 Heralded by many as one of the few auteurs in our medium, Hideo Kojima has transformed the way we think of games as interactive entertainment. He pioneered and popularized the stealth genre, imbued his games with a cinematic flair that has inspired many others to do the same, and is one of the few designers who has tried to push the medium when it comes to exploring themes integral to the human condition. Kojima has acquired an almost cult-like devotion from his loyal fanbase, and his notoriety has extended well past video games, cementing himself as a global icon. His most famous work, the Metal Gear Solid series, exemplifies all his design sensibilities, and has gone on to sell millions of copies worldwide. However, despite his visibility and fame, Kojima has very rarely spoken about his design philosophy, and how he goes about the business of crafting games. Being initially motivated by a desire to become either a filmmaker or author, his game stands out as uniquely expressive in how they blend mediums to craft experiences that are more than the sum of their parts. This background has given him a somewhat unique approach to designing games, with the medium of interactivity becomes a stage for artistic communication. Kojima also blends mechanics and themes in powerful ways, and often uses the language of interactivity to criticize the medium itself, drawing parallels between his work and postmodern meta-fiction. To properly understand Kojima's ambitions as a designer though, we need a firmer grasp of his inspirations, goals, and design philosophy when creating games. As we will explore, this enigmatic auteur's guiding principle of pushing past the impossible has a lot to contribute to our ongoing discussion about the future of game design. After completing Metal Gear Solid 4, seemingly ending the series, Kojima gave a talk at GDC 2009 where he explicitly outlined his design philosophy. Fundamentally, it is about making the impossible possible, by discarding our preconceived notions of design and attempting to scale a so-called barrier of impossibility. This barrier represents any design goal you may have, and the way to overcome it is by using either the hardware, software, or design sensibilities you have at your disposal as tools to ascend this insurmountable peak. However, as we attempt to realize our ambitions, hardware constraints, software limitations, and inefficiencies in design can inhibit us from realizing our dreams. The trick, according to Kojima, is to work within these limitations, shifting our priorities and goals, until we find an alternative way of scaling the barrier of impossibility. For example, when Kojima was tasked with creating a combat game for the MSX2, he realized that the limited number of sprites on screen would make it difficult to craft truly engaging gameplay, given you could only have a few enemies on screen at a time. Instead of an action game, he shifted it to one of avoidance, escape, and infiltration. The hardware limitation shifted the goalpost, and he conceived of a design program that could accommodate this. The themes of avoidance and infiltration were inspired by movies like The Great Escape and the Guns of Navarone, and even at this early stage, we see his love for cinema shine through. This new brand of game required new design heuristics, and so he added dynamic AI that shifted when you were spotted, and enemy range of sight mechanics to realize this fantasy of infiltration. Although Castle Wolfenstein predates Metal Gear as the first stealth game, Kojima and his team's well thought out design popularized the genre, which was functionally akin to a puzzle game of hide and seek. Ultimately, what Kojima did was to shift the mission to one that was more manageable given the hardware limitations at the time, but fortunately, these constraints actually functioned as a catalyst for creativity, generating a new genre in the process. With the second game in the series, Kojima focused on maximizing the return on the stealth concept of the first game by crafting a more robust set of systems that take place over multiple screens with multiple enemy states. The field of view of the guards was expanded to a cone, a radar system was implemented for the first time, and there was now an evasion phase between the binary of being seen and not seen that carried across multiple screens. With the lessons he learned from the first game, Kojima was able to more thoroughly explore the ideas he conceived of in the initial game to craft a more dynamic and immersive game world. The design space of a 2D stealth game was mostly solved with MG2, and the peak he reached was one he thought higher than his initial goal of a robust action game. Here we get a sense of how we climb mountain probable by alternative means. This idea of exploring the space of design is shared by many other scholars. Climbing mountain probable was a book written by Richard Dawkins, arguing for how natural selection can by virtue of its dynamic selection process, craft solutions to evolutionary problems over time without the intention of a designer. The possibility space of design, often called an adaptive landscape, is eventually surmounted by trial and error. However, the irony with games is that there is intentionality with design, there is intelligent design as we navigate our possibility space. The difference is that trial and error happens not across