 I didn't understand Metal Gear Solid 2 when I first played it. I mean, how could I? I was only a child. References to politics and artificial intelligence flew over my head, fictional abstractions that distracted from the tactical espionage action at the heart of the game. I knew there was something profound there, though, a truth that could be grasped. And so as I grew older I put the pieces together. Hideo Kojima designed the game around the theme of meme, a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, which references a cultural replicator responsible for the transmission of information. We live in the information age and our currency is the meme. To convey this point, the game manipulates, contorts, and feeds information to us at its discretion. We play Snake, surely, in the sequel to one of the most heralded games of all time, but only for a few hours. Instead, we get Raiden. Kojima lied to us. The promotional material never mentioned this. This meta-context permeates all levels of the game. Not only will we fool, so too is Raiden. He is tasked with infiltrating the Big Shell, rescuing hostages, disarming terrorists. It's a conventional power fantasy, surely. But alas, the Big Shell is not what it seems. It is a front for a new metal gear. But wait, this too is a façade. Everything in the game is a design scenario for the S3 plan, Solid Snake Simulator. That's what it's called, right? This entire escapade is an experiment to put Raiden through his paces, to see if they can train a soldier as powerful as Snake. So Kojima is playing with us again. He's drawing parallels between the real world and his fictional one, of the military industrial complex, of the ubiquity of violence and war, and the complicity entertainment shares in reinforcing this cultural meme. The Big Shell is testing Raiden just as he is testing us. We are both playing a game, training ourselves to become soldiers of fortune. Revelations come thick and fast. Every character you meet is living a lie. Peter Stillman can walk. He is feigning his injury. Pliskin is not Pliskin. He is in fact the very Snake we have been trained to be like. What on earth is going on? Things get even weirder. Your primary contacts in the mission rose in the kernel. Start acting strange. Dispute gibberish and nonsense with increasing fervor. Then another revelation. They are AI. They are facsimiles replicating memes. But for what cause? The actual S3 plan. Selection for societal sanity. Memes re-enter here. The entire Big Shell incident was a testing ground to see if human behavior could be controlled, could be manipulated, by playing with information, by altering the context. Commandment by didactic decree will always inspire insubordination. Manipulation is the nuclear bomb of the information age. And so the game is a lie. It isn't what it seems. Just like how a protagonist is also a lie, he has forgotten his own past. Malleable identities, arbitrary goals. This is the domain of video games. Then there is AI of course. There is machine learning and algorithms controlling our actions. You are watching this video because an algorithm fed it to you. Search engines and advertisements and consumer goods and news and our very preferences are shaped by AI. We are awash in the information of others and we have now become the product. In 2001, the internet was in its infancy. But it is now ubiquitous. It is the air we breathe. When you grow up you learn about words. Words like metafiction. When text is aware of its own fictional nature. And postmodernism. A term off-sighted to describe Metal Gear Solid 2. Jean-Liotard proclaimed, postmodernism is incredulity towards metanarrative. There is no truth to be found, only your own meaning. This was the parting lesson of Metal Gear Solid 2. We can create our own memes. And so the game simply foregrounds something about the nature of games and play. It is also a lie. Why is play a lie? Gregory Bateson wrote about how play is like the liar's paradox. It is both truth and lie. When we attack someone while playing, this is not real. Just like how an animal snarling its teeth is not necessarily a threat. To do this, metacommunication needs to happen. We have to signal implicitly that we are playing. But games are also a lie. They are fictional constructions. They are designed artifacts. In fact, they are ones and zeros. They are actually the matrix we were so enamored by. With every game, we change our identities at a whim. In fact, we are actually new cybernetic circuits in games. We are algorithms in a feedback loop as we press buttons, as we stare at screens and as we slowly leave reality and enter the holodeck. We are already living a dystopian future where humans and machines have converged, where the truth of who we are is slowly eroding. So are video games inherently postmodern? Is Metal Gear Solid 2 simply revealing what was true of games all along? This can't be the case, right? Jean-Bapt Rihardt, one of the most famous of the postmodernists, critiqued the matrix because the movie suggested you could distinguish between inside and outside. The real truth of lie is only manifest when we can't tell the difference. But games aren't there yet. We know they are fictional. Except when we don't. Except when we get lost in games for hours because they fulfill our needs better than the real world. Jane McGonagall said reality is broken in her book of the same name, formalizing this inkling. The paradox of postmodernism is that it too is nebulous as a concept. It referred to a form of architecture that challenged modernism, but is more a perspective of skepticism towards grand theories of knowledge. It tells us to doubt what we know, because what we know is always in doubt. In literature, the