Metal Gear Solid Act II: Solid Snake

There is great difficulty when approaching the Everyman that is supposed to be Solid Snake. His appearance in subsequent games--most canonical, some not (Super Smash Brothers Melee and the Ac!d games come to mind)--has slowly, almost reluctantly revealed the explosive past and personality of a character who was originally designed to be more transparent. Hideo Kojima explains in an interview: "When I created the main character [Snake], I knew he is essentially the player...I wanted the character to be vague. That way, players will project their own personalities onto the character, and form a stronger connection with Snake." This technique is not unique to games, yet the tropes of transparent characters rarely see such success. Few narratives can readily rely on a blank Everyman, though some do (Moby-Dick is perhaps the greatest example). The result is perhaps crucial to Snake as an avatar.

That isn't to say the character doesn't have personality or a past. The transparency must actually be a translucency, allowing some interpretation to filter through. Games like Doom and Quake are shallow beyond merely repetitive gameplay--their protagonists have no motivation because they require none; their depth is no greater than the thickness of the screen. Snake's storied past is baggage that allows the trip through the frozen Alaskan nuclear waste site to flow more smoothly.

Indeed, the back story that Snake has is rare--it is a continuity that has spanned over five or six console generations, with the occasional offshoot in the mix. More than that, however, is the intricacy and necessity that it has on the character. Snake may have had very little personality when he first parachuted into Outer Heaven on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but, as any remarkable character does, his experiences molded and shaped him.

By the time MGS begins, the patricidal Snake has not only grown older, he's actually retired. His previous exploits, only partially explored in other titles, bear down on him. He sounds irritated that he has been asked to participate in the infiltration of Shadow Moses, and there's a thread of exhaustion going through.

Significantly, Snake is injected with the latest in nanotechnology at the commencement of the game, an action that plays heavily into later games, as well as the convoluted plot upon which he is about to embark. There is more to this injection, however, than transmission of the FOXDIE virus and the requisite nanomachines and polypeptides that keep him from freezing in the Alaskan weather. The insertion of the nanomachines laden with a sleeper virus is a parallel for Snake's role as an active agent being inserted into Shadow Moses. Both have been designed from the genetic ground up to be killers.

Within the gamer theory, this is a representation of the analog being overrun by the digital, the technological subverting the natural order. The penetration is violence, and the end result is a lethal virus that has the precision that has become the hallmark of all technology--violence begetting violence. Perhaps some of the latent fear of video games is a similar paranoia. The needle's tip is small, the pain passing--but the potential for what it could become inside of the host is entirely out of the realm of control. And everything about the Metal Gear series is, in one way or another, about control.

Genes and Nukes

Baudrillard argues that there is a relationship between genetics and nuclear designs*. "The imaginary of representation...disappears in the simulation whose operation is nuclear and genetic..." (2). He goes on to say, "[In the biological] dimension, everything converges and implodes on the molecular micromodel of the genetic code" (35). This is, he observes, the "simultaneous assumption of two fundamental codes of deterrence..." Solid Snake, born of genetic manipulation and the proliferation of nuclear armament, combines within himself both codes of deterrence. In a sense, the clones of Big Boss are more than soldiers par excellence, but rather the "apotheosis of technology" and military. They represent--and Solid more than his brothers or his father--the greater streamlining and reduction that technology attempts to promise.

Snake is born because of nuclear proliferation. His part in the Les Enfants Terribles project comes about thanks to Operations Virtuous Mission and Snake Eater, but those missions themselves are instigated because of the Cold War and the tensions between east and west. Naked Snake, though castrated while a prisoner on the San Hieronymo Peninsula, 'fathers' (arguably) greater causes of warfare and death than the Manhattan Project did. In terms of direct lethality, only Liquid approaches the desire to create as much death as the atomic bombs dropped on Japan did, though the potential for Solid Snake to become his own weapon of mass destruction is shown throughout MGS4. Furthermore, the violence that Big Boss and his sons create is not maintained in one area, restricted to two single acts of aggression. Instead they span decades, causing a tidal wave of violence, counter-violence, death, and global control in the hands of the Patriots.

In the Shadow

But what of Solid Snake himself? His growth as a character and a soldier is significant in the way that he impacts the world. Through canonical reckoning, he saved the world from potential ruin at least five times, with the gamer capable of controlling him through four of those missions. Even his involvement at the Big Shell helped postpone the disaster that the Guns of the Patriots wrought on the planet, and helped prevent the deaths of thousands at the hands of Solidus. Despite this great service to humanity (perhaps part of the reason he was drawn to a group like Philanthropy?), he has always lived in shadow.

