shock value and very little else (n.p.).

Although O’Brien is correct that the cruelty is graphic, her reaction to it, while completely natural given the level of gore and violence, fails to take into consideration the larger narrative implications of its presence. Certainly, Paz’s ordeal is horrifying, and the game focuses on the event without flinching from even its worst moments, when other games or even films or television shows might have panned the camera away. The events are specifically fictional, but they are not without their real-world counterparts. Children are used across the globe as suicide bombers and have been since the technology became possible. John Sawicki discusses why women and children may be used as suicide bombers: The use of women and children fits into this schema because both groups are privileged noncombatants, protected universally under the Geneva Accords as well as several other international treaties. More importantly, almost every society has a revulsion to harming these two classes of human beings. Therefore, being able to employ women and children—who serve willingly or unwillingly—as human bombs can yield enormous tactical advantages along with the shock value. Compared to a man wired with explosives, women and children are likely to be able to approach a target more easily, evade scrutiny and, in general, catch the target with its guard lowered (40).

Sawicki’s thoughts coincide with Snake’s own actions in Ground Zeroes, when he decides to evacuate the injured Paz to base rather than first thoroughly investigating to ensure his ability to rescue her was not part of the XOF’s larger plot. An event that occurred in Damascus, Syria, in December of 2016 renders the events concerning Paz in an even more disturbing light. A young Syrian girl, who multiple reports claim was perhaps as young as seven years old and no more than nine, detonated

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a bomb on her person after she entered a local police station. She was the only one killed. One could not reasonably argue that a child of this age acted voluntarily or with any sort of understanding as to cause or outcome. She was most likely compelled to perform this action. Although Paz is much older than the Syrian child, she has nonetheless been denied bodily agency save for in her final moments, yet even then, it is only a partial choice—the bomb inside of her detonates, eradicating both her life and any true sense of choice. Ground Zeroes concludes with no resolution for Camp Omega, paralleling Guantanamo Bay’s still operational state. Prisoners might come and go, some more or less broken, but the facility remains. Dale Sprusansky argues of the current state of Guantanamo Bay as a prison site and the history of how it reached this point: The Marines who built Guantanamo were under the impression that the site would be used primarily for military commissions, [Dr. Karen] Greenberg noted. Several weeks later, when no one seemed to care that a courthouse had not been built, the base’s commander realized that this was not a priority. Though the prospect of military commissions has long been used to justify Gitmo’s existence, Greenberg noted that only 10 of the roughly 780 men incarcerated there have been charged. Of those, only two have been successfully convicted. The government has all but given up on charging additional detainees, she said (50).

The complexity builds because those who might not have been guilty of terrorism but faced and continue to face detention with no charges might now be radicalized and dangerous, whereas they originally were not. Chad Lennon explains: Shutting down Guantanamo may serve a purpose; however, closing the facility by releasing detainees is a decision that may cost American lives. Many of the detainees are held in Guantanamo on very serious allegations, or because they were caught fighting US forces abroad. Sending the detainees to prisons in other countries may be beneficial, but the countries must have adequate facilities to hold them. Those countries must support America’s fight to end terrorism. Releasing a detainee to a country suspected of aiding a terrorist organization is the equivalent of arming a detainee and letting him walk out of prison to immediately engage in combat against the U.S. (1039)

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This comprises a set of opinions that underscores the difficulty inherent in shutting down the facility, even after President Barack Obama committed to that action, and reifies the fate of Chico and Paz. If they had not died in the escape attempt, the narrative considers, then perhaps they would have been driven by retaliation, fury, and anger to exact revenge. The Phantom Pain moves to a broader narrative landscape than Ground Zeroes to consider not only the USA’s actions in the Middle East since 9/11 but also how outside presences have shaped much of that region for far longer. Additionally, the game’s latter missions take place in the Angola–Zaire border region, a contested area, allowing the story to also explore the plight of child soldiers and the influence of colonizers in Africa. Peter Mantello assesses America’s current wars in the Middle East in this way: For instance, while the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq succeeded at imposing selective regime change, they were arguably political and military fiascos with neither war bringing peace, prosperity, or even a modicum of security to either country. On the contrary, as a result of these US-led wars, the people of both nations are far worse off than under previous authoritarian rule. Yet even though the US military has officially pulled out of Iraq and significantly downsized its presence in Afghanistan, for-profit US security and security-related construction firms such as KBR and Haliburton are still reaping huge profits (486).

The Phantom Pain opts to explore a slightly different set of historical realities—a Russian-controlled Afghanistan—that in some ways may arguably allow it to comment, insightfully and pitilessly, on these selfsame realities. Adam Chapman notes that “simply, a daunting list of referential objects must generally be created to maintain the fictive world of the realist simulation” (64). This proves exceptionally useful in considering how a game like Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain utilizes space, place, landscape, visuals, and peripheral information to augment the narrative. The cassette tapes are inherently important to the story in this regard. There are two primary categories, one adding to a sense of provenance, and the other to the narrative’s sense of deeper historical reach. The first category is a collection of audiocassettes featuring music hits from the 1980s—Snake appears to be a fan of that decade’s music—and the player can therefore collect these tapes throughout the game. The second category contains, as is mentioned above, material

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inherent to appreciating the game’s complex internal mythology and also its interactions with actual history, such as with the game’s primary setting in the 1980s Soviet-held Afghanistan. The Phantom Pain explores real-world war zones in a manner distinct from that in which many typical military shooters might. Peter Mantello notes: More importantly, as a cultural text and procedural metaphor, the MS10 video game allowed individuals to come to terms with the reality of a war without spatial or temporal boundaries as well as the moral and ethical ambiguities of covert war (Mantello 2013). In the same manner, the hyperrealist MS game permitted players to leverage the chaos and unpredictability of a War on Terror by internalizing the precise and controlled logic and stable world of computer game play (Hoglund 2008) (494).

The Phantom Pain breaks with an expected pattern through its exploration of these very same ambiguities. Added to that is a narrative remaining to its close marked by its unpredictability. The player never knows for certain whether he or she will be facing real-world horrors, such as child soldiers, or the absurdity of using cardboard boxes as an effective means of stealth.11 The incongruous relationship in the narrative between the outlandish and the somber does not detract from the seriousness of the issues, including PTSD, explored in it. Instead, the moments of the bizarre or outlandish provide perhaps a bit of respite from the weightier components of the story.12 The Phantom Pain’s setting, a melding of real-world history and fictional narrative, allows for an exploration of America’s current wars in the Middle East from the vantage point of an earlier historical setting. Historical and ahistorical fuse in The Phantom Pain to present the concept of the never-ending war13 through the player’s exploration of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Matthew Thomas Payne posits, “If war is culture, as Mirzoeff claims, and modern war is visual culture, then postmodern war is simulational culture” (Military Video Games 72). This takes on resonances from the use of drones to strike targets, to the military’s own use of video games as training simulators for soldiers, to video games themselves as storytelling vehicles through issues related to war, with each iteration problematizing the idea of war as “simulation.” Certainly, American media offers both fictional and non-fictional representations of war. However, war itself now exists as both real—boots on

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the ground—and simulational—soldiers using drones or computers to hit targets in their stead. This leads to a gap, a form of loss, in which the experience of war either becomes filtered through a lens—whether a fictional or documentary lens—or filtered through technology. Yet trauma is created and remains in that gap. The game’s title, The Phantom Pain, not only explores the idea of someone feeling the sensation of a lost limb but also references the lingering fallout of 9/11, terrorist attacks around the globe, and the wars and turmoil in the Middle East. Even when such events are not directly present or are muted by time, the sense of lingering trauma remains. Adam Chapman notes of the intersection between history and digital storytelling, “The rejection of popular history is often not only based on the idea of the primacy of the written word but also the sole primacy of the academic word” (8). He further provides a compelling and useful set of parameters from which one can then consider the intersection of historicity and fictive space. He argues: When we speak of a realist simulation, we do not refer to the game’s historical accuracy. Some games that use realist simulation styles, such as Assassin’s Creed, also contain fantasy elements. Furthermore, in 2002 the best example of the realist style in a historical FPS [first-person shooter] would probably have been Medal of Honor: Frontline, a game whose graphical achievements have been far surpassed in the time since. Nevertheless, these games are still realist because of the way in which they represent the past and the general claims that this involves. Thus, when we talk of a realist simulation, we are referring to its stylistic approach to representation rather than evaluating its historical content (61).

Indeed, much of what happens in the main plotlines of The Phantom Pain borders on the fantastical, if not the highly improbable. Yet despite that the game’s fictive space demands careful consideration and analysis as a positing of what might be historically possible and an interrogation of events that actually occurred. The titles of each of the games in the Metal Gear Solid V series warrant closer inspection as they relate to issues of history and the ­ ­fictional exploration of history. Certainly, post-9/11, most players would immediately associate Ground Zeroes with “Ground Zero” as a referent to the World Trade Center site. Yet the game title specifically uses the plural (zeroes) as opposed to the singular, and that choice invites consideration of the broader idea of what a “ground zero” might mean

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post-9/11. Within the narrative itself, Snake, Miller, Paz, and Chico each face their own personal manifestation of a ground zero, defined here to be a moment of inconceivable trauma and a point at which, in moving forward, nothing will be complete as it once was. Snake manages to save both Paz and Chico, at least at first, but he cannot rescue them in time to spare them from torture. He then gets them to safety only to lose them almost immediately thereafter and to also witness the destruction of Mother Base and the end of the Militaires Sans Frontieres before his injuries place him in a coma. Miller, too, witnesses the death of his dream of Mother Base, yet his rage toward Paz even before that highlights a focal point in The Phantom Pain: Miller’s increasing anger and paranoia. Paz’s and Chico’s bodies themselves serve as ground zero sites, the loci of violence and atrocity. Expanding away from the narrative to a real-world historical context, Ground Zeroes reminds that even though Americans tend to think of ground zero as rooted in a particular geographical place, that interpretation is only one limited iteration. Every soldier who has fought in wars since 9/11 faces his or her own ground zero—that place of trauma or experience that transforms identity—as have civilians and victims of terrorist attacks. All other direct and peripheral victims also face their own personal ground zeroes in ways transcending the strict association of 9/11 with the national identity of being American. Considering the use of The Phantom Pain as a title, deep resonance exists tying the American wars in the Middle East and their intersection with PTSD in returning soldiers, furthering the idea of ground zero as a designation of personal trauma.14 The game’s title is evocative of Operation Phantom Fury, described as “the Second Battle of Fallujah, also known as Operation Al Fajr and Operation Phantom Fury. The battle spanned Nov. 7 to Dec. 24 in 2004, and is considered the bloodiest of the Iraq War” (Lamothe n.p.). A report on the battle prepared by the Department of Naval Science concludes, “While keeping in mind the Battle of Fallujah as a milestone in the evolution of warfare, the Marines, Sailors, Soldiers, and Airmen need the support of American people to accomplish their mission regardless of different points of view on the war in Iraq. Troops do not just want to go home, they want to go home with the feeling that they have done something good for the world” (Chang 37). The battle itself, by all accounts, was brutal and made more so in the killing of twenty-four civilians by a group of marines. Analyses on all sides of this event—from those who believe that the marines should

44  A.M. Green

have been convicted of murder,15 to those who believe that this was collateral damage resulting from the idea of the “fog of war”—demonstrate the complexity of the soldiers’ lived experiences in intense combat zones, such as Iraq at the time of Phantom Fury. The incident with the civilians followed the detonation of a roadside bomb by insurgent fighters, an attack that killed one of the marines in the convoy and seriously wounded another. William Langewiesche provides an unflinching account of the immediate aftermath of the explosion: The morphine can only have been meant for Crossan, because Guzman was not so badly hurt, and Terrazas was already beyond such needs. It is a requirement of understanding the events in Haditha—and the circumstances of this war—not to shy away from the physical realities here, or to soften the scene in the interest of politics or taste. Terrazas was torn in half. His bottom half remained under the steering wheel. His top half was blown into the road, where he landed spilling his entrails and organs. He probably did not suffer, at least. He must have lost consciousness instantly and have died soon after hitting the ground. He had a hole in his chin. His eyes were rolled back. He did not look peaceful at all. He looked bloody and grotesque (n.p.).

The recollections provide an account both unflinching and unnerving and underscore that witnessing such an event would leave “phantom pain.” Certainly, no story, regardless of format, can ever fully encompass the suffering and trauma of this magnitude. However, fictional considerations of historical realities serve to open those events to broader audiences, especially in cases like Metal Gear Solid V, wherein the player becomes rooted in the experiences of Snake, a man who has lived most of his life under siege and whose body has accumulated the outward physical reminders, through scars and a lost limb, of that reality. Although The Phantom Pain engages directly with PTSD, it is not the first game in the series to do so. Sharon Tettegah and David Wenhao note that “although the Max Payne and Metal Gear Solid series were among the first games to take an adult look at issues involving PTSD, the theme is now an increasingly popular plot device in games that extend outside the shooter genre” (19). These authors then consider how the Metal Gear Solid series as a whole, and not just The Phantom Pain, has explored the issue of PTSD and conclude that the following thematic elements are consistently present: “how characters use trauma

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to manufacture identity; how issues of PTSD interfere with personal relationships; how trauma is represented via nightmares; how self-medication is used as a coping mechanism; how PTSD is personified through villains; and how issues of trauma serve as catalysts for gunplay” (22). The game’s title is a signal that such issues will be explored in this game: How characters deal with phantoms of their past, such as the Diamond Dogs’ continuing problems with Cipher, and that even as they move forward, they are all very much rooted in the past. The game’s intersection with lived trauma deepens the weight of its narrative. Brendan Keogh considers the many military shooter-style games that dehumanize enemies and by doing so, provide players with tacit permission to kill their enemies without remorse, noting, “There are countless examples of how videogames do this. Be it through repeated enemy models, balaclavas to hide faces, a lack of names, or a justification of the enemies as pure evil. In the Call of Duty games, moving the crosshair over any allied NPC16 will tell the player what that NPC’s name is, humanising them. No such name appears for each enemy soldier gunned down without a second thought” (Kindle locations 416–419). Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is similar in that it does not provide any further details about enemies encountered by the player, but this is arguably due to the game’s shorter scope, and overall, the player is still encouraged not to slaughter enemy guards. In The Phantom Pain, players are able to learn about enemies, and these troops often have specific language skills, combat skills, and the like, which make them far more valuable recruited to Diamond Dogs than killed. Once recruited to Mother Base, via the game’s quirky Fulton balloon enemy extraction system, they each have individualized code names.17 While American modern news coverage of war tends to focus on indistinct violence—drone strikes, embedded troops reporting from danger zones that are depicted as largely bloodless—the reality is far more gruesome. Carrie Andersen argues: Black Ops II constitutes a powerful example of the outward bleeding of drones from the world of Brennan’s CIA and the armed forces’ bases. One of many commercially successful games in the Call of Duty series, which sold over 100 million copies before the release of Black Ops II, the game yielded over $1 billion in sales over the first fifteen days following its release (Richmond 2011; Agnello 2012). Although these numbers do not indicate how many individuals have played the game or the single-player drone-based campaign—many players solely participate in multiplayer

46  A.M. Green melees over the internet—they do suggest that the game is widely distributed and played. Whatever ideologies and anxieties Black Ops II reveals about drones and human soldiers are reaching a vast and significant audience of players, making this case study a compelling means of exploring the transitional status of the US soldier (362).

Andersen contends with the idea of drone warfare as one that can seem to be without direct and bloody consequence—the drone is guided, and the drone does the killing or surveillance. The Phantom Pain, by providing names for all of the player’s Diamond Dog recruits, eschews making them all faceless and nameless, interchangeable in life as well as death. It also conducts all of its missions with a sense of weight and consequence. Later in the game, the player can create forward operating bases, allowing Diamond Dog recruits to go on missions or defend Mother Base against other players. However, these are direct combat situations, not drone strikes, and if Diamond Dogs die in battle, the player receives a report detailing the casualties. Although The Phantom Pain takes place primarily in Afghanistan, the action shifts to Africa during the latter part of the game. Setting a portion of The Phantom Pain in the Angola–Zaire border region allows the narrative to continue to consider outside influences—specifically outsider, white colonizing interests—first in the Afghanistan of the 1980s under Soviet interference, which serves as a symbolic representation of America’s presence there today, and then on the Angola–Zaire border, which was subject to both its own civil wars and its Soviet influence in the 1980s and is now a source of renewed interest for the USA. Manuel Ennes Ferreira notes of modern-day American interests in Angola: The U.S. in particular has recently expressed a peculiar interest in Angola, for two main reasons. First, in distinction to the troublesome Middle East, Angola is a convenient alternative source for medium and long-run oil supplies. Second, the notion that Angola could potentially fill a useful role as an African regional peacemaker sounds good to the American administration. But potential vested economic interests require actual political stability. It would therefore be interesting to know to what degree, if any, UNITA18’s military defeat was linked to US intelligence or other support, or was tied in any way to the US desire to “resolve” annoying conflicts in the context of its post-September 1, 2001 anti-terrorism campaign (28).

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The theme of outside incursions, and their ramifications on the existing populations, resonates during the Angola–Zaire missions in the game. In the Afghanistan missions, civilians are not usually a major component of the action, as Snake’s targets tend to be strictly military, although the missions sometimes involve rescuing civilian prisoners. The Angola–Zaire missions, however, center on Snake’s recovering a group of child soldiers and attempting to rehabilitate them on Mother Base. Manuel Ennes Ferreira explores the history of Angola, including its civil strife, over a number of decades from the 1960s to the early 2000s. He notes, “What is the link between civil war and development in this period of time in Angola? Impressive resources were taken from the budget to finance the war: officially, more than a quarter in the second half of the 1970s and sometimes more than 40% in the 1980s” (26). When Snake initially finds the child soldiers, imprisoned and considered expendable by their former commanders, one of the children attempts to place diamonds in Snake’s hands through the bars. The actions are clear: The child attempts to pay for his life and the lives of the others. Civil war and incursions by colonizers throughout Africa and across hundreds of years of history reify what happens during this sequence of The Phantom Pain: Resources like diamonds are fetishized by outsiders and warlords alike and are often taken at will. Metal Gear Solid V expands on and adds a fictive layer to history, but never with an eye toward disrespect of its weighty explorations, including the war on terror, sites like Guantanamo Bay, and the recruitment of children into armies or other revolutionary causes. Instead, the game’s narrative dovetails with and then expands on the themes of these histories by revealing what is usually hidden—torture, the bloody realities of combat, the long-standing outside incursions, and influence in areas of Africa and the Middle East—and contends with them thoughtfully. This chapter continues examining the game’s intersections with history, but shifts the focal point to how PTSD is handled in Metal Gear Solid V alongside its existence as a diagnosis in the real world.