generations, but during the design process of a designer and their team. In his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett expands this idea further by suggesting that there is little difference between the naturally generated products of evolution and the man-made artifacts of human creativity and culture. We are forever conducting search algorithms to find the most adaptive solutions to problems. Kojima is one of the most prolific explorers in this wide field of possibility and the tools we have at our disposal are technology and design engineering. Kojima's next ambition was to craft a 3D stealth game, but he quickly realized that the MSX-2 was ill-equipped to realize this mission. However, when a new piece of hardware came to market, the PlayStation, suddenly this new peak of design was within reach and so Metal Gear Solid 1 was born. With a new dimension came new possibilities for crafting-engaging gameplay, which he explored by examining what the implication of 3D design meant for stealth gameplay. Conceits like going into walls and ducts, dynamic camera angles and a first-person view were suddenly made possible by this new dimension. Metal Gear Solid 1 was also the first game to feel truly cinematic by incorporating cutscenes, pacing techniques and more explicit homages to cinematic properties. Once again though, when it came to expanding the possibility space of design in the 3D realm, the PlayStation 1's hardware proved limited and so Kojima awaited the arrival of a new piece of technology that was rumored to be unprecedented in pure computational power. However, when the PlayStation 2 released, it was far from what Kojima and many others had anticipated and so Kojima had to adjust accordingly. Initially driven by the idea of crafting a realistic game, Kojima shifted his priorities once more to that of a more immersive one. The goal with Metal Gear Solid 2 was to craft a more grounded sense of place, so there were higher fidelity graphics, shadows, weather effects and interactive objects embedded in the world, all of which could be used in the gameplay as well. He used motion capture for the first time and also added many more actions to the mechanical repertoire, whether hanging off ledges or holding up enemies. Everything in the game was devised with the intent of fully immersing players in the tanker or big shell environments. So with Metal Gear Solid 1, Kojima had to wait for new technology to realize his vision, whereas with Metal Gear Solid 2, he shifted his design priorities after realizing the hardware wasn't powerful enough to accommodate his prior vision. With Metal Gear Solid 3 though, Kojima created a new game engine on an existing hardware to realize a new design goal, crafting a natural environment. The idea for Metal Gear Solid 3 came from mapping out the possibility space of the series on a 2D axis, one axis designating open world vs. closed games and the other artificial or natural environments. MGS 1 and 2 were mostly varying degrees of man-made and so with Metal Gear Solid 3, Kojima located a new area of possibility space to explore, a jungle environment. With this constraint in mind, Kojima came up with the survival mechanics of the game, where you have to consume flora and fauna to maintain your stamina. The game's natural environments would serve as the preliminary infiltration phase of a more standard Metal Gear game, as you make your way through dangerous natural environments on your way to an enemy base. Shifting to this brand of gameplay didn't come without its problems though, amongst them being a now antiquated camera system and a less fluid framerate. Regardless, Metal Gear Solid 3 was still a technical achievement and quite a departure from previous games. Kojima thought he was done with the Metal Gear series at this point, but fan demand for a conclusion to the drama brought him back once more for Metal Gear Solid 4. Again though, much like with Metal Gear Solid 2, he waited for a new console which he anticipated to be much more powerful than it actually was. His ambition was to craft the ultimate stealth experience, harnessing what he assumed to be the practically limitless power of the PlayStation 3. Again though, the reality was quite different, and so this ambition was thwarted in a way Kojima illustrates quite comically here. Once more, Kojima shifted his priorities to create a different kind of stealth experience, one where you had to sneak through a battlefield as two opposing sides fought one another. Not only could you use enemies against each other, but refined versions of prior mechanics including the Octocam system and enemy alignment mechanics were introduced. With a more refined combat system too, a pure action-oriented playstyle was now possible. Metal Gear Solid 4 was completed and was framed as the culmination of the series in the GDC talk he gave, but we all know what happened after that. Kojima went on to create the portable adventure Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker, which created small, adjustable chunks of gameplay suited for a handheld device, and then started work on Metal Gear Solid 5, The Phantom Pain. Given the design of the game was not covered in his talk, it's hard to tell how it fits in our understanding of the series, but we can make some assumptions. It can be seen as a more open-world version of the natural environments in Metal Gear Solid 