author is dead. Authorial intent is not where meaning resides. In philosophy, values are relative. There is no objective moral truth. In science, our enlightenment drive towards the pursuit of a singular truth has led to warfare and misery and colonialism. Pick a flavor of postmodernism, deconstruction, poststructuralism. Unearth the lies that permeate your reality. Maybe games are the ultimate form of postmodern text. Are they the art form of our century, best reflecting the paradoxes of the information age? In his book, More Than a Game, Barry Atkins rejects this notion, arguing there is a structure to games. He suggests that there is a postmodern temptation to classify games as postmodern text, because they are interactive, ultrable, and played with. We are choosing, adapting, but just because the player is responsible for narration doesn't mean the designers aren't still narrating. We are co-narrating a story. The state space is vast in games, but it is mapped. We have heard all the jargon. Games are ergodic texts. They require work, but they are still texts that have observable properties. But if we look at Ahab Hassan's list comparing modern properties and their postmodern equivalent, games do seem to embody some of these. Modernism involves purpose, he says, but postmodernism involves play. Play disrupts, it creates, it challenges rules themselves. It is perhaps instrumental in the creation of culture itself. However, it also has a purpose, both in its design and expression, in different individuals and cultures. Modernism has design, but postmodernism has chance. In art, John Cage's 433 illustrates this. The music was the background sound. It was mediated by the chance of the surrounding environment. Games involve design though, but they are often designed to have chance. Contingency is why we even play games, argues Greg Kostykan in his book, Uncertainty in Games. Why would you start a game or a puzzle if you knew you would win? That the conclusion is predetermined. Modernism has an art object, but postmodernism is a process. Games are finished objects we sell as commodities, but as Brian Schrank argues in his book, Avangard Video Games, games and play are an extension of the Avangard traditions. They are about play as a performance art, as a vehicle for social upheaval. Performance art and play have been used by political movements, and so there is no defined game because we are a part of the game, we are a part of the text. Perhaps the way to solve this dispute is to recognize something else about Metal Gear Solid 2, that we are cybernetic systems in play. In his book Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Alexander Galloway argues that game structure how we behave through rules and processes of interaction, they dictate different allegory rhythms of play. When we play universal paper clips, the allegory rhythm is obsessive optimization as you try to make more and more paper clips. However, to break out of this design, we need to break out of the system and realize what we are doing will simply destroy the universe. Play is paradoxical, it is both modern and postmodern. It is both to submit to rules and to break the very rules that require submission. Tamer Tabit argues games exhibit a monstrous textuality so designers can pick and choose between both sides of this dichotomy. We can create linear narrative based games or allow for chance, uncertainty, and choice. We can have games like chess with perfect information or poker with hidden elements. We can author levels or we can use AI to procedurally generate experiences. We can tell players what to do or we can let them choose their own goals. We can let them define their own telos, their own purpose. But then there are games that revel in this duality between games and play, between submission and subversion. Undertale requires efficiently getting to the end as we do in all RPGs, but doing so leads to a bad ending, not to mention the murder of innocence. The witness asks us to obsessively pursue puzzles to seek enlightenment at the end of the rainbow, but does enlightenment truly lie at the summit of journey's end? In Bioshock, we submit to the designer's desires without question and the fictional character we inhabit is manipulated. In Spec Ops, military shooters are turned on their head, killing never solves anything. In all of these games, we have rhythms of play but are also given the capacity to break free of these algorithms. They allow us to truly discover the meaning of play. Metal Gear Solid 2 was the forefather of all of this. The first post-modern game is another way of saying the first subversive game, the first meta-fictional game, the first game that recognized itself as one. Its relevancy only increases as the years go by because we live in a world now consumed with the very half-truths that frame the game. Simulation and reality are finally starting to blend as the post-modernists foresaw. And so when Raiden rejects us, the player, he is exhibiting perhaps what we need to do in turn. He rejects the mandate of lies, of half-truths and of memes. He forges his own path. He understands that there is no real understanding that there will always be a facade that obscures our interface with what passes as reality. He is no longer submissive and is now subversive. Ironically, he later becomes a cyborg. Literally, he becomes the cybernetic vehicle that we are all slowly adopting, human and machine blending together to destabilize our identity. Play and games are not modern or post-modern. They are in fact paradoxical. Like we said, play is both truth and lie just as Raiden is, just as we are, just as I was when I discovered that the truth of Metal Gear Solid 2 is that there is no truth at all.