Notes

1. Indeed, they are not the only prisoners at the camp. The player embodying Snake finds Chico in a complex of outdoor prison cages wherein other hooded prisoners are also being kept. It is unclear if these prisoners are under American or XOF jurisdiction.

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2.  Technically, it would be possible for the player to rescue Paz first, although that would arguably be a more likely outcome for a player who has completed the game before. The narrative directs the player toward Chico first, and because Paz is being kept in a secret location, one that is narrowed after Chico’s rescue, it is less likely that the player would get to Paz first. If Paz is rescued first, the narrative loses some of the impact brought about by the player finding Chico and listening to his audiocassette recording of her being brutally tortured. The narrative tension of needing to get to Paz is eliminated if she is rescued first. 3.  Paz has an especially complicated backstory that finds resolution in Ground Zeroes. She had initially appeared to work for the XOF, who planted her as a double agent within the Militaires Sans Frontieres. The XOF come to question her loyalty, so they capture her and begin to interrogate her at Camp Omega. Snake affects a rescue of Chico and Paz and is particularly concerned that if the XOF successfully interrogate Paz, she will reveal information about the Militaires Sans Frontieres to their enemy. 4. The “Background” is an in-game encyclopedia describing the major characters. 5.  Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (The Sandinista National Liberation Front). 6. There is some implication that Paz may have been raped in front of Chico to try to compel the young man to provide them with information. 7. Ground Zeroes is a very short game. It involves two specific rescue missions wherein Snake is needed to extract both Chico and Paz from a US military base where they are being tortured and held captive by the XOF. While it is technically possible to complete the game in perhaps twenty to thirty minutes, if the player knows or correctly guesses exactly where both are being held on the base, a more realistic and average playtime for the main story is approximately two hours. There are a few additional side ops available after the completion of the main game. Ground Zeroes is not narrative heavy, save for its specific and brutal resolution of Paz’s and Chico’s story lines. Its events take place in 1975 in Cuba, and the game ends with the destruction of the Militaires Sans Frontieres’ base of operations. 8. One of Paz’s diaries in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker makes mention of a character named Strangelove being more than ten years Paz’s senior. Strangelove is supposedly in her thirties around this time. 9. Joint Task Force Guantanamo. 10. Military shooter. 11. The Metal Gear Solid games have a running in-joke in which the player can utilize a series of cardboard boxes, which can be upgraded to more

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powerful forms, as a means of stealth. In these cases, enemy soldiers do not consistently find a moving cardboard box across the landscape to be a particular point of concern. 12. Additionally, as was explored in the introductory chapter of this book, Kojima’s storytelling overall has been marked by a balance of the grotesque and the odd. 13. This concept of the “never-ending war” is grounded within the game series’s own extensive mythology. For the Militaires Sans Frontiers, and then the Diamond Dogs, to continue to exist, there must necessarily be war. Yet war not only becomes tedious but it also destroys and rends both flesh and mind. The game’s exploration of the post-9/11 world reminds the player that the Middle East—more generally and Afghanistan in this case in particular—has always been a place of outside interference. The players have changed, but the overarching condition remains the same. 14. The title’s evocation of the concept of phantom limb pain is considered in this chapter as a component of that chapter’s consideration of PTSD and trauma. 15. Of the eight Marines who faced charges, only one was convicted and that was on the lesser charge of dereliction of duty. 16. Non-player character. 17. The player does not assign these; the game assigns them at random. 18. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

CHAPTER 4

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Fiction and Reality: Anguish and Agony

Abstract  This chapter considers the diagnosis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder first as it applies to returning military personnel past and pre­ sent. The American military, specifically, began by discounting the diagnosis as nothing more than cowardice, only to move in recent years to not only acknowledge the reality of this condition, but to actively attempt to get help to those who are suffering from it. Challenges emerge when the military’s mentality of being strong—physically and mentally—clashes with the notion of soldiers feeling empowered to seek out help. From here, the chapter considers how Metal Gear Solid V presents a complex vision of trauma and its lasting effects, one which avoids stereotyping all forms of trauma in the same way. Further still, Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain both illustrate that one does not simply and suddenly recover from trauma and that its lasting effects linger, perhaps for a lifetime. Keywords  PTSD · Trauma · Snake Although Metal Gear Solid V focuses on moments of lived trauma, the majority of characters in the story enter the narrative already damaged, leaving the player to infer the horrors these characters have endured. Their traumas result in both psychological scarring and physical wounds, especially missing limbs. Indeed, the title of the game, “The Phantom Pain,” refers at once to the real phenomenon experienced by © The Author(s) 2017 A.M. Green, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62749-6_4

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those who have lost a limb yet still feel its presence and, perhaps to an even stronger degree, to PTSD and the mental scars that are not easily healed. Although Snake remains the focal point of the game and the player embodies no one else but him over the game’s many hours of play, the player witnesses both in him and through his experiences how PTSD manifests in many complex ways. PTSD, in the larger context of history, has not been understood as a phenomenon, especially in returning military personnel, or even recognized as a valid form of psychological trauma until relatively recently. Ilona Meagher, in tracking the history of PTSD as a diagnosis, relates the following event in General George Patton’s history as a military leader, one which reflects a dangerous attitude that PTSD is simply cowardice: “Later that evening Patton grunted in his diary, ‘Companies should deal with such men, and if they shirk their duty, they should be tried and shot.’ Two days later, the general blasted off a memo to 7th Army commanders directing that, ‘Those who are not willing to fight will be tried by court-martial for cowardice in the face of the enemy’” (12). Meagher continues, “However, post-traumatic reactions were not exclusively reserved for those who fought in battle. Having survived the Great Fire of London in 1666, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary the frightened, angry, and disturbed moods that haunted him for the next several months, even though he had been uninjured in the fire and his house undamaged” (13). Meagher’s comments underscore why it is critical that the game refrains from delving into only one form of experience with PTSD as it also uncovers the complexities of defining heroism. Indeed, the game explores trauma and PTSD as they exist across a wide range of characters, both male and female, and across a wide range of ages, including its examination of trauma in child soldiers. Finally, Meagher notes: As a result of all this, in 2004, the Army and Marines launched Operational Stress Control, embedding mental health personnel within deployed combat divisions. Greg Gordon, a spokesman for the Marine’s Personal and Family Readiness Division, explained to a Washington Post reporter at the time that, “Before, we had to ship them out of the war theater. Now [the mental health professionals] can provide help immediately.” As of April 2006, more than 230 mental health practitioners were treating frontline troops for the emotional (sadness, worry, fear), cognitive (disorientation, confusion, memory loss, inattention), and behavioral

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(aggression, suicidal) components of combat stress disorder. Mirroring the goals set forth in WWI, the overarching aim is to rapidly return the soldiers to duty. The hope is that early treatment will also reduce combat veteran’s long-term mental health problems and its associated costs (21).

Herein lies another contradiction in real-world policy that is also treated carefully, and with no easy conclusions, in the game: damage the soldier, but also make sure to heal him or her. The Phantom Pain posits that all world governments that maintain armies will inherently exploit the men and women in their service.1 The only solution presented—give soldiers agency over their lives, rather than use them as pawns—proves deliberately imperfect in the game’s narrative. The war without end never exists as an ideal, but it provides structure, consistency, and camaraderie to the members of the Diamond Dogs. Within the fictive scope of the game, the care of the Diamond Dogs as voluntary recruits of this private army comes to the forefront. The leadership of the Diamond Dogs, pointedly, cares for the soldiers in its fictional setting of 1984 better than the American government does in the real world, even up until relatively recently, as revealed by the spate of scandals involving substandard and appalling care throughout the Veterans Health Administration system. As the player develops Mother Base, the Diamond Dogs’ base of operations in the waters near the Seychelles Islands, he or she discovers that one of the specific conditions that is watched for and then treated in the medical wing is PTSD. The diagnosis and care of soldiers experiencing PTSD in the real world have only relatively recently undergone significant changes designed to provide proper treatment. Sarah Hautzinger and Jean Scandlyn note that as of 2008, “the army also initiated a campaign to change army culture in an effort to ‘Pull the Stigma Down’ so that soldiers would seek help for combat-related mental health issues. This effort has two fronts: transforming ‘Army Strong’ to include seeking help from mental health professionals and reinforcing the medicalization of PTSD to reduce its stigma” (57). These authors also note: Army personnel who design these programs clearly recognize the conflicting symbols of Army Strong and invulnerability on the one hand, and PTSD and weak victims on the other. In response, a none-too-subtle effort has been made to extend the core metaphor of army strength to those seeking help. The clearest examples are straightforward. The Real Warriors

54  A.M. Green campaign slogan reads “Real Warriors, Real Battles, Real Strength,” and their website runs the headline “Reaching out is a sign of strength” (58).

Identification of the symptoms of PTSD proves even more ephemeral— a literal phantom—given that no one particular type of combat or war experience is guaranteed to result in long-term psychological distress. As Sebastian Junger notes: It seems intuitively obvious that combat is connected to psychological trauma, but the relationship is a complicated one. Many soldiers go through horrific experiences but fare better than others who experienced danger only briefly, or not at all. Unmanned-drone pilots, for instance— who watch their missiles kill human beings by remote camera—have been calculated as having the same PTSD rates as pilots who fly actual combat missions in war zones, according to a 2013 analysis published in the Medical Surveillance Monthly Report (n.p.).

The Phantom Pain delves into the contradiction of the strong warrior needing to seek help for PTSD through most of its primary characters. They are all, to a person, courageous, physically strong, considered, and competent. Yet they are also marked by deep psychological wounds, negating the idea, perhaps more especially resonant in popular culture, that the hero or protagonist can simply shrug off trauma, as if it mattered little. The game does not condescend its weighty material by implying that there are easy solutions—indeed, the game does not end happily so much as it does end.2 One of the challenges any video game centered on war, soldiers, and combat faces lies in how those people and events find form within the digital narrative, especially when contending with characters who endure PTSD in ways that deepen conversations about the care of veterans, as opposed to cheapening their plight. As Matthew Thomas Payne notes: If gameplay matters for digital games generally, then it certainly matters in the case of military-themed video games. War games frequently engage and conspicuously elide some of the most challenging political issues of the day: the efficacy and moral status of using torture to extract intelligence or of drone-aided assassinations to disrupt terrorist networks; the questionable justness of preemptive war policies; and the existential horrors of collateral damage and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to name but a few (Military Video Games 2).

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Game developers may well find themselves in a position of choosing between a more realistic, weighty, and narrative-based game and one that may be punctuated here and there with story beats, while ultimately remaining more in the realm of an action game. Herein lies a point of special importance to not only this particular game but also video games more generally. The storytelling in video games certainly varies from game to game and, in the case of the war game genre, from title to title. Payne is correct to a certain extent in calling into question the importance of deeper storytelling in war games, especially those that feature real, modern tools of warfare, such as drone strikes. However, the Metal Gear series more generally and The Phantom Pain specifically do engage with these complexities bluntly and directly. The game handles these issues with a great deal of sensitivity, if not to the same degree of detail. For example, the game delves into the moral implications of warfare, especially for a paid army like the Diamond Dogs, yet this is not really the core of this narrative; although that material is treated with care, it simply is not the main focus. The concept of a war without end underscores that the Diamond Dogs exist because conflict rages across the globe, and therefore, their services are needed. The issue of the moral implications of the type of work Snake, Miller, and Ocelot accept for the Diamond Dogs manifests perhaps only briefly and directly when the Diamond Dogs are given a contract to kill a group of child soldiers who are essentially living a feral existence, without any adult supervision or care. Miller accepts the mission, but does so with the understanding that the Diamond Dogs will rescue rather than eliminate the children. To that end, the leadership of the Diamond Dogs, although vigilant about making a profit, exercises a high degree of ethical consideration. What is consistently and thoughtfully central to The Phantom Pain is the long-term fallout, on both civilians and soldiers alike, of warfare and violence. As the game reaches its concluding chapter, the fictive space, that is, the world of the Diamond Dogs, Snake, and the other primary characters, does not present the player with a definitive resolution to the story. Snake eventually defeats Skull Face, ending his immediate plans, but the threat of continuing conflict looms, and some degree of conflict around the globe—whether between nations or on a smaller scale—is necessary to allow the Diamond Dogs to maintain their community on Mother Base. Skull Face, a pawn of the elusive group Cipher, which has served as the game’s antagonistic force throughout its history, is only one of the

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Diamond Dogs’ enemies. Instead of providing resolution, the narrative simply draws the curtain on the immediate set of events of 1984, but it is understood that this reflects one small piece in a larger history of many of its primary characters. Similarly, the post-9/11 landscape in the real world continues to unfold, as wars and conflicts are ongoing, and thus no curtain can be drawn on 9/11, marking it as a closed event. The Phantom Pain’s narrative deftly handles its refusal to portray the traumas and subsequent responses in individuals with PTSD as taking one easily identified and simplified form. The narrative also eschews the implication that such injury can be easily healed, if healed at all. None of the characters in the narrative respond to trauma in the selfsame way, and all have had some degree of atrocity perpetrated on them for different reasons. For example, Kazuhira Miller3 is rescued by Snake after having been captured by the enemy and sustaining gruesome injuries as a result. The child soldiers, rescued by Snake toward the middle of the game’s main narrative, have fewer visible physical injuries, but prevalent and pervasive psychological ones. In addition to the game exploring the overall idea of wartime trauma, its story is very much a product of and commentary on America’s post9/11 wars in the Middle East and the lingering damage caused by those wars as well as by 9/11 itself. Aaron DeRosa notes that “rather than recovering lost memories or seeking mimetic repetition—two approaches privileged in contemporary trauma theory—we may be better served by producing new versions of the original” (608). This provides an interesting vantage point from which to consider the literature of trauma generally and post-9/11 works more specifically as they contend with these complex issues of self, culture, and history. The Phantom Pain seeks to pursue a narrative line of exploration that dovetails with what DeRosa addresses here, this idea of creating a “new version” of the original trauma. This becomes inherently conflated with other complexities of the post-9/11 narrative storyscape, which includes issues related to a fragmented self and the fragmentation of identity4 manifested in the game literally with a late narrative sleight of hand that calls into sharp relief the entirety of the time the player has spent embodying Snake. Jean Baudrillard writing soon after the events of 9/11 states, “Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent. We can no longer draw a demarcation line around it” (10). Baudrillard’s investigation into

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the heart of the nature of fear that people across the globe feel toward the idea of a “terrorist” is investigated in the game’s narrative by the persistent threat of outsiders destroying what Snake, as Boss, and the other Diamond Dogs have attempted to build with the new iteration of their base of operations: Mother Base. This base was erected in defiance of the destruction of their prior base, which had resulted in the deaths of many men and women in events that form the background of the game, but are only momentarily depicted in frightening flashbacks to the chaos of the base burning and its soldiers attempting to flee. The larger horror lies in the reality that Snake and the others were betrayed by one of their own, highlighting the idea that the concept of a “terrorist” is made all the more frightening when it cannot be readily predicted who might be a terrorist. Therefore, it becomes easier, perhaps, to brand large groups of people, wholesale, as potential terrorists so as to avoid the ambiguity of a formless threat. The Phantom Pain eventually reveals that one of the antagonists, a hopelessly selfserving coward named Huey Emmerich, fed intelligence to the Diamond Dogs’ enemies, allowing for the attack on the base. Emmerich fits the role of a terrorist with frightening clarity. In this case, he is depicted as a white male, so he is not racially the Other. However, this is perhaps what makes him so effective as an iteration of the terrorist concept. Baudrillard asks, “Might not any inoffensive person be a terrorist?” (20) to which the game’s narrative answers, simply and frighteningly, yes. The game proper finds Emmerich attempting to defect from the enemies with whom he sided nine years prior and return to the good graces of Snake and the Diamond Dogs, only to be discovered, once again, as a force of malice seeking the destruction of Mother Base and the Diamond Dogs, seemingly for no reason that he can articulate. Emmerich also uses his own young son as a test subject for piloting his Sahelanthropus project, killing the boy’s mother when she objects. Emmerich’s appearance is deliberately non-threatening. He is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a mechanical device of his own construction to enable him to move around. He frequently comes across as placating and groveling. Yet he is the proverbial snake in the grass, a persistent force of malice. At every narrative turn and during many of its missions, The Phantom Pain provides little for the player to look to as stable and stabilizing. Peter Mantello argues, “Certainly, the ‘military shooter’ (MS) video game offers itself as cathartic instrument to guard against the kind of traumatic immediacy America experienced as a result of 9/11 by allowing gamers to