3, with systemic and emergent gameplay mechanics at its core. Day-night cycles, a robust metagame, and an assortment of viable strategies to tackle different missions were all a part of its possibility space, bringing Metal Gear in alignment with the genres of immersive sims and open-world games. Controversy surrounding the game's production and conflict between Kojima and Konamiya's side, the game was still a success. With the history of the design progression of the Metal Gear series, we see how Kojima has explored the possibility space of the stealth action genre, by working within the constraints of the hardware and adapting the game engine and design sensibilities he brought to bear on each project to climb the mountain of impossibility. As exceptional as his expertise at crafting unique and engaging gameplays, what makes Kojima's games as popular as they are are the themes that they explore through their fiction. The Metal Gear series is fundamentally an anti-war series, one that emphasizes our capacity to break free of the systems of control that permeate our reality and forge a unique identity independent of these fetters. The themes of the game are also intertwined with their mechanics, suggesting there is more to the possibility space Kojima was exploring than just its system. In a discussion he had at the Smithsonian Art Museum, Kojima reaffirmed his idea that games, although they contain art in them, cannot be considered art in the conventional sense, as they are interactive and beholden to user input to bring them to reality. However, he seems less interested in the question of legitimizing games as an art form than he is in using the medium to craft interactive versions of other experiences. On the subject of why his games have anti-war themes, he stresses how his parents live through the horrors of the Second World War, an event that paralyzed the subconscious of the Japanese as a people and turned them away from warfare since. In any case, Kojima's artistic inspiration, historical background, and ambitions all come to bear in the Metal Gear Solid series. The themes of each of the Metal Gear games after the first solid game are gene, meme, scene, sense, peace, and pain respectively. Each of these themes are explored using the game's fiction and their mechanics. For example, Metal Gear Solid 1's gene speaks to how our genes can control our actions, robbing us of agency when acting in the world. This theme is explored through the rivalry between Solid Snake and Liquid Snake, twin brothers who are clones of the legendary hero Big Boss. Liquid Snake mistakenly thinks himself to be the recipient of recessive genes and is clearly haunted by the insecurity of being constrained by his genetic legacy. By pitting you, Solid Snake, against the antagonist, the game deconstructs the idea that we are beholden to our genes and leaves us with the message that we are more than our rigid inheritance. What's brilliant about Kojima's thematic design is he integrates it with the mechanics and narrative of the game. Aside from the obvious anti-war theme of having nonviolent stealth gameplay, scenarios through the game illustrate the theme quite clearly. The much heralded boss fight with Psycho Mantis in Battle Gear Solid 1 demonstrates this well. Mantis is a psychic who can read your moves suggesting we are determined by prior actions and all that we do is predictable. To defeat him, you have to switch controller slots mid-battle so he can no longer read your actions to defeat him. Apart from the sheer ingenuity of this battle, it reinforces the core theme of the game. It shows us how even though we are constrained by our heritage, actions, and lineage, we can break free of it as well. Each of his games explores the theme in a similar way by reinforcing it at multiple levels of resolution. Metal Gear Solid 2's meme is in reference to not just being genetically determined but determined by our culture as well. The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene and is in reference to a hypothesized standard as unit of information that can be transferred from person to person. Metal Gear Solid 2 uses everything at its disposal to show you how easily we are manipulated by the information that permeates our reality. The big shell is a lie, Raiden is a lie, Plisken is a lie, and in a brilliant use of meta-fiction to craft meaning, the game lied to us as consumers that Snake would be the protagonist. Kojima uses both the narrative of the game as well as the context surrounding it to craft meaning. The S3 plan at the heart of the game also proves to be a lie as the entire facade of the big shell itself turns into a facade, one where artificial intelligence is attempting to control us by manipulating information. The themes of Metal Gear Solid 2 were inspired by the postmodern ethos of movies like The Matrix and the deconstructive language of movies like 2001's Space Odyssey. Metal Gear Solid 2 is very often considered as one of the first postmodern games, one that uses interactivity to critique the idea of truth and how we define our purpose therein. Metal Gear Solid 3's scene refers to how context changes what is right and wrong, and so the game takes a standard macho action hero and deconstructs him to the point where he's left a cynical mess by the end. It plays its themes in a much more conventional way than its predecessor, but is still equally