An exploration of the influential body of work of Hideo Kojima, creator of cinematic titles such as the blockbuster Metal Gear Solid franchise, Snatcher , and Death Stranding , as it applies to the areas of socially-relevant narratives, cinematic aesthetics, thematically-connected systems, and reflexive spaces.
An exploration of the influential work of Hideo Kojima, creator of cinematic titles such as the blockbuster Metal Gear Solid franchise, which has moved over 50 million units globally, as well as Snatcher, Policenauts, and Death Stranding.
As the architect of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, Kojima is synonymous with the “stealth game” genre, where tension and excitement is created from players avoiding enemies rather than confronting them. Through the franchise, Kojima also helped to bridge the gap between games and other forms of media, arguing that games could be deep experiences that unearthed complex emotions from players on the same level as films or novels.
Drawing on archives of interviews in English and Japanese with Kojima and his team, as well as academic discourses of social/political games and cinematic narrative/world-building, this book examines Kojima's progressive game design as it applies to four key areas: socially-relevant narratives, cinematic aesthetics, thematically-connected systems, and reflexive spaces.
In this work Hartzheim offers a compelling, nuanced portrait of Hideo Kojima (and crucially, his collaborators) as auteurs. Going further, Hartzheim borrows from Kojima’s bag of tricks and breaks the shell of the digital game medium, proposing: Kojima and his team are transmedial auteurs, drawing upon the language of cinema, television, music, and other entertainment to deliver their unmistakable signature. This novel claim is backed by at times enthralling attention to detail and a masterful grasp of concepts from media, cultural and film studies. A must-read for not just Kojima fans, but anyone interested in the very notion of authorship in the first instance. Steven Conway, Senior Lecturer in Games & Interactivity, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Kojima-san has achieved cult status by creating blockbusters that disrupt our expectations and informed ideas about what video games are or should be. Productions from the Kojima Clan highlight the potential of remixing media, agency, and genre conventions to evoke deep immersive experiences that move us beyond the frame of our screens. To experience Kojima's progressive game design, one must learn to follow the director's reflexive cues, regressing to a mere spectator at times, in order to see our ludic worlds and our roles within them in a new light. Bryan Hikari Hartzheim’s book is an essential strategy guide to make sense of this metagame. Carl Therrien, Professor of Game Studies at the Université de Montréal, Canada, and author of The Media Snatcher (2019)
Bryan Hikari Hartzheim is Associate Professor of New Media at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.
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