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leverage the chaos and uncertainty of future threats through the coherent and stable world of algorithmic game play” (496). The Phantom Pain, while arguably containing the same overall mechanical stability indicative of all video games, refuses to provide the same level of stability in its narrative. Perhaps by maneuvering Snake through a known series of controls, with which the gamer gains proficiency over time, the narrative’s consideration of weightier matters finds fuller form. For example, Emmerich’s identity as a traitor and his murdering the mother of his child are more impactful when these narrative moments are at the forefront, as opposed to while the player is focused on learning mechanical controls. The Phantom Pain allows the player to become not just a witness to the suffering and pain of its main cast of characters but also a full participant in many of these episodes. Linda A. Jackson and Alexander I. Games note that “similar to what research has shown about the function of traditional play, the pretend context of video games may be real enough to make the accomplishment of goals matter, yet safe enough to practice controlling or modulating negative emotions in the service of these goals” (25). Certainly, the player is in no actual physical danger through the performance of the game’s various activities and quests while he or she embodies Snake. However, the game’s emotional resonance proves powerful as its narrative builds. In terms of the idea that games can be a “safe” place in which to perform actions or view actions that would otherwise cause trauma in the real world, this game specifically allows the player to become emotionally invested in the story and at the same time to negotiate the depictions of trauma in it. The Phantom Pain does not feature a cast of physically perfect or even young characters. All of the game’s major characters, including the antagonists Emmerich and Skull Face, have obvious physical impairments: Snake is missing an eye and his left arm from about the elbow down; the sniper Quiet is set on fire during the game’s opening sequence but survives her gruesome injuries5; Kazuhira Miller is missing an arm and a leg; Skull Face is drastically deformed; and Revolver Ocelot, while not physically impaired or injured, has been the subject of his own repeated brainwashing. In a very real sense, Ocelot exists in a space marked by the constant reordering and fragmentation of his own identity. The decision to present the player with a cast of characters who defy traditional standards of heroism, masculinity, or beauty follows in the tradition of a game like The Last of Us, which features Joel, a male protagonist in his forties by the time the main game starts. However,

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that being said, it is uncommon to find any depictions of disability, let alone numerous examples in one game. Yet any real discussion of trauma and PTSD must confront wounds, both visible and not. Video games sit in a unique position of not only enabling the visual depiction of such injuries but also immersing the player in the story as he or she embodies the character, rooting the player through perceptions or experiences in one particular character. In The Phantom Pain, the embodied character, Snake, carries horrific and visible injuries to his body. On top of the physical scars left by war and violence, a number of the game’s major and ancillary characters exhibit signs of PTSD, including most notably Miller, who becomes increasingly paranoid and aggressive, and the African child soldiers rescued later in the game, who try, but ultimately are unable, to adapt to life on Mother Base and away from war. The issue of the performance of war and violence in video games opens another compelling avenue of study as it relates to both the advantages and limitations of veterans utilizing these types of games as a means of working through, or coping with, PTSD. Marjorie Campbell and her fellow researchers, as part of a larger study looking at coping behaviors of soldiers with PTSD, conducted a study of fifty-three soldiers. Although the sample size was small, it is worth noting that fifty-five percent of respondents endorsed playing combat-based video games as a positive activity (1173). This research, as well as this section of this book, does not suggest that this is a curative approach or even altogether positive in a clinical sense. On the contrary, “it appears to reflect an addictive pattern of behavior that is associated with impairment” (Campbell et al. 1175). What is striking, when taken in tandem with this research and for the purposes of considering Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain as a war-themed video game that in many ways defies standard expectations of that genre, is that the main characters in the game, all of whom display signs of trauma, PTSD, or both, continue to participate in warfare to various extents. Although war and violence have taken from each of them, the game’s main characters seem to find no way to exist outside of that world, striving instead to find agency and autonomy within it.6 The very name of the character embodied by the player, Punished Venom Snake, informs the narrative’s complex relationship with violence and trauma.7 In the series of games, the protagonists (and sometimes antagonists) traditionally have some variation of “Snake” as their name. For example, there has been a Solid Snake and a Liquid Snake. In the present case, the three-part name (the others have been two parts)

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proves to be of particular interest. The “Venom” portion of the name is obvious: It speaks to danger and, in parts of the game’s narrative, the quest for revenge against the betrayals that caused Snake’s coma and the destruction of the previous Mother Base nine years prior. It also refers more obliquely to the idea that something which is venomous will tend to keep others at bay, whether or not the creature is inherently dangerous and aggressive. This highlights the relative isolation of the game’s main characters, especially Snake, and makes the tentative romantic connection between Snake and Quiet8 more poignant. Furthermore, even the most venomous and dangerous snakes tend to bite only when threatened, similar to the Diamond Dogs, who are not pursuing war merely to kill. The “Punished” prefix of the name tempers the idea of a venomous snake. While Snake is not brought low per se—he gains in strength as the player builds up Mother Base and upgrades his skills and equipment— the player is constantly reminded of the trauma that remains with Snake. Although their work specifically references Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Gustav Verhulsdonck and Marohang Limbu provide insights into Snake that prove cogent with regard to The Phantom Pain: The fact that Snake does not express pride in his heroism let alone pleasure in his violence does at least make the player consider the moral value of his violent acts. There is then a current of anti-heroism in Snake when he frames his own valiant acts in such a way that he considers himself ‘no hero… never was… I’m just an old killer… hired to do some wet work’ (Kenichiro and Kojima 2008). The player is subsequently implicated in this wet work to reinforce the notion that war driven by politics is ultimately immoral (262).

Moreover, Snake does not take pride in being a hero, even though some of his actions during the game, such as rescuing the child soldiers, certainly qualify as heroic. The “Backstory” option in Ground Zeroes enables the player to flip through a series of pages, always having a simple background illustration and text that fills in aspects of Snake’s personality as well as some of the overall history of the series. One of Snake’s quotes reads, “I was made to fight. I am a gun.” While Snake, either through specific plot points in the series or via the player’s own embodied choices, certainly can be, at times, simply a killer, his own sense of introspection undermines standard hero tropes in which a grizzled, injured older man seeks to carve out a sense of justice in an otherwise unfair world. For Snake, there is only fighting and death, and he never speaks

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of, or seems to envision, a life outside of the Diamond Dogs. Whether or not his specific actions and choices over those long years take on heroic resonance makes little difference in his overall contextualizing of his life. Irit Keynan asserts this of soldiers who become disillusioned with the divide between imagined heroism and the realities of war: Imprisoned by a myth, soldiers find the walls especially imposing when the war in which they participate is controversial. In such wars, one segment of the public regards soldiers as the nation’s saviors and expects of them heroism, determination, and a constant mobilization of all of their mental and physical resources, without the smallest expression of doubt. Another segment rejects the official, heroic image of the soldier, while often showing hostility toward individual soldiers, seeing them as enforcers of a policy that they repudiate (23).

Although Snake is no longer a soldier in any one nation’s army, he once was, as were all of the men and women who eventually gravitate to the sense of power and agency found with the Diamond Dogs. Snake creates a scenario wherein all of these standard rules of warfare may be successfully subverted via the Diamond Dogs’ social structure, wherein they are answerable only to themselves and to their own consciences. No one is forced into service as one of the Diamond Dogs, and, presumably, they are all free to leave at any time. This concept is reinforced through the player’s ability to dismiss Diamond Dogs through the game’s personnel interface. The game provides the player with brief, concise personality traits for the soldiers currently serving. Those who have the potential to be troublemakers are noted as well. For example, the player may learn that a particular Diamond Dog has a tendency to fight, thus dragging down morale and creating problems, such as infighting. What matters within the fictional world of the game is camaraderie and each individual soldier’s ability to both fit in with life as a Diamond Dog and to freely serve. Finally, The Phantom Pain as a title, expanding on the previous discussion of it as a marker of post-9/11 trauma, certainly refers to the idea of the lingering pain or presence felt by those who have lost limbs, sensations emanating from an absent limb. Finn Nortvedt and Gunn Engelsrud describe the concept this way: “Phantom pain can be defined as ‘pain referring to a missing part of the body or to the paralyzed part of the body after a total spinal lesion’” (Nortvedt 2006 p. 13). A century and a half ago, the American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell used the word

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“phantom” to label the experience of feeling or sensing a “missing” limb, which he encountered while attending to a multitude of amputees during the American civil war. He characterized this experience as an “unseen ghost of the lost part” (Mitchell 1871). Patients often describe their phantom pain as a burning, cramping, or itching sensation (Nikolajsen and Jensen 2006) (599). These authors further note that “roughly 60–80 percent of patients experience phantom pain after losing a limb or body part. There seems to be no correlation between its occurrence and the patient’s gender or age (Nikolajsen and Jensen 2006). The pain can last a lifetime. In a study of several thousand soldiers who had lost a limb, Sherman (1997) found that more than 70 percent continued to experience phantom pain as long as 25 years after the amputation” (600). In the case of The Phantom Pain, Snake’s lost arm is replaced with a bionic one, which allows him even intricate degrees of finger movement. The player can, to perhaps even absurd effect, find blueprints to upgrade the arm, to the point of it being able to shoot rockets or pull distant enemies toward the player. Whereas Snake rarely seems to be particularly bothered by his missing arm, Kazuhira Miller barely keeps his bitterness in check. Speaking of his survival of the destruction of their last base and his capture and torture, Miller says, “Why are we still here? Just to suffer? Every night, I can feel my leg … and my arm … even my fingers. The body I’ve lost … the comrades I’ve lost … won’t stop hurting … It’s like they’re all still there. You feel it, too, don’t you? I’m gonna make them give back our past.” He is, in many ways more than any of the others, haunted by the past, by the phantoms, and he regrets that he cannot find a way to contextualize or move past them. He lives in the present, yet mired in the past, wanting to stop their enemies, but only with the idea that this will somehow allow him to reclaim or remake what they lost nine years prior. In another similar recording, Miller speaks of Snake’s return after nine years and its ramifications: “We’ll unite all private forces under you, transcending nations and economies. What is a nation? Just a patch of dirt. The bonds among us will surpass nations, and that’s what’ll put the world under our control. We’ll establish a new kind of country, redefine the very concept of it.” On the idea of national identity, Benedict Anderson asserts: The great wars of this century are extraordinary not so much in the unprecedented scale on which they permitted people to kill, as in the colossal numbers persuaded to lay down their lives.… Dying for one’s

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country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association or perhaps even Amnesty International cannot rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at easy will (144).

He posits, therefore, that it is the concept of a nation that can bind people under such ideals and drive them to such ends. Yet the Diamond Dogs have rejected, wholesale, such ideals as inherently meaningless. All they had received for their military service for their various nations was exploitation. So instead of rallying around the concept of a nation, they rally around the Boss and the concept of solidarity under his leadership. This narrative point dovetails with current global events and comments on them in uncomfortable ways. Mark Henrie offers a complex, even controversial, assessment of America’s now long-standing wars in the Middle East, especially in Afghanistan, in the vein of what is morally right. He argues, American military forces intervening abroad for humanitarian purposes do not take the form of a Good Samaritan version of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—volunteers so drawn by selfless devotion to their cause as to eagerly lay their lives on the line. Those who fight for us are members of the armed services of the United States, young men and women with hopes and dreams for their lives ahead. They will find themselves in Afghanistan or elsewhere at the command of their country’s political leaders, and they will not be free to avoid the brutality, futility, and stupidity of war. On what grounds are we justified in compelling our fellow citizens to undergo that ordeal? The moralistic pursuit of a putative global justice— whether or not it is in our interest—is not enough (48).

Henrie’s thoughts exemplify why the Diamond Dogs exist in The Phantom Pain, in which there is a revolt against the idea of the solderas-pawn or worse, as cannon fodder. Snake’s recorded comment provides his perspective: “Us Diamond Dogs, we don’t have a country to call home. That means we have no past, nothing to prove that we lived. Every one of us threw it all away when we came here.” Tellingly, unlike Miller, Snake is forward-looking, focused both on the welfare of the Diamond Dogs and on forging a new sense of self and identity. At the game’s main narrative conclusion, it is Snake who seems willing to move forward into the future, evidenced by a scene of him ­riding a motorcycle into an unknown future, as contrasted with Miller, who

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is more consumed than ever by his paranoia and his belief that someone, somewhere will try to destroy the Diamond Dogs. The fact remains that, whatever individual characters do to cope with the threat and reality of violence, the life they live is one focused on the well-being of their comrades-in-arms. While they still live dangerously—they are members of a private army, after all—they have established something of a utopia, a place to go for soldiers who do not belong anywhere else or who have been exploited in other armies. The Phantom Pain further problematizes this tension between idyll and violence by refusing to be a standard shooter game, as many players might initially think given the game’s seeming emphasis on warfare. Indeed, it is played from the third-person perspective, as was discussed earlier, and while killing is an option, the game does not privilege this as the best approach. The concern that the leadership of the Diamond Dogs extends to the current soldiers on Mother Base also includes those who previously served with them and brings to the player’s attention the importance of not leaving any of them behind. The “Wandering Soldier Missions,” a series of optional side ops, underscores the trauma suffered by soldiers. These are side quests that appear one by one throughout the game and number ten in total. Although they are optional, their completion adds not only additional narrative weight to the game but also additional scenes. These wandering soldiers were members of the Militaires Sans Frontieres who were not present on Mother Base nine years prior when it was destroyed. However, they have been suffering trauma ever since, heavily suggested to be due to survivor’s guilt, and are only made whole when they are brought back to Mother Base. Snake must use stealth to subdue them—or use Quiet to snipe them with a tranquilizing round— as they are erratic and seem to have little sense of themselves or their surroundings. Their instinct is usually to flee from Snake, although they will attack if he runs directly at them. Each Wandering Soldier carries what the game deems a Memento, a photograph of them nine years prior. The importance of these missions intensifies as they unlock a series of scenes between Snake and Paz. The game’s Prologue mission9 features a starting series of cuts in its opening sequence before settling on the primary initial setting, a hospital. Before that point, an abrupt shift in scene disorients the player and focuses on another indeterminate scene in terms of both space and place—it appears to be some sort of war zone, as abundant gunfire can be heard in the background—and the following quote appears in the

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corner of the screen: “Just another day in a war without end.” This idea is complex and circles back to the larger ideology that underpins the Metal Gear series as a whole, as well as this particular title, and is both lived and espoused by many of its main characters. The Diamond Dogs, previously the Militaires Sans Frontieres, is an army for hire, but it is more than just a band of mercenaries. The Diamond Dogs choose their causes and seem to operate from a moral imperative. The main drive behind the initial vision that the other Bosses had for such a private army was to free soldiers from the tyranny and abuse that they often suffered at the hands of the world’s governments. Matthew Thomas Payne notes that “post-9/11 military shooters were and remain marketplace successes because their photorealistic visuals and immersive stories sync with what producers and players believe combat to look and feel like. Moreover, these narrative and procedural elements engender a virtual sense of patriotism” (Military Video Games 74). What becomes a fascinating point of departure for The Phantom Pain is that it takes away the element of inherent patriotism. Indeed, the soldiers serving on Mother Base have a shared, nearly universal experience of having been used as pawns or worse, as throwaway fodder by their respective governments. Ironically, the world’s major superpowers all attempt to hire or to obtain the services of the Diamond Dogs. While they are, technically speaking, a mercenary force, they do not accept missions solely for money. They operate under a fairly strong and honorable moral code, as most of the targets and missions that come up during the game strike at despots and those who seek to harm civilians or innocents. The game takes this further in terms of the customization choices the player accesses regarding the appearance of Mother Base. While some of these are cosmetic, as in the color of the base’s buildings, of specific note is the ability of the player to choose and fully customize a flag for Mother Base. The flag can contain very basic geometric symbols, but it can also come to include specific symbols related to the story’s characters. For example, the player can unlock a butterfly, Quiet’s symbol. Every time the player leaves Mother Base to undertake a mission, he or she must first select the gear to bring along, including weaponry and vehicles, and also which companion, if any, will accompany Snake. Once made, the choices are shown on a specially composed screen that calls to mind patriotism while also rejecting it. The player’s choice of flag looms large in the background, with vehicles in front of the flag, Snake’s companion next, and then Snake himself in the most immediate foreground. Specific

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music, which has notes of military pomp and circumstance, plays over the image. Yet for all of the similarities between this scene and military propaganda found all over the world, complete with the sense of scope, cause, heroism, and adventure, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s main characters have all rejected such formalized allegiance to governments as part of their militaries, having deemed them inherently untrustworthy and exploitative. Ilona Meagher makes the controversial assertion that “instead of creating soldiers who will fight, but will later have the ability to return to normal life, today’s training concentrates on creating professional soldiers whose job is to kill, with little worry about how this kind of training will affect them once they return home” (82). This sets up an intriguing lens through which to view Mother Base, the Diamond Dogs, and the idea of a war without end that drives their ability to function as a private army. Mother Base even has a specific wing in its hospital and medical facilities designed to treat soldiers with symptoms of PTSD. Perhaps more intriguing is why these men and women, who maintain a powerful loyalty to the Diamond Dogs but especially to the Big Boss, continue to associate themselves with war and violence, even though it is now effectively on their own terms. Marjorie Campbell and her colleagues examined the complex issue of soldiers who return from deployment with PTSD but engage in behaviors, to greater or lesser degrees, that immerse them in matters related to war and found that these soldiers experience positive emotions associated with these war-related behaviors. The authors describe in one case study, that “LCpl A was reliving stimulating, rewarding combat-related events accompanied by an ‘adrenaline rush’ for long periods—which he described as ‘getting amped up.’ Bored at work, he engaged in lengthy animated combat-related discussions with other veterans. When off-duty, he played the video game Call of Duty for hours; watched war documentaries, sometimes with a knife in hand; looked at his deployment photos; and watched combat videos (his own and online), stimulating feelings of being back in Afghanistan” (1171). Regarding the ongoing problem of troops returning from deployment with PTSD, Ilona Meagher argues: On top of enduring the anxiety of one or more combat deployments, upon their return home, these brave men and women are met not with compassion and support, but by a military culture that, in the face of all evidence, insists that their psychological injuries are a sign of weakness. Because of

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this, returning combat soldiers are discouraged from asking for help, and are forced to do battle with an under-funded bureaucracy in thrall to a partisan political agenda, and, perhaps most isolating of all, kept ignorant of an historical context that would help them understand that they are not alone in their struggles (xiii).