subversive in how it deconstructs militarism, warfare, and the line dividing good and evil. All the characters in the game are affected by the scene, much like all the characters in 2 are affected by meme, and the characters in 1 are influenced by gene, highlighting through each persona the nuance of the idea. The boss, a female super-soldier credited as a traitor, turns out to actually be a hero who saved the world. Metal Gear Solid 4 is about sense or will and how we go about interpreting the desires of others and what it means in the context of reality. People's will is lost when they die, and others often tend to misinterpret things in light of their own ambitions. Sense also refers to the loss of one's senses, the desensitization that accompanies being in war, and this theme was infused into the game's narrative mechanics and social commentary. By the end of the series, Kojima starts to dwell more on the cost of war for both nations and individuals, and this bleeds into Kojima's final game of the series. Metal Gear Solid 5's pain applies in many different ways in that game. There is the pain of soldiers when they return from battle. There is the pain that comes from warfare, colonization, and mayhem, perpetrated by all of us, and there is pain in the cycle of violence that transmits through history, whether by gene, meme, scene, or sense. The game speaks to the anxieties of post-colonialism, much like Metal Gear Solid 4, speaks to those embedded in the mechanization and privatization of warfare, and punctuates many of the anti-nuclear themes that pervade the series. By the end of Metal Gear Solid 5, the game breaks the fourth wall and incorporates us into its fiction, asking us to question our role in perpetuating violence and how we might take responsibility for overcoming it. When trying to understand the source of the themes of his games, one can only look to his inspirations as a designer, and in keeping with our understanding of Kojima's integrated approach to design, they seemingly come from other mediums. His cinematic influences include the great escape, the guns of Navarone, the Matrix, Akira, James Bond, and Escape from New York, which express themselves in the espionage mechanics, the character design, and the overarching subversive plots of the game. Less well-documented are some of Kojima's literary influences, including the post-modern meta-fiction of Kobo Abe, and the anti-authoritarian writing of Yukio Mishima. In any case, my treatment of the themes in each of his games has been superficial and reductive, but my point is how the themes of each game drives much of its aesthetics, mechanics, and narrative. Kojima is clearly exploring a possibility space with each of his games, but unlike what he claimed in his GDC talk, it is one that extends well beyond the idea of a game as a mechanical object. Games are a medium for communicating ideas, and Kojima is one of the best exponents of this craft. Whether the mechanics or the themes of his games serve as the driving force of his design is less relevant than the fact that they are mutually reinforcing and intertwined, suggesting an integrated approach to design. This is much like how he conceptualized hardware, software, and design as collaborative mechanisms in the mission to transcend the impossible. Kojima's design ethos is ultimately integrated, interdisciplinary, and rooted in communicating ideas with exacting clarity, which is my sense of why his games are so enduring. At the end of his GDC talk, Kojima spoke about the broader context of his design philosophy, as well as the future of our medium. He suggests that there exists two broad umbrellas of design, one which is designer-driven and another which is technology-based. He claimed that Japanese devs tend to be more design-oriented, and Western devs more technology-based, giving them different tools to overcome barriers of impossibility. This explains the different pathways both cultures have taken and the kinds of games they make as well. In general, I do tend to agree with him, but the generalization cannot be applied too rigorously. There are plenty of Western devs who are design-oriented, and there are certainly Japanese studios that are technology-oriented first. This divide, in my estimation, is much broader than this, though. Not simply dichotomized along regional lines, but existing in every country, studio, and person. Regardless, what is this relationship between technology and design, and how does it impact our medium? Our medium started out as an extension of a computational paradigm, and so much of the foundational work in video games is rooted in technology. Only recently have we conceptualized design along both the thematic and design dimensions, other axes in the possibility space of games. However, as Chris Crawford argues in his book on game design, game development, that being the skills required to create games, whether programming, animation, or sound design, is not what game design is, which is the abstract process of creating a game conceptually. There are still many scholars who write about the need for a game design vocabulary, the most famous being Greg Kostakian's paper, I Have No Words And I Must Design, and we are still searching for a common language to understand the foundations of good game design. In a talk given at IGS in 2007, Kyle Gabler asked the audience to envision a future where there are no