Beneath his father's umbra, Solid is one of three clones, but he is not the first snake. His father, somehow twisted from a patriot for his country, becomes the force behind Outer Heaven, a world in which soldiers would always have a place. This dream, inherited from Gene in San Hieronymo, is realized only through the creation of the very weapon that Naked Snake's progeny would fight over in the next generation: Metal Gear. Part of Naked Snake's shadow is Metal Gear, and, by the time the crises at Shadow Moses arrives, it is the only shadow of Big Boss' that has substance. In Operation: Intrude N313, Snake commits patricide, an act that doesn't seem to bother him very much. (Judging from some of Liquid's comments, Big Boss and Liquid had some sort of relationship, during which time Liquid felt his inadequacy as a son--perhaps fueling his hatred for his father and his loathing for his brother, who had the task of killing Big Boss.) Again in Zanzibar Land, Snake grapples with his inheritance: a genetic capacity for murder. After defeating the physical representation of nuclear proliferation, as well as fighting Gray Fox to the death in a minefield, Solid Snake's killing should have reached a catharsis.

Perhaps that is why his involvement on the island is so crucial for him. In terms of his character, his motivation--on the surface--appears to be a willingness to do as ordered, to perform his duties because he is 'asked' to. As Raiden later comments, there must be something that Snake has to motivate him to survive a sneaking mission, "Something higher." But as the mission proceeds, the realization that he has yet to fully escape the long stride of what his father let loose on the world helps to compel him. The impossibility of the task doesn't faze him, though it should. Rather, there is an intrinsic motivator that Snake can never explain, save perhaps through his introductory lament in MGS4: "War has changed."

Snake's Fate

What of fate? What do avatars have to look forward to save a renewal of the battle? A game can be put down, just like a film or a book, and never returned to. Yet the battle always awaits, encoded within the flimsy plastic of the disc or cartridge. What kind of a future does an avatar like Snake have in the darkness of Shadow Moses?

Liquid's observation seems pertinent: "You can't fight your genes, Snake." Genes 'tell' us to do certain things, though it's usually more subtle than an outright declaration. In the case of a fictional character like Snake, his genetic coding is actually digital coding, the compulsion of input streaming from the controller to the avatar. His existence is purely digital, so it fits to have his genes be of the same (im)material. The endless sneaking, hiding, killing--it is all a part of what Snake wishes he could end, what he could stop. This is his great curse: to be good at killing. This ability is necessary schediologically and ludologically, but narratively speaking, it is his greatest sin--to excel at something.

There is a lot of debate about the way real people live, whether or not their lives are predetermined and how much agency or 'free will' actually exists.

As a character, Snake's free will is circumscribed by his genes--traitorous genes that eventually threaten the whole of the world in the form of an eroded FOXDIE virus. While on Shadow Moses, Snake loses his ability to call off the mission, to dismiss the call, to avoid the peril. Only when the game is defeated or turned off can he find escape. In a sense, herein lies the ideal, for who would not wish to be able to 'change the game' or 'switch the channel' on the disasters of life?

As an avatar, Snake's free will is circumscribed by the algorithms that define his actions and movements--algorithms that grow with the technology of the consoles on which his drama is enacted. His time on Shadow Moses can be brief or lengthy, depending on the skills of the gamer. It is not enough that Snake is a skilled spy, one whose best assets are to avoid detection. The gamer's skill must be transmitted to the agent, becoming a puppet with pretended abilities. The fact that Snake cannot become more than what the gamer can accomplish is perhaps more imprisoning than the gamer's lack of accomplishment at the hands of genetic deficiency. At least, for the gamer, he has his parents to blame. But for Snake, he knows not the hand--or, as the case may be, the thumb--that guides him.

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*The atom bomb imploded; the effect of so much mass pushing inward knocked loose atoms from the radioactive elements, sending an outward domino effect in three dimensions. The rogue protons ripple throughout the bomb, splitting other atoms, and multiplying the force of the blast exponentially. Similarly, genetic sciences lead inward, down smaller and smaller until the genes themselves are manipulated. Once forced in the correct way, the domino effect of outward expansion and genetic proliferation continues, kept in check only by the blueprint the DNA itself contains.