This contrasts directly with the apparent ability of the soldiers on Mother Base to readily and easily receive care for PTSD and the command staff’s emphasis on watching for its signs in the soldiers. The irony, of course, is that members of the command staff, Miller being a primary example, do not seek out such help themselves. This behavior underscores what Meagher points out here: the desire to help soldiers abuts against the attitude that emotional weakness must be hidden at all costs. In this game, as the player sees later upon arriving at the rebuilt Mother Base, the men and women who serve on the base really look up to the Boss. Both his physical person and the legend that precedes him bond all of them under a common flag and goal. One could say this is a sort of cult personality overlaid with the legend of the Boss and his military exploits and bravery, an image seemingly fostered by the Boss. Ocelot, in one of the game’s recorded cassette tapes, which provide much of the more intricate backstory, says to Snake: “Diamond Dogs is different. Everyone here believes in you. Regardless of where they came from or why they’re here, they revere you, and they’re fighting because it was their choice.” As an example of this, when Snake returns to Mother Base after deployment in the field on a mission or side op, a group of Diamond Dogs always awaits his return and salutes him upon his disembarking from a military helicopter. They will often seek to gain his attention by requesting that he train or spar with them or even by just providing him with a welcome. The game’s most powerful narrative moment happens during the player’s completion of “Mission 43: Shining Lights, Even in Death.” Here, the player has no choice but to kill all the Mother Base soldiers who are infected with the Wolbachia vocal cord parasite, which has infested the base and threatens to kill everyone. The completion of this required mission will automatically add 5220 Demon Points to the player’s total, as the game allots 180 points for each member of Diamond Dogs staff who is killed. Even if the player does not reach 20,000 Demon Points after this mission, Snake will still have his “demon” appearance until the mission ends. Throughout it all, Mother Base’s computerized voice continually

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notifies the player that one of the Mother Base soldiers has died. Since there is no cure for the Wolbachia parasite at this point, the only solution to stop its spread is to kill the infected soldiers. Because the parasites drive the host to seek daylight—as Code Talker explains, to go out into the open to give the parasites the best possible chance of spreading to others—a quarantine proves ineffective. Adding to the tense atmosphere, Emmerich hijacks the communication system at one point and accuses Snake of killing his own men. This is clearly unfair, but it contrasts with both Ocelot and Miller urging Snake to kill the infected men. Emmerich continually castigates Snake throughout the mission. The individual soldier’s reactions to his or her own death are varied and heartbreaking. Some of the soldiers beg for help. Others are upset and angry. Poignantly, one group salutes Snake as he shoots them one by one. The sequence ends with Snake falling to his knees, bloodied, amidst a pile of bodies. The relationship between a player’s freedom of choice in a given video game and the game’s overall narrative arc, which may be unchanged by player action, provides an important lens through which to consider this sequence of events. Although Grant Tavinor is specifically assessing the climatic mission of The Last of Us, his ideas hold larger merit for video games more generally and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain specifically. He argues, “The tension between depicting game play that is satisfactorily interactive, and a narrative that charts a determinate path, is solved then by introducing a forced move into the game, intentionally subverting the interactivity of the game play to make a narrative point. The scene has a kind of quasi-freedom: players are responsible for performing the actions that render the scene, but they have no choice given their desires and the means of action available to them” (281). In the case of “Mission 43,” the player is not given any choice. All of the infected soldiers must be killed or the game would be effectively trapped in that moment, with the player unable to advance the narrative any further. The only way past the mission is through it. However, the player is not made to be a passive spectator. Instead, he or she must actively participate, as it is the player’s action that triggers each kill shot. Sebastian Domsch argues, “Given the laws of thermodynamics and the inevitable passing of time, there is no choice that can be postponed indefinitely without any consequence, though the temporal dimension might be so large that it is not perceived as important at the moment. Thus, it is one of the exclusive prerogatives of all games that they can create a-temporal choice situations” (116). This provides

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an additional line of thought from which to consider not only Tavinor’s thoughts on morality and choice but also how morality and choice are expressed in Metal Gear Solid V. In the case of “Mission 43,” the actions that Snake must take are not choice-based: He must shoot the soldiers. If does not shoot the first group of soldiers who try to make it to the outside, the mission will fail. If he fails to shoot the remaining infected soldiers, the mission will effectively never end, the game will cease to move forward narratively, and the player would essentially have to choose to walk away from the game rather than do what he or she must: kill the infected soldiers. In terms of what Domsch says about a-temporal choice, the game in this instance showcases the pressure placed upon the player when a-temporality is taken away. In this case, with the soldiers who attempt to push past Snake to reach the outside of the medical facility, the player must effectively shoot them in real time—the only reaction is an immediate one. In other places throughout the game, as is the case in many video games, the player may “pause” time nearly indefinitely as he or she makes choices about what to do next. It is the aftermath of the outbreak and the killing of the infected soldiers that brings the game’s narrative full circle, even though a number of main missions and side ops remain. Initially, the plan is to cremate the soldiers’ ashes and bury them at sea. Snake, at the last moment, cannot bear to do this and commands that the Diamond Dogs turn the men’s ashes into diamonds instead of giving them a burial at sea. There is a recording earlier in the game of Miller talking about the origin of “diamond” in relation to the name Diamond Dogs: “The word ‘diamond’ originally comes from the Greek adàmas. It means ‘indomitable,’ ‘unyielding.’ Other words for the stones often mean ‘eternal bond,’ ‘fortitude,’ or ‘purity.’. .. They represent innocence, as well as chastity. Yielding to no man while maintaining one’s virtue— in other words, staying loyal to something.” With the crew ready to begin the ceremonial interment at sea, Snake pauses and says as he holds an urn, “I won’t scatter your sorrow to the heartless sea. I will always be with you. Plant your roots in me.” He tastes the ashes then spreads them on his face, like war paint, bodily connecting with all he was forced to kill and assuming their imagined suffering upon himself. He says, “You’re all diamonds.” He then gives the order, “We’ll make diamonds from their ashes. Take them into battle with us.” While the action reflects his heartbreak, it reinforces the message that the only

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place these soldiers have is with their comrades. If that is a type of peace, it is a measured, cautious one at best. Metal Gear Solid V ’s narrative concludes much the way it begins–with uncertainty. Ground Zeroes considers trauma in visceral form through its exploration of torture, as especially embodied by the battered Paz. The Phantom Pain closes the curtain on its narrative with all of the main characters more or less resolved to their lives, while unresolved to their tragedy. Perhaps the real Snake, the one who rides his motorcycle off into some unknown future, has the best understanding of how his choices have shaped and reshaped him across the many games in the series. For the others, the future proves more uncertain, perhaps even bleak. Although The Phantom Pain probes trauma throughout its story, it is in the game’s opening mission that the player is thrown into a horrific nightmare of a world, one in which the innocent and the injured are killed as though for sport. This Chapter examines the evolution of the game’s consideration of trauma by providing a focused analysis of this opening mission.

Notes



1. In the game’s larger mythology, the Boss’s overall plan to create a safe haven for the world’s soldiers becomes folded into a larger set of guidelines and actions designed to achieve this collectively deemed “Outer Heaven.” This becomes perhaps a bit confusing in that there are also locations and bases throughout the series that have this same name. What is important here in considering the idea that the Boss has always had a vision for a safe haven is why he gives it this particular appellation. It is not the vision of something like Valhalla, or a final resting place where soldiers are free to exist as such in a paradisiacal afterlife. Instead, the implications prove more somber. The soldiers are always just out of reach out heaven, together but in a place that is separated from this final idea of paradise. 2. A more detailed narrative analysis of the game’s concluding chapter is given later in this book. 3. Miller’s reaction to his bodily and psychological trauma is considered later in fuller detail. 4.  Kevin Powers’s devastating and hauntingly eloquent novel The Yellow Birds is a fine example of the depiction of such fragmentation of self. 5.  Her particular experience with trauma and how it manifests will be explored in more detail.

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6. One of the only references in the game series to a character who seems to transition into more of a civilian life is Kazuhira Miller. This aspect of his biography is not explicitly seen as part of the game’s narratives, but appears in the user’s manual for Metal Gear Solid 2. If Miller, perhaps the most emotionally troubled of the game’s main characters, does indeed manage to carve a life outside of war, the series opts to not directly depict it. 7. A major plot point—one examined in full detail later and one that serves to radically shift the player’s perception of the entire game—reveals that the player is not technically the real Snake, but rather a doppelganger. Given that this is not actually revealed until the game reaches its initial conclusion and because it is entirely possible that the player may miss the mission in which the initial segment is replayed and to keep the story as streamlined as possible, Punished Venom Snake, the Big Boss (or Boss) all refer here to the character embodied by the player. 8. Quiet’s story arc and the media’s frequent mischaracterization of her due to her appearance are considered in Chap. 5. 9. A close analysis of this mission is the subject of this chapter.

CHAPTER 5

The Phantom Pain’s Opening Mission: Hospital as Slaughterhouse and an Introduction to Trauma

Abstract  This chapter provides the reader with an in-depth and ­sustained analysis of The Phantom Pain’s opening mission, the Prologue. This mission, a deliberately harrowing and disjointed narrative introduc­ tion into the game proper, at first seems to throw disparate elements at the player one after the next. However, careful consideration reveals that every element of the Prologue, from its acts of cruelty and shocking violence to its use of the song “The Man Who Sold the World” as its opening backdrop, serves a larger narrative purpose. The Prologue is the player’s first hint that the game will not play to expectations and that its major point of exploration lies in considering how years of violence and war have affected its main characters. Keywords  Snake · Quiet · Trauma · Flashback Prologue: Awakening The game’s opening chapter, named “Flashback Prologue: Awakening” and therefore not one of the game’s numbered chapters, immediately immerses the player in a claustrophobic, confused setting that emphasizes bodily and psychological trauma. The game starts, as the opening logos flash by and then transition to a black screen with some red shading, with a chaotic voice-over detailing a Mayday and an aircraft crashing. The player will discover it is a helicopter crash from nine years prior, a result of an attack on the Militaires Sans Frontieres’ base. Instead of allowing the player to have a moment to digest or take in any of the © The Author(s) 2017 A.M. Green, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62749-6_5

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chaos, the scene rapidly switches. This opening scene ends with a quote by Emil Cioran: “It is no nation we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our true fatherland.” This will tie into later events involving the game’s main antagonist, Skull Face, and his desire to spread a parasite that will wipe out all of the world’s languages. Essentially, that parasite is lethal. It infests the vocal cords of those infected. Each strain of the parasite is keyed toward a different language, and when the microbes feel the vibrations caused by that given language’s sounds, it reproduces itself. The player continues in a state of confusion as the scene shifts, moving from the chaos of gunfire and an unknown location to an up-close focus of an audiocassette labeled “From the Man Who Sold the World,” which the player does not hear played at this point. The next scene—in which the player awakes in the first-person perspective in a hospital bed and over which the initial opening credits roll—utilizes “The Man Who Sold the World” as the opening music of the game. This proves to be a nuanced choice, and instead of using David Bowie’s original version, the game opts for Midge Ure’s 1984 remake, an iteration of the original that sounds slower, hallucinatory, and much more dreamlike than the relatively up-tempo original. The opening stanza contains the lyrics “We passed upon the stair/We spoke of was and when” and ties thematically to the game’s exploration of memory and revenge and its more general conclusion that the men and women of its narrative, however forward-looking, cannot set aside the past but carry it with them as a burden. The song’s refrain states in part “I thought you died alone/A long, long time ago.” This line is transformed near the end of the song to “I must have died alone/A long, long time ago.” The player, embodying Snake, wakes up in a nightmare scenario: seriously injured and unable to move. The revision of the line also expresses the death of an original identity or sense of self-transformed by trauma. It can also be taken to reflect the sense of confusion felt by Snake, as in “I thought I died nine years ago.” The song continues with the refrain “Oh no, not me/I never lost control/You’re face to face/With The Man Who Sold The World.” If the song is taken to reflect, in part, the main character/narrator of the song meeting some sort of an alter ego or doppelganger, then this factors into the game’s ultimate reveal that the player is not really Snake/Big Boss, but one of the Diamond Dogs who has been mentally conditioned and surgically altered to take his place. The game has several points of conclusion, including the specific ends to character arcs, such as Emmerich being put out to sea in a raft

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or Quiet leaving, should the player choose those routes. However, those are not overall narrative endings that bind the larger themes of trauma and PTSD. That resolution lies in the game’s “real” ending, wherein the player discovers that he or she is not really Snake. The mission in which this is revealed is not a new mission, but rather an expanded version of the game’s opening “Prologue.” In this expanded version, the player sees events from all perspectives rather than just Snake’s. It is possible to complete the game without reaching “Mission 46: Truth–The Man Who Sold the World,” as it will only unlock if the player continues to complete Side Ops or the replays of the game’s other main story missions. The narrative’s constant refusal to present one cohesive and chronological set of events to the player serves to create a pervasive sense of uneasiness. Dan Dawkins argues that “the entire game is hinged on the subjectivity of facts, and how ‘completing’ the lore could easily be reverse engineered at a later stage. MGS5’s first words are ‘This is a work of fiction’ and it concludes with Nietzsche’s claim that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations.’ It’s a game that begins in confusion, and ends in a twist—with a warning that one detail can change the entire context of 70 hours play” (n.p.). The line, “I never lost control,” repeated as part of the song’s refrain, takes on more than one important meaning when the game concludes the story line of the Diamond Dogs versus Skull Face. At that point, and it is perhaps the only point in the game where this is the case, Snake does lose control in that sequence, highlighting that the particular choice in musical score serves as something of a narrative outline for the thematic elements of the rest of the game. Toija Cinque considers the possible meaning of the song and argues that “the idea of madness for its part is a theme in many of his compositions, for example, the original album cover for The Man Who Sold the World (1971) depicts an asylum and includes the song ‘All The Madmen,’ and Aladdin Sane  (1973)—a lad insane—are but two examples (401).” Given the player’s limited knowledge at the start of the game, as he or she embodies at that point an unknown character and awakens in a hospital bed essentially unable to move, the scene makes the player question the narrative itself. After all, all of the game’s promotional footage and the imagery on the console versions’ cases would indicate an action game, not one in which the player lies immobile. Additionally, the first views the player has are blurred, adding to the overall sense of unease and perhaps even a sense that perhaps he or she is playing someone who has been institutionalized or is otherwise mentally ill.

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The opening sequence of the game secondarily serves to train the player in the mechanics of the game, that is, how to move, how to use weapons, and the like,1 but it does so in a way that promotes a pervasive sense of helplessness rather than empowerment. For example, the first thing the player is asked to do by the attending physician is to nod his head. The player can barely do that but nothing else, being too weak to get out of the hospital bed. While this essentially trains the player in the game’s controls one step at a time, it also causes the player to feel helpless and undoes expectations that this is merely a war or a more straightforward military-style game. The doctor then slowly reveals what has happened to the player, starting with the revelation that he has been in a coma for nine years. Each traumatic revelation causes the player to hyperventilate or need sedation. This presentation and the player’s reaction are in opposition to the doctor providing an unrealistic sustained exposition of the traumatic facts and the player handling all of the revelations at once without any sense of panic or trauma. This opening then leads to further disclosures covering the extent of the player’s injuries. He2 has lost his right eye and left arm below the elbow, and large pieces of shrapnel remain in his body, the most significant of which is a bit of shrapnel protruding from his forehead that will later correlate to the player’s Demon status. The player is not embodying, at least at this stage, a strong character—he or she is vulnerable and weak. The scene soon takes a dark and graphically violent turn when the XOF3 attacks the hospital in which the player is convalescing in an attempt to murder him. The change from a relatively calm setting—save for the player’s physical trauma—to one of cruel and brutal violence is deliberately ­ shocking and provides the player with the sense that he or she is playing through psychological trauma in a physical form. While the doctor is in the foreground, leaning over the player and talking about the danger the player is in and the need to have altered his physical identity, the player sees one of the nurses, in the background and slightly out of focus, brutally strangled by one of the enemy soldiers.4 The player’s pulse rate quickens, but he or she cannot speak as Snake cannot yet speak, get out of the hospital bed, or alert the doctor, who is then killed as well. The player is saved by another patient whose face is covered in bandages, Ishmael, a stranger to the player. Ishmael, who gives the player the initial alias of Ahab, is later revealed to be the real Big Boss. The choice of these initial names proves important in terms of literary richness. Ahab is associated with a madman’s quest—in his case for

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the white whale upon whom he seeks bodily vengeance. Snake is not out for such a direct type of revenge, rather he is on a quest to create an idyllic place and an idyllic army for the world’s exploited soldiers. Although not a fool’s quest per se, it has been proved to be ephemeral, given the events that occurred nine years prior to the start of the game. The idea of the real Big Boss going by Ishmael is equally fascinating. The opening line of Moby Dick directs the reader to “Call me Ishmael” with regard to its narrator. On one level, which is not apparent to the player until the prologue is replayable (in full) late in the game, this is a sign that the mysterious Ishmael is the real Big Boss, the real Snake. After all, the command to “call” the narrator of the novel “Ishmael” speaks to an unwillingness to provide any concrete sense of identity to the reader. Amirhossein Vafa comments on Ishmael’s role in Moby Dick, asserting, “Ishmael has already betrayed the position of a detached narrator in the opening line of the novel, ‘Call me Ishmael,’ and that Ishmael holds a ‘fixedly centralized presence’” (54) in the novel. Charles Olson posits of Ishmael, “He is passive and detached, the observer, and thus his separate and dramatic existence is not so easily felt” (58). In the game, Ishmael assumes an active role in saving Ahab from danger, but he remains, as Olson says here, “passive and detached.” Although Ishmael shows concern for Ahab, the player learns that this really serves only the larger function of ensuring that Ahab survives to assume Snake’s identity. As Ishmael leads Ahab to safety, the latter’s vulnerability is painfully clear. The player cannot even stand up properly, owing to how long Ahab was in the hospital, and must resort to slowly crawling, which the game sets up as a movement that is both slow and clumsy.5 Ahab tries to stand by propping himself on furniture, but falls to the floor. As increasing numbers of soldiers descend on the hospital, the player feels an increasing urgency to flee although he cannot even stand until Ishmael injects him with a muscle stimulant, and even after that injection, Ahab’s initial gait is shuffling and imprecise. The game turns its opening setting completely on its head by having the XOF attack a hospital instead of trying to eliminate Snake in a fair fight. A hospital is supposed to be a place of sanctuary, yet here it sounds like a war zone, complete with the sounds and sights of descending helicopters, screams of terror, and gunfire from all angles. At this point, the game’s overarching theme of the persistence of trauma—a soldier, perhaps, who leaves the frontline and is still living out horrors that can hardly be articulated or shared—comes more sharply into focus. Just as Ahab and