more limitations to design, a world where anything we imagine is possible. Presuming we create this future, a possible state of affairs given the growth of technology, game design and artistic expression will be the only barriers to exploring new creative possibilities. In some sense, technology can be seen as a hindrance in realizing our ambitions. However, in the same session, Jonathan Blow cautions us against thinking in these idealistic terms. Blow conceptualizes design space as one that contains all possible games. Our job as designers is to explore this infinite space and bring them to reality. Blow, as a proponent of investigating truth and beauty in game design, suggests we can't simply be creative for the sake of being creative or think of creativity along one dimension. But we must also think of deepening our conception of design and explore the areas we already have with more discerning eyes. This idea aligns more deeply with Kojima's view on the topic, which is an integrated approach. Yes, mechanics, themes, hardware, software and design are all distinct branches of our medium, but they are all intertwined in fundamental ways. Technology is the language of creativity we currently have, whether we like it or not, and true mastery at game design requires an understanding of many other disciplines as well. In a more recent talk he gave entitled Preventing the Collapse of Civilization, Jonathan Blow outlines how much of our technical language and design is mired by vestigial elements that no one fully understands. Given enough time, he thinks mastery at programming and interfacing directly with computers will dissolve, much like how knowledge at building aqueducts and pyramids disappeared in the great civilizations of the past. If we do get rid of technical limitations to design, it will be pure abstraction, but somewhat disconnected from what's actually happening as we design. Furthermore, our programming languages, game engines and design heuristics can all be thought of as our medium's equivalent of tools and tools constrain and inform how we actually go about being creative. Ultimately, it is important we actually understand how and why we are doing the things we are doing as we go about designing. Why do I bring this all up? Well, it is essential to understand Kojima's parting words on the subject of the future of design. Kojima implores us to entertain a more collaborative paradigm between the technical and the artistic aspects of our medium where the synergies activated between the two can propel us towards new heights in design space. This requires people across disciplines, across studios and across cultures work together in harmony, leveraging their strengths and nullifying their weaknesses. There is certainly some precedent for this in the indie sector. For example, Thumper was designed by a two-man team, one of whom was a programmer and another a musician. Similarly, FTL had a very similar configuration between its two designers, showing the power of tight collaboration between technical skill and the craft of design. With someone like Blow, you have a designer who is both an artist and adept at programming, which is possibly why he has been inspired to craft his own programming language to change the rules by which he designs. For those who think this reeks of idealism, a development during the design of Death Stranding, Kojima's latest game, vindicated his thesis all those years ago. After he left Konami on bad terms, Kojima had to relinquish control of the Metal Gear series and was effectively left out to dry. First, he announced a partnership with a company he was on good terms with, Sony, and signed an exclusivity deal to start developing a new IP. However, he had to assemble a team of his own, come up with a new game engine and go about the arduous task of the logistics of his new studio. Fortunately, another studio stepped in to lend a hand in this process, Gorilla Games, who effectively gave Kojima open access to their game engine. As Kojima explains in this interview, this act of kindness moved him to tears, saving him perhaps years from his next project. This modified version of the engine was called the Decima Engine, named after the port of Dejima. The Dutch were moved to Dejima, and during most of the Edo period, the island was the single place of direct trade and exchange between Japan and the outside world. Gorilla Games, incidentally, is a Dutch studio, and so the engine was named to commemorate the union between the two studios. Gorilla Games is a great studio in its own right, but is best known for their ability to push PlayStation hardware to its limits, and hence the union between the West and the East, between technology and design, comes full circle. Kojima even cites how this unity between publisher, technology, and designer inspired the themes of Death Stranding, but how that impacts the game is yet to be seen. Regardless, this story exemplifies much of what has driven Kojima's design ethos. It's about pushing past the impossible by integrating technology, design, theme, and mechanics to push towards new frontiers of understanding. We are all a part of this distributed process, and all of us play a role in pushing the medium forward. Ultimately, nothing is impossible if we work collaboratively, a message that extends well outside the medium of games. I suspect Hideo Kojima wouldn't have it any other way.