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Ishmael are about to reach an elevator, they are blocked by a new threat in the form of the Man on Fire, who is later revealed to function as a physical embodiment of trauma. The Man on Fire at this stage attacks anyone he sees as a threat, so this has the one benefit of him also taking out some of the soldiers looking for Ahab. The Man on Fire is always accompanied by a child known as the Floating Boy, a symbolic representation of psychological trauma. These are two of the fantastical characters in the game, and their superhuman and supernatural powers lend a bizarre turn of events to an already disquieting opening segment of gameplay.6 There are a few sequences in the remaining hospital escape segment that highlight the focus on brutality and suffering, especially of the innocent. As Ahab hides under a hospital gurney, he sees another wounded soldier on the ground crawling away from an enemy soldier, who cruelly follows him at a slow pace before shooting him in the back, a deliberately non-lethal shot, and then in the head after leaving him to suffer for a few moments. The player is helpless, with no weapon, and can only watch. Before the player is able to move again, once the XOF leaves the room, he or she must look, face to face, into the dead eyes of that soldier. In another scene, a nurse is holding onto a wounded soldier in her care and waving to a helicopter as they are both gunned down. Finally, Ahab and Ishmael come to a blood-splattered corridor filled with patients shot dead by the XOF and have to hide among the bodies. Enemy soldiers have returned to plug more bullets into the bodies to ensure they are dead. Even in death, the innocent are bodily violated. Matthew Thomas Payne notes of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, “Call of Duty 4 has been praised for introducing particularly stark battles and scenes into the single-player narrative that underscore the ugliness of war. For instance, in an especially bleak sequence near the game’s beginning, the gamer plays as President Al-Fulani, the kidnapped leader of an unnamed Arab county, who is being escorted to their televised execution. The player is powerless to do anything other than to look around helplessly during this sequence” (“Military Realism” 320). This sense of helplessness and voyeurism are also found in The Phantom Pain; the reality of the slaughter going on throughout the hospital only serves to underscore here that the player is helpless, rather than some sort of hero who has arrived on the scene to act as a savior. As Ahab nears the hospital’s entrance, with the objective of escaping with Ishmael, he acquires a gun and can therefore kill the soldiers blocking the way out, providing the player with a greater sense of power

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over the otherwise bleak circumstances. Later in the game, the player will always have the option to utilize a gun firing tranquilizer rounds instead of bullets, but that option is not available here. The player can only opt to shoot to kill or try to remain undetected. It is possible, though difficult, to use stealth to sneak around the soldiers, who are then killed by the Man on Fire once Snake reaches the exit. The game in this way sets up the player’s expectation of The Phantom Pain as a standard military-style shooter, only to subvert that model. After the vehicle he and Ishmael are fleeing in wrecks, Ahab awakens to discover that Ishmael is nowhere to be found, a detail that is not explored again until the expanded Prologue sequence is available late in the game. The sequence ends with Snake rescued by Revolver Ocelot,7 emphasizing Snake’s helplessness as throughout this entire mission, he lives only because others, Ishmael and Ocelot, come to his rescue. The player’s possession of a relatively weak handgun seems scant protection, upon reflection, from the dangers faced in the hospital. Gamer Alec Meer, who had not played a Metal Gear game prior to The Phantom Pain, presents this view of the prologue sequence: An escape. I can only crawl. A horrible wet, slapping noise as my emaciated chest—nine years asleep—collides with the cold floor again and again. Who am I? Who is this masked man who sounds like I should sound? Is he real? He keeps . . . disappearing. Returning suddenly. Never quite noticed. Is he me? Am I me? Who are these men with guns, why are they killing everyone? Who—God, who is that man on fire, impervious to bullets, to rockets, to high-speed collisions? (n.p.)

Of note here is his persistent sense of embodiment coupled with his emotional reactions to the narrative elements. While Meer’s experiences certainly cannot be expected to represent all gamers who may play The Phantom Pain—indeed, those wanting a more action-oriented game from the start may become frustrated with Snake’s inability to really fight—his reaction underscores that digital narratives, due to their immersive nature, possess the ability to force a player into a direct sense of investment. In the particular case of this game, this investment allows The Phantom Pain to ask the player to consider a number of deeper ­narrative points. The Phantom Pain’s brutal and disorienting opening mission never provides the player with a firm sense of footing either mechanically, by

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virtue of Snake’s vulnerable physical state, or narratively, as the events move dizzyingly from the brutal to the fantastic. The opening inexorably moves the player through a scene of carnage and horror and focuses attention on what might not be clear at this early stage, but becomes clearer through subsequent missions: This game is about the infliction of trauma and its aftermath. Chapter 5 considers how the game’s varied and diverse cast of characters, from Snake to a group of rescued child soldiers, all present with differing and complex manifestations of trauma. The narrative provides no quick fixes or happy endings to neatly tie off these otherwise tragic narrative threads. Instead, these characters, bearing physical and psychological wounds, simply continue to endure and survive.

Notes 1.  This feature is not unique to The Phantom Pain. Most modern video games, rather than relying on an instruction manual, use their opening segments, generally one or a few more missions, to allow the player to ease into the control system. 2. “He” is used here because the player will soon learn that he or she is embodying a male, but lacks the identity of that person until a bit further into the sequence. Snake’s loss of his eye is not a result of a new injury from nine years prior, but Snake initially reacts to all of his injuries with shock and horror. 3. The XOF is essentially a covert/special ops group under the command of Cipher and is the main overall enemy of the Diamond Dogs and the Big Boss. 4. This turns out to be Quiet before she left the XOF. 5. In my initial playthrough, I found that this caused an increasing sense of panic and that I had the tendency to try to push the control stick harder, as if that would somehow get Ahab more readily out of danger. Given that players are normally accustomed to controlling an agile main character, the slow and clumsy pace proves unnerving. 6. Given the importance of both the Man on Fire and the Floating Boy to the overall theme of trauma, both are discussed at length in Chap. 5. 7.  Ocelot is also a long-standing character with a complex history in the Metal Gear series. He has been everything from an enemy, to a double agent, to a triple agent. In The Phantom Pain, he is depicted as a staunch ally of Snake’s and has undergone intensive self-hypnosis to allow him to keep the secrets of Snake’s true identity and the real Snake’s location.

CHAPTER 6

“You Can’t Patch a Wounded Soul with  a Band-Aid”: Manifestations of Trauma in the Characters of Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain Abstract  This chapter focuses its attention on in-depth analyses of trauma as it manifests in the main characters from Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. Quiet, often misunderstood in media and Internet discussions of her, is given in-depth consideration, critical as she is to the plot of The Phantom Pain and existing herself as a bodily embodiment of trauma. The Phantom Pain’s antagonist, Skull Face, is also considered at length since he occupies the unique position of being both evil and also himself a victim of childhood trauma. In addition to the analyses of these characters, all other major characters are given consideration as embodiments of trauma. The chapter demonstrates that Metal Gear Solid V takes its consideration of PTSD seriously and instead of presenting the player with a happy narrative ending, concludes with uncertainty. Keywords  Snake · Quiet · Kazuhira miller · Revolver ocelot · The man on fire · The floating boy Metal Gear Solid V spreads trauma across a broadcast of characters, from major to minor. In each case, trauma and PTSD find individualized form, meaning that each character reacts differently to lived trauma, providing a realistic consideration. The game’s narrative also examines trauma in a broad range of populations, from Snake, a man in his ­forties, to Paz, a young woman in her twenties, to a group of child soldiers, some of whom appear no older than perhaps eight years old. © The Author(s) 2017 A.M. Green, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62749-6_6

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Ground Zeroes focuses on trauma as it specifically relates to torture and lack of bodily agency and denies the player any resolution to the brutality depicted given that Paz and Chico both die at the end of the story. The Phantom Pain, spanning a much broader geographical perspective and drawing to a close rather than to a definitive conclusion, considers how trauma lingers over time and wields the power to permanently alter one’s identity. The title of Chap. 5 in this book is drawn from a quote by author Michael Connelly, and his simple, pointed phrase finds form across the many characters of The Phantom Pain. The game never cheapens the weight of its exploration of trauma and PTSD by implying that fixes come simply, if at all. Instead, wounds remain. They might, as Connelly indicates, be bandaged over, but the wounds continue to fester beneath the surface. For example, although Paz dies during the concluding scenes of Ground Zeroes, she haunts Snake during The Phantom Pain. While Paz does not otherwise factor heavily into The Phantom Pain, and these scenes are missable should the player opt not to complete the “Wandering Soldier Missions” and not to build the Medical Platform area on Mother Base, it is possible for a player to finish The Phantom Pain without the additional insight provided into Snake’s character and the reality that Paz’s suffering continues to haunt him1. Because her story line appeared to have concluded with her death at the end of Ground Zeroes, a player familiar with the game’s larger mythology would be caught off guard by her appearance here. In their initial meeting, unlocked after Snake rescues the first Wandering Soldier, Snake appears relieved that Paz is alive even though this seems to defy all logical reasoning. She had saved Snake’s life by sacrificing hers—the enemy had implanted two bombs inside her stomach, and she jumped to her death from a helicopter to avoid the second one detonating and killing Snake, Chico, and the other personnel aboard after the first bomb was successfully removed. The player familiar with this event will certainly know that her death was without question because she exploded when the bomb detonated. When Snake finds Paz during The Phantom Pain, strangely, Ocelot comments to Snake that she “hit the water hard, but managed to survive.” However, it later becomes apparent that Paz is another phantom, another painful memory that Snake has to contend with and ultimately cannot resolve and that these scenes are only in his head. At first, the scenes are peaceful—Paz is said to have lost her memory of all the trauma she had suffered. Yet in the last of these scenes, nightmarish and

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bloody, Snake folds the past onto the present moment. He sees Paz tearing open her stomach in a desperate search for the second bomb. He cannot keep a peaceful memory of Paz in his mind—the violence of her death always intrudes. After the player completes the Prologue and “Mission 1: Phantom Limbs,” during which Snake rescues Kazuhira Miller,2 the narrative opens up significantly. The player is now offered a choice between selecting a main story mission or a side ops, or the player may simply take time to explore locations he or she deems worthy, which offers the opportunity to obtain items and personnel for Mother Base. Over the course of these missions, especially the main numbered missions but also some of the side ops, such as the Wandering Soldier missions, the player comes across numerous characters all bearing physical or emotional wounds or both. The first such character the player encounters, after Snake and Miller, is Quiet. Quiet proves to be one of the most compelling—and perhaps ­misunderstood—characters in the game, denied a voice and yet forced by virtue of her physical injuries to remain a source of potential objectification. The player, embodying Snake, has already encountered her in the hospital when she attempted to kill him after she first killed his doctor and nurse. Ishmael rescues Snake from her, but dispatches Quiet in a brutal way. He sets her on fire, and when she continues coming at them, he throws a chemical at her to intensify the flames. Throughout this sequence, she is screaming, first in fury and then in agony as she burns. She eventually falls out of a window, presumably to her death. As this sequence plays out, the game’s soundtrack plays a haunting melody of a woman singing a few particular notes. This wordless melody later comes to be associated with Quiet when she reenters the narrative, and it symbolizes the curious path she later threads between being allowed choice and denied agency. Quiet manages to survive her injuries, but at great physical cost such that her body becomes permanently altered and, arguably, no longer completely her own. Her injuries were mortal wounds, but the introduction into her system of the parasite strain dubbed The One that Covers allows her to heal.3 Snake eventually confronts Quiet again in “Mission 11: Cloaked in Silence,” and at this point, the player has the option of either taking Quiet as a prisoner or of killing her at the end of the mission. Killing her would eliminate one of the most compelling characters in the game and, arguably, one of Snake’s strongest and most capable companions. However, since this is a game about violence and its consequences, it makes narrative sense to allow the player agency to kill Quiet

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at this point, even without much insight into who she is or what she has been doing. Miller, who is marked by an increasing sense of paranoia, urges the player to kill her, while Ocelot suggests that she could prove to be of value If Snake chooses to take Quiet back to Mother Base, yet she makes clear, by initially escaping her restraints and then voluntarily putting them back on, that she goes with Snake only by her own choice. Yet choice becomes a dubious concept in this instance. She faces Snake killing her outright if she refuses to comply, and she also seems inexorably drawn to Snake after their encounter at the hospital. Importantly, Quiet embodies the appellation given to her by Snake because she never speaks, even under threat of violence, and chooses not to communicate by other means, such as writing. Instead, if the player takes her on missions as a companion, she will hum the same haunting melody from the hospital sequence as a sign that she is in position and has targeted an enemy. Quiet’s vocal articulation of this one particular set of notes and how this symbolizes her trauma proves intriguing, given that this serves, effectively, as her only sustained vocalization in the game. Julie Sutton and Jos De Backer’s work with music therapy as a means to help those suffering from trauma has led them to conclude that: Sensorial play describes the characteristic playing of patients who, while producing sounds, are notable to connect with or experience these sounds as coming from themselves. The patient’s music is characterised by repetitiveness and/or fragmentation. The improvisation cannot really be begun nor ended, and there is no clear melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic development, no variation, and no recapitulation. The patient is perceptually and emotionally detached from his own musical production (76).

An intriguing parallel can be readily drawn between Quiet and this idea of repetition and fragmentation. The song becomes indicative of Quiet, both to Snake and to the player. Indeed, those notes, whenever they occur in the game, represent her as an embodied form. These notes inextricably connect Quiet to her “death,” or at least to her symbolic death as the woman she had been before Ishmael sets her alight in the game’s opening minutes. It is never clear precisely why Quiet selects these notes, whether they meant something to her in the past or whether this is simply a melody she knows. The narrative sets up a complex situation in which Quiet becomes body and sound while existing in her own shell, voluntarily shut away from others to protect them.

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The reason behind her self-imposed silence is that she has forgone the ability to more easily connect and communicate with others in order to save the Boss and everyone else who speaks English. She has been infected with the English strain of the Wolbachia parasite and knows that if she speaks English, she will release that strain. She speaks briefly, and then only once, to Code Talker, an elderly Navajo who was forced by Skull Face to develop the Wolbachia into the biological weapon he envisioned. In response to Code Talker asking if she can understand him, she answers in Diné bizaad, the Navajo language, that she “never will” speak English. She remains isolated from Snake insofar as her inability to more fully communicate with him although they clearly come to love and trust each other deeply. It would appear that Skull Face has managed to create a strain to “infect” nearly every language except for Diné bizaad, leaving Quiet without the use of another spoken language. If she speaks English, she releases the English strain; if she speaks another “activated” tongue, she is infected and becomes a disease vector herself. She chooses not to write, implying that writing lacks the human element, and the game makes much of the idea of being able to communicate freely, to fully express oneself. How could words, the game seems to posit, possibly fully reflect on all she has been through? They simply cannot. There is an optional mission in which Quiet speaks English to save Snake but then immediately leaves Mother Base; however, that mission is not required to complete the game and is missable, meaning the game can be fully completed without the quest ever appearing in the player’s queue. If the player initiates this optional mission, then Snake is sent to rescue Quiet after she has been captured by Soviet soldiers. A sandstorm moves into the location and the Diamond Dogs are unable to locate Snake and Quiet to extract them. Snake has been badly injured, and to save his life, Quiet radios in their location and then presumably goes into exile, given that her actions have activated the English strain of the Wolbachia parasite. Unfortunately, the character of Quiet has been widely derided and mocked by some because of her provocative appearance once Snake encounters her after her injury. Many have misunderstood or failed to even consider why she appears scantily dressed, and in so doing, have failed to apprehend her importance to The Phantom Pain’s narrative themes. When she is first encountered in the game attacking Ahab in the hospital, she is dressed the way one might expect of a soldier. Her outfit for the remainder of the game leaves much of her body exposed. However, the key point that has been often overlooked is that she is

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forced to be on display in this way. It is not her choice to be viewed as sexy or as a seductress. She has no control over her body—akin to how Miller is very debilitated by the loss of his arm and leg—and has had to adapt to the changes in her body caused by The One that Covers. Here is a character whose physical injuries are internal, who dares not speak, and who must contend with an image that is highly sexualized. She wears something like a bikini that is overlaid with some additional covering, including torn lightweight tights, combat boots, her weapon, limited gear, and pouches. Even with those extra items, however, much of Quiet’s body remains exposed, like someone going about her day in relatively scanty beach attire. Tellingly, none of the characters in the game treat her as a sexual object, as one might think. Most of the soldiers on Mother Base are afraid of her and shout insults like “freak” at her. There is a scene, when she is initially in a prison cell, in which she showers while other soldiers appear to be watching with interest. However, this begs larger and more complex questions. Is that the player’s assumption? Are the soldiers just watching someone they perceive as a freak or a threat to Mother Base? After all, they regularly call her “freak” to her face. This scene in particular reveals Quiet’s cruel reality, one in which she is essentially always on display. The changes made to her system as a result of The One that Covers render her both respirating and “drinking” water through her skin as well as gaining nutrients through photosynthesis. Thus, covering her body with more clothing would literally suffocate her. One could even argue, given as much as she does wear, that she is in a constant state of discomfort. Hideo Kojima, on his official Twitter feed4 addressed the issue of Quiet’s appearance over a series of posts made in September of 2013 after images of the character were released. He turned the sexualization of Quiet back onto the player, noting in part: “Once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds,” and “Story touches the misunderstanding, prejudice, hatred, conflict caused by the difference of language, race, custom, culture, and preference. The response of ‘Quiet’ disclosure few days ago incited by the net is exactly what ‘MGSV’ itself is”.5 Her very survival means that she (1) is viewed as a freak, (2) dresses in a manner that would invite, in many situations, sexual harassment or violence, and (3) has no ability to articulate her feelings about this in words (or at least not in English) and does not trust that words alone—without inflection or voice or feeling—will be able to encompass her thoughts. In many

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ways, she has become only a body and is deliberately—following along with Kojima’s assertions—presented that way to the player, regardless of the player’s gender or sexual orientation. The player who immediately sexualizes or objectifies her has reified the idea that without her voice, Quiet is consistently subjected to this sort of gaze. It matters not at all whether that gaze is male or female, and arguments that have sought to divide the assessment of Quiet along these lines, thus dubbing her a subject of male fantasy and therefore offensive, fail to stand up to further scrutiny. Indeed, the argument that Quiet is only a male fantasy creates a scenario in which she becomes objectified by those who make the argument. First, it discounts the possibility of lesbian or bisexual gamers who might find Quiet desirable or attractive and who then are also guilty—following this overall line of argument—of reducing her to being the subject of a gaze. It would also discount any gamer of any sexual orientation who might, at some point in the game, admire Quiet’s body. That does not make them sexist, and it does not mean that those gamers view Quiet only in a sexual manner. Finally, and most disturbingly, this sort of reductive argument about the gaze and objectification fails to consider Quiet’s importance and ends up playing precisely into what Kojima warned against. In addition to Quiet herself being analyzed with little real care or depth, a scene involving her and Snake has also been misinterpreted and maligned across the Internet.6 She absorbs water through her skin, and in this particular scene, it is raining on Mother Base. Quiet exults in the rain on her skin, writhing and splashing bodily in the resulting puddles. While there is obviously and undeniably an erotic tinge to this, what has been lost in some of the considerations of this scene is why. The player embodies Snake, who observes the scene. The two of them have formed a tentative bond that, in this sequence, moves more solidly into the realm of a romance. He joins her, and the two playfully splash each other with water, childlike and for a moment carefree. The scene brings to bear a common theme in the Metal Gear series, that of alienation. Sharon Tettegah and David Wenhao note of previous iterations of the series and the characters Snake and Big Boss that “Snake and Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid are basically unloved protagonists; while they may stumble upon a love interest on the battlefield, there is always a sense that the relationship is fleeting” (24). In the case of The Phantom Pain, no answers are given as to the long-term viability of Snake and Quiet’s relationship. If the player completes “Mission 45: A Quiet Exit,”

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it ends with Snake discovering an audiocassette she has left behind. In it she says, “I wanted to express my feelings to you. If only we shared a common tongue.” This would seem to involve their own separately lived and experienced traumas as much as it does their other barriers to more direct communication. Like Quiet, Kazuhira Miller bears both outwardly visible and inward scars. However, whereas Quiet turns almost introspective and somber about the course of her life after her injury and joining Snake, Miller’s trauma manifests as an increasingly encompassing paranoia and rage. During the time in which Snake was in a coma, and under conditions that are not explicitly detailed, Miller loses an arm and a leg while in captivity and tortured by the Soviets. Additionally, something is wrong with his eyes. He appears to have something like cataracts, and it is implied this injury was inflicted during his captivity. Although he is not blind, the injury has apparently impacted his vision, given that he says the soldiers of Diamond Dogs will need to be “his eyes.” He does not mean this metaphorically because he removes his glasses at this point, for the first time in the game, to reveal the damage to his eyes, which are cloudy and seem to be photosensitive. He always wears sunglasses, no matter the level of ambient light. Symbolically, it could be interpreted that the clouding over, obscuring of his eyes speaks to his increasing paranoia and his constant search for those who would betray them, real or not. The first of the game’s main missions after the “Prologue” involves Snake rescuing Miller from the Soviets. Miller is deeply resentful and angry over what happened to him and, as the game moves forward, becomes increasingly paranoid both of the potential for or imagined betrayals on Mother Base by Diamond Dogs and especially by Quiet, in whom he embodies all of his fears of an enemy who will once again destroy Mother Base.7 Miller’s primary obsession lies with warding off potential threats to Mother Base, and the only way he sees to accomplish that is via more warfare: “For us to survive, we need to expand our organization, and get strong enough that no one can threaten us. So our only option is to fight, and grow, and fight, and grow.” In and of itself, given that they had all been betrayed nine years prior, his attitude is not unreasonable. His paranoia has a base in his own historical reality. However, combined with his other comments about wanting to somehow reclaim the past, the danger lies in his inability and refusal to deal with his injuries, both physical and emotional. Instead, he lashes outward, seeing conspiracies

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and danger where none really exist. Toward the end of the game, Kazuhira gives the Diamond Dogs a speech about their continued quest to eliminate Cipher: “Our brothers are unavenged and the phantom pain he brought us lives on.” For Miller, there is only revenge and constant vigilance. The importance of “The Man Who Sold the World” as the game’s opening song resonates here, reminding the player of the idea of being stuck in the “was and when.” The manner in which Miller deals with his physical impairments offers a marked contrast with how Snake copes with the loss of his arm and with having only one good eye. Snake uses a replacement bionic arm as soon as possible and never seems terribly bothered by the loss of his eye. Ocelot offers the same option of replacement limbs to Miller, who turns them down vehemently, saying, “Forget it. I’ve no intention of relying on bionics. Right now, I need to keep the pain fresh in my mind.” When Ocelot wonders if Miller finds his lack of limbs “inconvenient,” he replies, “Not a bit … but the phantom pain … it never lets up. Do you know how many men I saw die that day? There’s nothing we can do to bring them back, and you expect me to care about getting a measly arm and leg back? Sorry. But my pain belongs to all our dead comrades. I’ll keep living with it for their sake. It’ll guide me straight and true until I’ve gotten them the vengeance they deserve.” Miller carries both literal and symbolic phantom pain, yet instead of attempting to find a resolution, he uses the pain as a visceral reminder of his agony and rage. Research into the phenomenon of phantom pain reveals that “theories that describe phantom pain as a purely neural event and localized perception in the mind have distinct limitations. These theories don’t explain the phenomenon; they just describe it as a purely neural event in a conscious brain. But phantom pain is not experienced in the mind as an isolated perception; it is experienced in the body, by a living human being” (Nortvedt 601). Miller seems to feed off of this particular type of suffering, and rather than finding a way to feel more whole, he deliberately keeps himself in a state such that his injuries are always physically visible, both to himself and everyone else. This phantom pain in Miller manifests not only as a sense of feeling his lost limbs but also in his increasing inability to act as an effective leader on Mother Base.8 His paranoia nearly gets out of hand when Huey Emmerich, responsible for getting the previous base destroyed nine years ago, is discovered to be both a pathological liar and a turncoat. Snake had originally rescued him from Skull Face because Emmerich genuinely

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seemed to need help and because he proclaimed that what had happened previously was not his fault, that he had been tricked as well. Emmerich is again found to be a traitor and is brought for both questioning and judgment to the Diamond Dogs, specifically to Snake. The room where Ocelot, Miller, and Snake question Emmerich and discuss what to do with him feels close and claustrophobic, as it is filled with Diamond Dogs. The soldiers watching become increasingly agitated, to the point at which they could nearly physically tear him apart, in large part due to Miller’s incitement of them. When a cassette tape reveals that an incident similar to this had occurred previously, Ocelot defuses the situation by demanding the Diamond Dogs return to their posts. Miller does nothing to assist or prevent what may easily have become a mutiny. During this confrontation with Emmerich, Miller states to everyone that they “exist outside of the law,” and he turns to Snake for his decision about Emmerich’s fate. Miller appears to want an execution, as he says ominously, “Just give the order … . We’ll handle the rest.” Snake opts to put Emmerich overboard in a raft on the open sea9 without the exoskeleton he must use because he is paralyzed. Miller is angry and begins to yell, now clearly showing he wanted an execution: “This is the enemy! And he’s here … on his knees!” Snake responds, “We are not responsible to judge an enemy.” Upon seeing that Snake will not be persuaded to kill Emmerich outright, Miller leaves the room in fury. This episode taps into the game’s overarching complexity regarding its views on the concepts of “good” and “evil”: those categories are not easily defined. They are made more complex when characters who have reasons for revenge and for anger, those who have suffered bodily and psychological trauma, face situations which stoke their fears. While Cipher is the explicit enemy of the Diamond Dogs, many other relationships are not so easily drawn, for example, those with the child soldiers or with Quiet. Emmerich is certainly a traitor, but he is too weak to act on his own—he needs others, such as Cipher, to act for him. Miller’s pattern of behavior fits traits outlined in recent research on PTSD and its accompanying symptoms, such as paranoia. Alison Gracie and her research team conclude, “Recent cognitive models suggest that persecutory delusions can be seen as threat beliefs which may emerge as a response to the experience of interpersonal stress and trauma (20). Pre-existing negative beliefs about the self (e.g., as vulnerable, weak and unlovable) may combine with threatening appraisals of others (e.g., implying that others

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are dangerous or untrustworthy) to give rise to negative emotions (particularly anxiety), and thereby contribute to the emergence of feelings of threat and paranoia, thus making the formation of persecutory delusions more likely (20)” (281). Miller cannot distinguish between friend and foe, save for those who distinctly act first as Diamond Dogs. How he sorts this is not completely clear, but it appears to be tied in part to the uniform, the idea that he can “identify” a Diamond Dog, while everyone else is an unmeasured quantum and automatically a threat. However, he also does not immediately trust everyone who has served as a Diamond Dog. Given that they had been betrayed from the inside—via Emmerich—Miller maintains a constant state of vigilance and paranoia, which he passes onto the men and women serving on Mother Base by imploring that they must also watch for internal threats. Perhaps the strangest manifestations of trauma and PTSD that the player encounters in the game are through two characters, the Man on Fire and the Floating Boy, given that both possess superhuman qualities bordering on the paranormal.10 The two appear together in the game, but the exact nature of their relationship is only slowly revealed. The Man on Fire is a man named Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin, who has a long history within the game series, not just The Phantom Pain. He harbors a hatred of the Big Boss. Volgin survived and became stronger after he was experimented on by the Russians, and the results of which provided him with his pyrokinetic and nearly superhuman abilities. What drives him, though, is vengeance—vengeance made manifest by his very form. It is via one of the game’s numerous side ops missions that the final resolution of the Man on Fire is found.11 Snake attempts to retrieve the body of the Man on Fire from the Soviets, only to discover that he did not really die (during the events of Mission 20). The Man on Fire makes his initial appearance, along with the Floating Boy, in the chaos of the game’s prologue, in the hospital sequence. The player generally tries to run away from the Man on Fire whenever he appears. In “Mission 20: Voices,” however, the player is finally given a direct opportunity to engage with the Man on Fire, but even then does not successfully defeat him. Given that the Man on Fire can only be slowed or distracted, usually by momentarily extinguishing his flames with water, he functions as a symbolic embodiment of rage, the type of destructive force consuming characters such as Miller, made manifest and nearly hyperbolic for the purposes of exploring the larger narrative concern.

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The player does have the opportunity, eventually, to see the Man on Fire’s story line come to a conclusion, but it ends on a deliberately anticlimactic note, one that distinctly sets aside violence as its point of resolution. The Man on Fire, albeit in a weakened form, goes after Snake at one of the enemy’s strongholds. Although he is thought to be dead, he comes ablaze, seemingly defying death one final time, exemplifying the lack of peace trauma inflicts. As the Man on Fire nears, Snake hesitates and lowers his weapon. When the Man on Fire attempts to strangle Snake, the game flashes, as it does on numerous occasions, to Snake as he was in the hospital, vulnerable and wounded. The Man on Fire changes as well, taking on his original and fully human appearance. This is subject to interpretation, but it appears that at this point the Man on Fire recognizes that Snake is not the real Big Boss, the subject of his hatred.12 However, that does not diminish the significance of the moment. He loosens his hold on Snake, who stands and drops a handful of bullets onto the ground. Immediately thereafter, the Man on Fire falls dead. One of Ocelot’s briefing tapes about the Man on Fire notes, “If Skull Face was right, and a thirst for revenge can turn a man into a demon, and keep the dead alive, then this ‘Man on Fire’ who’s been coming after us ever since you woke up, well, that might just be what’s left of our old friend Volgin.” The symbolic significance is of the pointlessness of vengeance. Whether this is interpreted to mean that the Man on Fire does or does not fully realize this does not lessen the narrative’s message that the type of vengeance that has fueled the Man on Fire for so long is literally consuming. By refusing to engage in one final violent conflict, the Man on Fire, extinguished of flame and finally at peace in death, may have finally achieved a measure of solace that had otherwise remained elusive. The Floating Boy’s story proves perhaps even more tragic, given that he had also been subject to Soviet experimentation, but from the time he was a child. Ocelot reports: The boy, parasitizing the Man on Fire’s desire for revenge, gave him his new abilities in return.” The boy, who the Soviets deemed the Third Boy, has both telekinetic and empathic abilities. Tellingly, “according to the report, the Third Boy was easily influenced by other individuals’ ‘bio fields.’ ‘Evil thoughts’ in particular. They affected his mind like a virus. Extreme anger, or resentment … motives for revenge, in other words.

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Sharon Tettegah and David Wenhao note of the Floating Boy, who appears in Metal Gear Solid 4 using the name Psycho Mantis, “Like the protagonists, Mantis suffers from PTSD, which manifests itself in violent, psychotic tendencies. Psycho Mantis represents the mental indoctrination of soldiers in the war economy, with brainwashing a prevailing theme” (29). Their thoughts about the tragedy of the child’s fate are drawn into further harsh relief by Ocelot: “The boy’s only crime was being born with unique gifts, but he was sacrificed on the altar of war, his life reduced to slavery under other people’s wills. Turned into a living weapon with no will of his own. Eventually, the only emotion he could feel must have been the desire to get revenge for the hand he’d been dealt.” The game’s other message is that persistent war and violence poison and damage the innocent, the children. The Floating Boy is outfitted with the tools of war and insanity. He wears a gas mask— one that appears to be military grade and designed, therefore, to filter chemical attacks—and a straitjacket, though the sleeves are unbound and hang down as he floats. Generally, and especially when he first appears, his arms are outstretched, giving him a cruciform shape and underscoring his existence as a victim of war and exploitation. The Floating Boy is not the only child to have experienced the trauma and horrors of war and violence, and the game considers more plausible and real-world-based examples when the setting shifts to Africa. A major plot point involves a young white boy named Eli, who has adopted the moniker White Mamba, and a group of African child soldiers in the Angola–Zaire border region. This story line begins with “Mission 23: The White Mamba.” Miller’s mission briefing reads thus: Boss, the CFA soldiers deployed to Bwala ya Masa have been annihilated. There are no signs of combat, nor any endemic disease. All the adults just … disappeared. Only children were left. All those kids were ever taught was how to fight, and now they’re free from the control of adults. They’ve become a regular bunch of marauders, raiding nearby villages, beating people, and destroying property. Our contract comes from the government. We’re to locate this “militia,” these kids … and kill them. But I suggest we do this the Diamond Dogs’ way. The government wants to see these raids stop? We can see to that. But not by killing kids. We’re going to disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate them. A DDR operation. To begin with, extract their commander to Mother Base. Once they lose that kid, the one they call “White Mamba,” the rest of the group will fall apart by itself.

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Even though Miller does not seem to particularly like children or the thought of a group of them being housed on Mother Base, he acknowledges the great evil perpetrated on them. His suggested course of action fails to pan out the way he intended, however. Before the player actually reaches Eli, he or she, embodied as Snake, rescues a group of child soldiers being held prisoner in a mine. The Diamond Dogs had originally been recruited to “execute” these soldiers, but were deliberately mislead as to the true nature of the mission and the soldiers. Rather than act strictly as mercenaries carrying out a paid contract, the horrified Snake, with the full endorsement of Ocelot and Miller, records gunfire to pretend that they have executed the children, and then takes them back to Mother Base for rehabilitation. Although the Diamond Dogs exist effectively as mercenaries, they do not function without mercy or a sense of higher morality and as such, as an externally paid army, ironically offer greater consideration to the victims of warfare than the governments of those countries where such atrocities take place. The rescued children do not easily respond to this attempt at reintegration, which is consistent with the results of research into the trauma felt by real child soldiers. Fionna Klasen and her research colleagues explore the specific trauma associated with the experiences of child soldiers, noting: Such experiences have detrimental effects on children’s development. When exposed to unpredictable and uncontrollable danger, a child will immediately react to frightening stimulus with fight, flight, or freeze response without being able to learn from the experience. Resources normally dedicated to growth and development are allocated to survival instead (van der Kolk, 2007). This means they may not be able to complete developmental tasks, for example, the development of secure attachment relationships, of a stable and integrated self-concept, and of the competence to self-regulate emotion and behavior (van der Kolk, 2007)” (1097).

Indeed, the children at first seem amazed by Mother Base and what likely appears to be luxury compared with their previous location. Yet many also rapidly vacillate between fear of their new surroundings and anger at any adult they see. Additionally, Mother Base is not, in many ways, an ideal place to try to rehabilitate child soldiers, a point reiterated by Miller, given that they are an adult army.13 Yet the narrative

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underscores that the men and women of Mother Base are perhaps the only ones who can understand what it means to be consistently exploited. Some of the children appear much more willing to adapt to life on Mother Base—a life where they are given schooling and rules, such as other children of their ages (they are perhaps 8–12 years old)—whereas others seem less able to adapt. The narrative involving the children keeps in focus that “resilience is not defined as a positive adjustment per se, but rather a positive adjustment in the context of high levels of adversity (Masten, 2001)” (Klasen et al. 1098). The children do not speak English, and although the base has a number of different language experts, communication with the children proves difficult at best. This hampers the ability of the children to fully relay their levels of trauma, despite the best efforts of the staff at Mother Base. In addition, the children rely on Eli as an authority figure although he too is an exploited child, and his hatred of everyone on Mother Base serves to further alienate the other children and inhibit their potentially working through their trauma. Aside from the game’s depiction of the mannerisms of the children, as in the case of one child who upon first reaching Mother Base grabs a gun and threatens Miller with it seemingly out of habit, and the fact that the children have been left for dead when Snake initially finds them, much remains up to the player’s inference as to what they may have suffered. Indeed, if the children had been given long expositional dialogues outlining their trauma in detail, their inclusion in the narrative would have felt forced and false. True horror instead emerges from the possibility of what these children, in their totality, would have likely experienced as child soldiers. Research, into real-life child soldiers in Uganda, provides a sense of what the narrative allows these children may have endured: On average, children were abducted at 10.75 years of age (SD = 2.30, range = 5–16 years). All children in the sample were abducted by rebel attacks, one exception being a child born in captivity. Different tasks were assigned to children during their captivity: 41.8% were assigned primarily front-line tasks, for example, fighting, looting, abducting civilians (55% for boys and 26.8% for girls); 28% performed mainly logistic tasks, for example, carrying loads, spying, escorting commanders (34.3% for boys and 20.8% for girls); and 27.7% were assigned domestic chores, for example, cooking, caring for younger children (10.1% for boys and 47.7% for girls). The children experienced several traumatic events. For example, 90.6%

96  A.M. Green of the children were beaten by armed forces, 87.9% witnessed murder, 86.4% were threatened with death, and 25.8% were raped by members of the armed group (22.4% for boys and 29.4% for girls). The average score on the Victim Subscale of CSTQ was 10.26 (SD = 2.30, range = 1-13). Many children were forced to commit atrocities. For example, 65.2% looted houses, 59.1% abducted other children, and 52.6% killed another person (Klasen et al. 1103).

Certainly, these experiences detail only one subset of the global and widespread use of children, both in the modern day and throughout history, as pawns in the war games of adults. Given the horrific nature of the lived experiences of these child soldiers from Uganda, and if one extrapolates out logically that these experiences are not unique to Uganda and that the children in The Phantom Pain would not have fared much differently, then their fictive counterparts in the game are logically not given an easy homecoming or rehabilitation. Quite the opposite occurs. When Snake first rescues the children, they have been locked in a cell inside of a diamond mine. When they see him, they reach their hands through the bars, each producing one or more raw diamonds to offer Snake in exchange for their lives. Snake does not take the diamonds, but Miller notes, “Their lives for a fistful of diamonds, huh? And what happens after that?” The children have existed only as the property of others and think of themselves only in terms of commodification and exchange, exemplified by their belief that Snake will find the diamonds a valuable trade for human lives. Lynne Lamberg explores the complexities of trying to reintegrate child soldiers into their families and communities, noting: In collaboration with UNICEF, the CCF selected and trained 200 activists who worked mostly through local churches to prepare families and communities for the return of child soldiers. Many district officials and local leaders feared child soldiers would be troublemakers; the activists stressed that the former soldiers had been forced to do things against their will and wanted to return. Citing experience in other war zones, they offered reassurance that with appropriate support, former child soldiers could reintegrate successfully and contribute to their communities” (3).

For the child soldiers in The Phantom Pain, their initial reaction is to attempt to buy off an adult using a valuable commodity. They do not mention their families or any desire to return to them, and taken

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together, these omissions may well point to what Lamberg considers. It is not illogical to consider that the children in the game may have known others who did try to escape and return home, only to be rejected. Better perhaps, then, in the minds of the children Snake rescues, to try to buy their freedom in what they consider an equal exchange than to expect compassion or understanding. Despite rehabilitation attempts at Mother Base, the child soldiers eventually leave both the base and the narrative for an unknown fate, but one which hints at an eventually violent end for them all. Ultimately, the children remain under the thrall and influence of Eli, the White Mamba, who at some point takes them under his wing/command and seems to want to create his own force of child soldiers who will not submit to the authority of the adults who had failed, brutalized, and exploited them. Eli’s command of the child soldiers seems to also be partly out of their fear of him, but whatever each of their individual motivations, at the end of the game, they leave with Eli when he steals the wreckage of the Sahelanthropus and commandeers one of the Diamond Dogs’ military helicopters. Although there is something of the “white savior” about Eli—he is white whereas all of the other child soldiers are black—he never seems to hold sway over the children because of his race. Instead, it appears to stem from his physical power and his unwavering hatred toward all adults. Eli’s fate is not a happy one. When he is extracted and returned to Mother Base with the other child soldiers, his reintegration is not successful. Miller notes, “We’ve taken away his weapons and banned him from using his nom de guerre. Apparently, his real name is Eli. He must feel like we’ve stripped him of his whole identity.” While some of Eli’s fury is based on his mistaken belief that he is Snake’s son— he is, instead, a clone of Snake who was created as part of a program to “breed” perfect soldiers and is thus as much a victim as any of the other children—he lashes out at everyone, going so far as to discourage the other children from setting aside war and violence. The Floating Boy seems to eventually bond with Eli—as the two appear together later in the game—out of a combination of Eli’s own seething hatred of Snake and with the world more generally. Both the Floating Boy and Eli are at their cores exploited children, and the Floating Boy is last seen leaving Mother Base with Eli. Although characters like the Man on Fire, the Floating Boy, and Eli serve as antagonists, their roles are minor compared with that of Skull Face, the primary force of evil in The Phantom Pain. However, as has

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been the case with all of the game’s characters, Skull Face does not exist as an otherwise motiveless force of evil. He, too, is a victim of war. During long years spent seething in bitterness over what happened to him, he facilitated the development and now wants to release on the world the Wolbachia vocal cord parasite, which will take away the language of war as surely as it will wipe out language more generally. Forced by Skull Face, Code Talker held a primary role in creating the vocal cord strains, yet even his actions have their origins in his own cultural trauma: Yes. I began thinking minority languages needed some sort of deterrent against dominant languages. In order that they, that their peoples and cultures survive. It was then that I came across literature at the foundation claiming that man acquired language thanks to a type of parasite. One that distinguishes between languages as a precursor to reproduction. If I could just resurrect it, make it more pathogenic … I would have my deterrent against English. But I failed to hide that aim from Skull Face. He noticed. Yes. I wanted to retaliate against the English language! Though never did I intend to actually use it as he planned. You know how the story ends. I was forced to study how to make the parasites compatible with all the world’s languages—all but English.

The game equates language with an inherent part of the self, as in Quiet’s refusal to employ written communication instead of verbal, yet it also deems language the means through which cruelty, war, and aggression flourish. Code Talker’s biography speaks of the scourge of the Indian Schools, which sought to eradicate Native American culture by destroying its languages. Code Talker despises Skull Face and does what he demands to try to protect his people, yet the two men are not so dissimilar in their experiences. While Skull Face is clearly willing to kill untold numbers of innocent people to obtain his goal of a world brought to its knees, devoid of language, he has endured a series of events that have led him to conclude that his way and his plans are the only means to force a global peace: through the constant threat of nuclear war. He says to Snake at one point, “You too have known loss, and that loss torments you still. You hope hatred might someday replace the pain, but it never goes away. It makes a man hideous, inside and out. Wouldn’t you agree? We both are demons. Our humanity won’t return. You. Me. We’ve no place to run, nowhere to hide. And that’s why I’ll show you my demon.” Yet when he

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finally corners Snake and has the opportunity to kill him outright, Skull Face instead wants Snake to understand. He takes Snake on a jeep ride to the location of the Sahelanthropus, which Skull Face wants to deploy as a tool of war, thinking it will essentially serve as the conduit by which the entire world will become nuclear-weapon capable. The Sahelanthropus is armed with nuclear weapons that can be readily deployed, given that the bipedal machine would be easy to use on a battlefield. Skull Face wants to wield it as a tool of fear that would compel nations with adequate funds to buy their own nuclear weapons—presumably from Cipher. Basically, he sees the solution to war as a twofold front: profit from fear, and reduce all national identity constructed via language to nothing. On the long jeep ride to the location of the Sahelanthropus, which the player embodying Snake ends up destroying,14 Skull Face offers insight into his history and motivations: “I was born in a small village. I was still a child when we were raided by soldiers. Foreign soldiers. Torn from my elders, I was made to speak their language… . War changed me. And not only my visage. Words can kill. I was invaded by words, burrowing and breeding inside me.” He then reveals his ultimate reasoning for destroying all languages: “People will suffer, of course—a phantom pain. The world will need a new common tongue. A language of nukes … . Every man will be forced to recognize his neighbor.” Adam Chapman posits, “Conceptual simulations are not only (or even necessarily) a simulation of the past itself but a simulation of discourse about this past. There is a shift here to more considering why things in the past happened rather than recounting what is claimed to have happened” (75). This concept not only allows Skull Face’s motivations to come more fully into their importance but also comments on other thematic plot points, such as the overall reason why the Diamond Dogs function as a private army and the plight of the child soldiers. The game, clearly, takes an overall historical context and overlays it with the game’s narrative. However, it does not always need to point to a specific historical event, as it does with those elements related to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, in order to make larger and more complex assertions about those general types of events. For example, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, which gives rise to the Mujahedeen resistance and then, eventually, to the Taliban, functions as a more pointed critique of interference in the Middle East, asking the player to consider the USA’s continuing and many years-long wars throughout the region. The narrative avoids placing specific blame on the USA, but

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rather posits that although the players change in that part of the world, the results are the same. Such is also the case with Skull Face, who began as an innocent victim of the wars waged by governments far beyond the scope, reach, or influence of a child. The child soldiers are specifically from the Angola–Zaire region in the game, but their trauma and experiences reflect those of child soldiers from around the globe.15 Snake ultimately defeats Skull Face, leading to a decision placed upon the player as to whether or not to kill him. It is at that point no longer a matter of a physical fight. Skull Face lies graphically pinned beneath a steel girder, and Miller and Snake confront a man no longer able to resist or fight. Sebastian Domsch considers, with regard to agency and choice, the perspective that the player takes on the game: If she chooses to save the princess only because she wants to win the game and this is the way to win the game, this is a rational and not an ethical decision. But if all or even only part of the motivation for the choice lies in its ethical value (the player chooses to do something because it is morally good to do this), the choice becomes ethical and thereby narrative. This is why such choices are so successful in giving the player the impression that they are narratively relevant events in a storyworld (156).

His thoughts dovetail in an intriguing manner with the aspect of choice as it relates to the death of Skull Face. This proves to be a false choice in that the player cannot, in practice, actually spare Skull Face. When the player is given the option, upon confronting Skull Face, to kill him or not, even if the player chooses not to, the sequence still concludes in Skull Face’s death. If the player chooses to kill Skull Face, then he or she will be able to fire a few rounds into Skull Face’s dying body, which, as they hit, will lead to flashes of Snake in his vulnerable state at the start of the game. So in this particular case, and especially during the first playthrough wherein the player would not know that the outcome of the sequence is essentially the same, the idea of ethics collides with the games overall thematic exploration of trauma and of revenge. Although the player’s interaction with Skull Face during the sequence in which he and Snake drive to the location of the Sahelanthropus gives Skull Face more of a backstory, it does not necessarily make him sympathetic or worthy of being spared. However, that does not render his final moments any less difficult to witness. Skull Face says “Kill me,” and “Finish me,” essentially asking to be euthanized as he is suffering terribly

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from his injuries. Instead, Miller steadies Snake’s arm and they essentially fire together. They shoot off his arm and leg, mimicking the injuries Miller endured. Each time the gun fires, there’s a flash to Skull Face’s suffering, then to Miller’s missing body parts, and then to Snake, vulnerable in his hospital attire at the start of the game. Eventually, they stop shooting and seem unwilling to deal the lethal headshot, as Skull Face, now horribly mutilated, is breathing his last. Miller pushes a revolver with one bullet chambered on the ground toward Skull Face and tells him to “do it yourself.”16 Later in the game, there is a moment in which Snake sees a ghostly vision/image of Skull Face as they are moving the Sahelanthropus, intended as an instrument of fear and death, showing that revenge—perhaps especially very violent and painful revenge—fails to excise suffering. Parallels exist between The Phantom Pain’s conclusion that trauma becomes indelible, unrelieved by revenge or justness of cause, and Spec Ops: The Line. Holger Pötzsch also considers the more radical take on warfare and its consequences in Spec Ops: The Line, arguing: Although Spec Ops: The Line’s mechanics apparently render a very conventional game experience that is centered upon map-based fighting sequences, the carefully devised narrative problematizes and ultimately subverts the generic procedural rhetoric and its constitutive filters. Upon fighting their way through the remains of Dubai, players are repeatedly exposed to the devastating consequences of the acts of violence unleashed by Walker to complete missions and reach his constantly changing objectives. These acts gradually tear down the moral and mutual trust of Walker’s team and often backfire and lead to increased resistance that enforces yet harsher and more devastating measures by the main protagonist. By these means, the game illustrates at the level of procedure the logics of violence as a vicious circle composed of mutually enforcing conduct and counterconduct, and this way subverts the frames of war set by a consequence filter (163).

He further observes, “This final discovery turns the received plot structure of the genre on its head. Rather than eradicating the main adversary and saving the day, Walker himself emerges as the mad officer he was initially sent out to apprehend and as ultimately responsible for the havoc and destruction surrounding him” (164). The Phantom Pain blurs distinctions between enemy and friend, good and evil, and justice and tyranny.

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Such ambiguity both as to purpose and consequence—and the player’s agency during any of these complex narrative moments—shares much in common with the final confrontation with Skull Face. Each bullet Snake and Miller fire into Skull Face’s body acts as a moment of subversion, each one reflecting on the broken state of these men. Soraya Murray discusses at length how Spec Ops: The Line defies its identity as a military shooter game and does so with specific deliberation. She argues, “Players begin to want to distance themselves from the very figure with whom they are initially encouraged to identify. By situating combat in increasingly fraught circumstances, and creating its hero as an unreliable narrator, The Line weaponizes its core game mechanic of shooting against the genre itself” (38). Her analysis of The Line finds points of similarity and divergence with The Phantom Pain. In the latter game, players never lose the sense of wanting to identify with Snake. Even when he is at his most brutal or violent—arguably during the killing of Skull Face and when Snake has to euthanize a number of infected soldiers on Mother Base—the narrative centers the player’s sympathy and emotional ties to Snake in his struggle, rather than making the player feel external to it. However, The Phantom Pain does share with The Line a sense of violence as repugnant, not something to be celebrated, even upon the defeat of grave global threat like Skull Face. Starting in Ground Zeroes and continuing through The Phantom Pain, Metal Gear Solid V focuses on how its characters have both endured and contended with the lasting fallout of trauma. Whereas some characters, such as Miller, become outwardly aggressive and hostile, others, for example, Snake, guard their trauma more carefully. Snake holds sufficient guilt and anguish over Paz’s violent end that he hallucinates a resolution to her story that allows him to see her well and whole again. Quiet, stripped of voice, bodily manifests trauma at every moment she appears in the game. The child soldiers, on the precipice of new lives, instead follow Eli and the lives of violence that have become familiar to them, even if not wanted. PTSD, the game’s narrative suggests, does not simply come to an end at some undetermined point, and someone enduring the lasting effects of trauma does not simply get over it one day. Hollywood’s culture is deeply rooted in the happy ending—the hero who overcomes adversity, who triumphs over evil, who seems able to shrug off scarring emotional and physical events. Metal Gear Solid V refuses to conform to such narrative conventions and instead asks the player to sit with trauma and PTSD and witness the myriad ways they

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alter personalities. This chapter considers how all the narrative elements of the game find final form in the revelation that the Snake embodied by the player throughout The Phantom Pain has never been the real Snake, leading to one final consideration of fragmented identity and trauma as the game draws to its end.

Notes









1. Even if the player completes the “Wandering Soldier Missions” and the Medical Platform, it is still possible for him or her to miss the scenes with Paz. Paz is found in a room on the Medical Platform that is locked prior to the completion of the first “Wandering Soldier” mission. The player must be observant to notice that one and only one door unlocks, and it is designated by blue lights. It is interesting to contemplate why important scenes exploring how deeply Snake’s actions and perceived failures have scarred him would require consideration to unlock. Given that Snake’s job as the Boss is to instill confidence and loyalty in the Diamond Dogs, he would necessarily want to keep his own sense of failure and emotional pain well buried. As such, the difficulty the player has in finding Paz on Mother Base mirrors Snake’s struggle to keep his trauma hidden. 2. This particular mission is unique in that, unbeknownst to the player, it is being timed. The player does not see a countdown indicating the remaining time available to complete the mission, but is told, via Ocelot, that Miller is in enemy hands and may not live much longer. If the player takes too long to get to where Miller is being held, then the player will find Miller dead and fail the mission. For this reason, the player cannot reasonably explore the game world until after successfully completing the mission. 3. The specific mechanism of this is not explained in full, but it appears that The One that Covers forms a second skin to cover the skin that is lost and damage internal organs, and it forms a symbiotic relationship with its host. When Quiet is examined on Mother Base, Miller confronts her about her internal organs showing evidence of having been burned. 4. Found here: https://twitter.com/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/). 5. The grammar errors in the Tweets are Kojima’s. 6. I am certainly not suggesting that the Internet is—or should be—a place for considered and thoughtful discourse, especially about video games, particularly as found in various blogs, twitter feeds, and YouTube channels. However, mainstream media often provides further publicity for those who assert outrage at scenes like this, without giving those ideas any interrogation.

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7. Convinced as Miller is that Quiet secretly plots the destruction of Mother Base and the death of Snake, Miller goes so far, initially with the help of Ocelot, as to have Quiet tortured before Ocelot finally calls it off. This particular scene is important in that it makes no coherent sense because Quiet is sufficiently skilled and enhanced from The One that Covers to have slaughtered not only Snake but most of the soldiers on Mother Base had she really wanted to. 8. Miller is second in command after the Boss, but given that Snake often deploys into the field, much of the daily management of Mother Base falls to Miller. 9. The base is located on open water near Seychelles. 10. Quiet has some superhuman abilities as a result of The One that Covers. She has heightened reflexes and can move at great speed. However, the game does not treat the parasites’ ability to enhance her in this way as paranormal. 11. This underscores the importance that is placed, in many video games and not just The Phantom Pain, on being a considered and thorough player. Much of the narrative’s exploration of themes is nuanced, and the careless player risks not seeing these deeper connections. 12. It could also be the case that he does believe this to be the real Snake but concludes that violence and vengeance have won him nothing. 13. That does not mean that the Diamond Dogs would forbid young people from serving. Chico is an example of this. The key point here is that the children are victims of trauma and are unable, at this point, to voluntarily or willingly serve as soldiers. 14. They tow the broken machine back to Mother Base, where it is eventually stolen by Eli and the child soldiers. 15. It is interesting to note that the Metal Gear series as a whole has had a prolonged interest in exploring and commenting on the plight of child soldiers. In Metal Gear Solid V, child soldiers cannot be killed, either directly or by accident. For example, if Snake throws a grenade and a child soldier dies, the mission fails and the player must restart it. 16. Emmerich ends up shooting Skull Face.

CHAPTER 7

“Who Are You? Snake? It’s not You . . . Is It?”: Contradiction and Fragmentation at Game’s End

Abstract  The book’s final chapter considers a set of closing thoughts regarding Metal Gear Solid V’s exploration of trauma and fragmented identity. The game’s plot eventually reveals that the player, who supposedly has been embodying Snake, has really been embodying a doppelganger, while the real Snake has slipped past his enemies with a new identity in hand. This plot point coincides with the game’s own defiance of the standard hallmarks of the military-style shooter genre and its careful consideration of the contradictions of history and the role soldiers play as both those who might perpetrate acts of violence and then suffer lasting trauma as a result. Keywords  Identity · Doppelganger · Trauma · Phantom limbs · PTSD The Phantom Pain draws to a close in part by having the player revisit an expanded version of the opening Prologue mission. As the player continues to complete main and side ops, eventually, “Mission 46: Truth— The Man Who Sold the World” appears in the list of possible options. At first, this appears to be an identical run through of Snake’s initial escape from the hospital. However, this proves to be an expanded version, one that returns to the moment at which Snake awakes in the overturned ambulance to find Ishmael gone, and completes the puzzle of Ishmael’s whereabouts. The player discovers that everything he or she has believed to be true following the initial playthrough of the hospital escape has © The Author(s) 2017 A.M. Green, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62749-6_7

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been a carefully crafted lie, one perpetrated on the other characters ingame, but also, as meta-narrative, on the player himself or herself. Snake, as the player has thought of him, is not Snake at all, but a man surgically altered to look like Snake and to take his place so that the real Snake, with a new identity and surgical alteration of his own, can escape his enemies. Snake refers to his double as “my very own phantom,” and through this twinning, this confusion of identities, the narrative presents its final commentary on the fragmentation of identity and the reshaping of it in the aftermath of trauma. Of the real-world relationship between the military, veterans, and military-style games, Peter Mantello observes that “video game industry giants depend on the martial expertise and battlefield experiences of actual veterans as consultants to give their synthetic world authenticity and realism. This crossfertilization of human resources, ideas, and strategies from these once distinct worlds signals the growing ability of the virtual battlefield to reshape civilian and military understandings of future war” (485). In this sense, the line between reality and fiction collapses and identities merge and split, much as they do in “Truth—The Man Who Sold the World.” Myriad gamers may only ever experience war as it appears in a military-style shooter or war game. Veterans may play these types of games both for release and for escape from trauma. Into this, The Phantom Pain posits that identities may be swapped and realities blurred, but not without consequence. The final scenes of the mission end with Snake—but which version is entirely uncertain—covered in blood and punching a mirror after viewing himself in it. Whether this is Snake’s double now suffering from his own lived trauma, the real Snake at some point in either the past or the future, or some other iteration of Snake, a phantom, remains tantalizingly inconclusive. Peter Mantello argues, “Today, political leaders, military planners, defense contractors, corporative advertising executives, and videogame designers are busy building inter-subjective relationships around the virtual battlefield in pursuit of military solutions, corporate profits, and political legitimacy” (484). The muddied sense of purpose Mantello addresses here again asks the player to consider the boundaries between the fictional world of Metal Gear Solid V and the machinations of those who specifically utilize war-themed games for political or propagandistic ends.1 Such a blending of the pursuit of fictional storytelling with the interests of stakeholders such as the government and military speaks to the problem of identity and representation. Holger Pötzsch considers how

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war-themed military shooters can choose to subvert standard expectations in noting: The selective realism of games such as those belonging to the highly popular Call of Duty-franchise, the Medal of Honor-series, or the Battlefieldsequels is a powerful convention of the photorealist F/TPS genre. Most games belonging to the genre follow comparable patterns and tie players to a similarly limited paradigm of possible in-game perceptions and performances. Apart from active ways of playfully engaging and possibly subverting the generic filters introduced previously, also critical and politically conscientious game design can negotiate hegemonic positions and performative as well as perceptual frames in that they reappropriate, or highlight the effects of, conventionalized mechanics and design features with the objective to consciously promote alternative ways of seeing, thinking, and (en)acting (162).

What sets games like Metal Gear Solid V apart lies in their willingness to defy conventional expectations of military heroism and PTSD. In Snake, especially, the player constantly contends with the reality that as heroic as Snake arguably is, he is also a man marked physically and psychologically by the weight of what he has done, who he has killed, and who he has failed to save. Matthew Thomas Payne asserts: Modern military shooters are a popular form of banal war media (Mirzoeff, 2005) that normalize combat spectacle as entertainment in the service of supporting American Empire (Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter, 2009; Hardt & Negri, 2010). If the initial story premise and gameplay design of Spec Ops are painfully banal, its ultimate experiential objectives are not. And therein lies its critique of militainment. Spec Ops is not a parody of military shooters that lampoons tired conventions through representational excess and sophomoric humor (e.g. Duty Calls, Duke Nukem, and Bulletstorm). Instead, the game’s critique is achieved by combining narrative elements with gameplay demands that challenge the conventional military shooter’s basic gaming pleasures” (“War Bytes” 267).

In the same way that Spec Ops: The Line treats its subversion of the military game genre seriously, with a narrative that crushes the protagonist, slowly but surely, beneath the weight of his own actions and choices, so to do both Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain consider their exploration of war, consequence, and trauma seriously. To be certain,

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The Phantom Pain especially can be given over to moments of hyperbole and strangeness—Hideo Kojima’s own self-insertion into a late side ops mission being one example. However, these stranger narrative moments, themselves a hallmark of Kojima’s distinct storytelling style, never undercut the weightier narrative exploration that buttresses everything else that happens in the game. Payne continues: These de facto graveyards contain no shortage of horrors. During one of the game’s grislier moments, Walker’s group discovers the remains of Konrad’s command squad amid an underground mass grave. The team has been tortured and executed. With few exceptions, gamers rarely see depictions of slaughtered American soldiers in militainment. Furthermore, these slumped, hooded bodies sitting before blood-splattered American flags cannot help but call to mind the infamous photos of the detainee abuses at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad, Iraq. Or the scene might, for an older generation of gamers, remind them of the horrors inflicted on US soldiers imprisoned at “Hanoi Hilton” during the Vietnam War (Ibid 271).

In both Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, players are called on to consider the broader implications of both story and setting as they find their real-world counterparts. Paz, tortured and bloodied in her orange jumpsuit, certainly calls to mind pictures of detainees at both Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Snake and Miller, with their limbs lost in combat, could well be stand-ins for the untold numbers of veterans of war who have suffered similar injuries. The “war without end” continues, the game posits, with only the theaters of battle and the identities of the wounded changing. The idea of phantom pain permeates the game’s narrative and is the intended player focus of the entire game, across all its initially seemingly disparate narrative pieces and characters. Phantom pain finds form literally, as Miller and Snake experience the literal loss of their limbs, and symbolically via the continued mental anguish of the characters. The phenomenon of phantom pain can be considered in this way: “Phantom pain seems to anchor the body, which means that it provides ‘bodyness,’ or that the pain has body. In this manner, the pain becomes a reminder of the former whole and functioning body, and the body returns through the pain. One might say, then, that their phantom pain makes these individuals feel embodied and reminds the body of itself” (Nortvedt 602).

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If that is the case, then the conclusion the game comes to is that the only concrete aspect of self left to all of its main characters is a grounding in their past suffering. Matthew Thomas Payne comments, “The drive toward more fully realizing the aesthetic ideals of agency, immersion, and transformation has resulted in more intimate and personalized ludic war experiences over this same time, making possible a ludic subjectivity that represents the transition from the first-person to the firstpersonal shooter” (69). Even though the player embodies Snake almost exclusively through the third-person view rather than the first, the experience is no less personal for that choice in game mechanics. Certainly, it has not been the purpose of this book nor would it be accurate to propose that Metal Gear Solid V would be effective in helping soldiers who are dealing with PTSD. Experiencing the game may or may not be helpful, but such an experience would be so individualized that to try to extrapolate on such a possibility here cheapens the very real damage of PTSD. Corey Mead has investigated the military’s use of video games and asserts, “While they are used extensively in health care, engineering, and other fields, the primary maker and user of serious games has always been the military, which uses them in a number of ways including as training tools for combat and as a form of therapy for returning service members” (n.p.). Of note here and of more specific relevance to the thematic elements explored by the game is the military’s bifurcated exploration of video games and warfare. On the one hand, they are used as training tools to help soldiers become more effective—specifically to kill. On the other hand, they are used to try to help soldiers deal with the aftereffects of combat. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain gets to the heart of that contradiction.

Notes 1. Certainly, video games are not the only popular media form to experience such outside influences and pressure regarding their representations of warfare, especially in American society as it relates to America’s post-9/11 military campaigns and its war on terror.

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Index

A Afghanistan, 3, 17, 28, 29, 40, 41, 46, 47, 63, 66, 99 Ahab, 76–79, 85 Angola-Zaire, 93, 100 Atrocity, 10, 18, 21, 33, 37, 43, 56 B Big Boss, 3, 6, 66, 74, 76, 77, 87, 91, 92 Black ops, 4, 28, 29 Black Ops II, 45, 46 Black sites, 9, 28, 29 Boss, 22, 57, 63, 67, 85, 93 C Call of Duty, 20, 24, 45, 66, 78, 107 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, 20, 24, 45, 66, 78, 107 Camp Omega, 16, 28–30, 33–36, 39 Cassette tapes, 23, 40, 67 Chico, 82 Children, 93–97 Child soldiers, 99, 100, 102

CIA, 3, 9, 29, 35, 45 Cipher, 90 Code Talker, 68, 85, 98 Colonizers, 29, 40, 47 Coma, 3, 24, 37, 43, 60, 76, 88 Cuba, 3, 28, 29 Cutscenes, 8 D Death Stranding, 5, 6 Demon Points, 18, 19, 67 Demon Snake, 16, 19 Diamond, 2, 3, 6, 17, 19, 20, 22, 29, 33, 36, 45, 46, 53, 55–57, 60, 61, 63–67, 69, 74, 75, 85, 88–91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99 Diamond Dogs, 53, 55, 57, 61, 63, 64, 66, 69, 90 Digital narrative, 5, 28, 34, 54 Dine, 85 E Eli, 93–95, 97, 102 Embodiment, 1, 24, 78, 79, 91

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 A.M. Green, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62749-6

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118  Index Emmerich, Huey, 3, 57, 89 Extraordinary rendition, 2, 28, 34, 35 F First-person perspective, 21, 74 Floating Boy, The, 24, 27, 78, 91–93, 97 G Government exploitation, 17 Ground Zeroes, 2–6, 9–11, 16, 18, 21, 24, 27–34, 36, 38–40, 42, 43, 45, 60, 70, 82, 102, 107, 108 Guantanamo Bay, 2, 4, 9, 28, 29, 33–36, 39, 47, 108 H Heroism points, 19, 20 Historical context, 23, 28, 43, 67, 99 History, 5, 10, 24, 27–33, 35, 39, 41, 42, 47, 52, 55, 56, 60, 91, 96, 99 I Ishmael, 76–79, 83, 84, 107 K Kojima, Hideo, 1, 4, 5, 7–10, 18, 86, 108 Kojima productions, 7 Konami, 4, 6, 7 L Language, 3, 32, 45, 74, 85, 86, 95, 98, 99 Lethal, 18, 74, 101

M Man on Fire, The, 24, 27, 78, 79, 91, 92, 97 “The Man Who Sold the World”, 74, 89 Mass Effect, 17 Max Payne, 44 Mechanical, 10, 57, 58 Metal Gear, 1, 2, 4–10, 15–17, 20, 21, 24, 28, 36, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 51, 55, 59, 60, 65, 66, 68, 69, 79, 81, 87, 93, 102, 106, 107, 109 Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots, 60 Metal Gear Solid V, 4, 8, 9, 15, 20, 23, 28, 47, 70, 102, 109 Middle East, The, 9 Militaries sans frontieres, 66 Military shooter, 2, 15, 16, 19, 20, 41, 45, 57, 65, 102, 107 Miller, Kazuhira, 21, 56, 58, 62, 83, 88 Mission 1: Phantom Limbs, 83 Mission 41: Proxy War without End, 11 Mission 43: Shining Lights Even in Death, 2 Mission 45: A Quiet Exit, 87 Mission 46: Truth—The Man Who Sold the World, 105 Mother Base, 5, 6, 19, 20, 43, 45, 46, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 64, 66, 67, 82–85, 87–89, 91, 93–95, 97, 102 N Navajo, 85 Nicaragua, 30, 31 9/11, 9, 34, 40, 42, 43, 56, 57 Non-lethal, 18, 19, 78

Index

O Ocelot, 55, 67, 68, 79, 82, 84, 89, 90, 92, 94 Ocelot, Revolver, 21, 58, 79 The One that Covers, 83, 86 Operation Phantom Fury, 43 P Paranoia, 43, 64, 84, 88, 90, 91 Parasite, 2, 3, 67, 68, 74, 83, 85, 98 Parasitic infection, 3 Paz, 3, 5, 18, 28–30, 33–37, 43, 64, 70, 81–83, 102, 108 Perspective, 21, 22, 30, 63, 75, 82, 100 Phantom limbs, 83 Phantom pain, 1–4, 6, 9–11, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 27–29, 31, 34, 36, 40–44, 46, 47, 51, 54, 55, 57–59, 61, 63, 65, 68, 70, 73, 78, 79, 82, 85, 87, 89, 91, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 106, 108 Physical torture, 36 Physical trauma, 1, 76 Post-9/11, 4, 8–10, 16, 23, 28, 42, 56, 61, 65 Post-traumatic stress disorder, 2, 51 Private army, 2, 3, 6, 22, 53, 64, 66, 99 Prologue, 3, 10, 18, 22, 34, 64, 73, 77, 79, 83, 88, 91, 105 Psychological torture, 36 Psycho Mantis, 93 PTSD, 2, 3, 8, 10, 22, 24, 28, 36, 41, 43–45, 47, 52–54, 56, 59, 66, 67, 75, 81, 82, 90, 93, 102, 109, 111 Punished Venom Snake, 1, 3, 59

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Q Quiet, 20, 58, 60, 64, 65, 75, 83–86, 88, 90, 98, 102 R Rape, 36 Rendition, 2, 28, 34, 35 RPG, 11 S Sahelanthropus, 3, 18, 57, 97, 99–101 Sandinista, 30–32 Shrapnel, 18, 19, 76 Side ops, 4, 64, 69, 75, 83, 91, 105, 108 Silent Hill, 6, 7 Skull Face, 3, 27, 30, 33, 36, 55, 58, 74, 75, 85, 89, 92, 97–102 Snake, 3, 4, 8, 16, 18, 19, 24, 30, 33, 35–37, 40, 43, 44, 52, 55, 57, 59, 60, 62–64, 67–69, 74–76, 79–83, 85, 87, 89, 92, 94, 97–101, 103, 106, 108 Soviets, 28, 88, 91, 92 Spec Ops: The Line, 20, 21, 23, 101, 102, 109 Stealth, 15, 17, 19, 41, 64, 79 Storytelling, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 20, 41, 42, 55, 106, 108 T Terrorism, 4, 8, 9, 28, 39, 46, 56 Terrorist, 30, 33, 35, 39, 42, 43, 54, 57 Third-person perspective, 17, 21, 64 Torture, 28–30, 33, 34, 36, 43, 47, 54, 62, 70, 82

120  Index Trauma, 2–4, 8, 10, 16, 18, 21, 24, 30, 33, 34, 36, 42–45, 51, 52, 54, 56, 59, 61, 64, 70, 73, 76, 78, 80–82, 84, 88, 90, 93, 94, 100–103, 106, 107 Triple A, 7 V Vocal chords, 3 Volgin, Yevgeny Borisovitch, 91 W “Wandering Soldier Missions”, 82

War, 1, 2, 4–6, 15, 16, 22, 24, 28–30, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 54, 55, 59–62, 64, 66, 69, 76, 77, 93, 96, 98, 99, 101, 106–109 Warfare, 1, 2, 16, 22, 24, 43, 46, 55, 59, 61, 64, 88, 94, 101, 109 War on terror, 29, 41, 47 “War without end”, 108 White Mamba, 93, 97 Wolbachia, 3, 67, 68, 85, 98 X XOF, 16