I’ve been on a bit of a Hideo Kojima binge of late, both playing through the Metal Gear Solid game franchise across multiple devices and reading The Creative Gene, a collection of his writings from the last two decades.
The Creative Gene is about our desire to pass along our humanity through not only our genes, but our memes: our personal collection of ideas, customs, and values; it is also about the stories Kojima carries from his favorite films, music, and novels.
He writes that our preoccupation with sharing our memes leads to the collision of ideas and the emergence of new connections between them. To keep up the rate of novel connections and new ideas he encounters, he (a man after my heart) tries to browse a bookstore every day and buy whatever happens to strike him.
In the spirit of the work, I felt compelled to connect ideas from The Creative Gene and what I’ve encountered on my replay of his best-known games.
Joy Division and the foolish genius
Kojima writes at length about his lifelong feelings of loneliness and isolation, and the various ways he has used media to cope with these overwhelming sensations.
For much of his life, he would turn in his darkest moments to the band Joy Division, led by vocalist Ian Curtis, who committed suicide at the age of 23.
Joy Division’s music — and knowing Curtis’s fate — gave Kojima a sense of connection, through the simple knowledge that someone else had lived with the same overwhelming feelings.
Later in the book, Kojima writes of The Genius Bakabon, a surrealist manga that taught him that “non-sense” is really a new sense that you do not yet understand or appreciate. The protagonist’s father is known for statements that seem both foolish and insightful, and Kojima ends the essay meditating on a pair:
“The opposition of agreement” and “The agreement of opposition.”
For whatever reason, my mind flashed to the Joy Division chapter as I chewed over these lines in my turn. In particular, the title of Kojima’s favorite song, the ironically titled “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
Enemies and opposition
We are prone to the narcissism of small differences: when we share things in common with others, the seemingly minute differences remaining can feel all the more important.
Having an enemy therefore means having at least one person in the world that cares about the same things as you.
An enemy in opposition makes us stronger. We must improve to overcome them, often by becoming like them: observing their behavior and imitating what has been working against us.
They even make us appear stronger: for the purposes of ego and propaganda, it behooves our enemies to exaggerate our strengths. As my Twitter friend Visakan Veerasamy captures with numerous examples in this thread, “haters do the best marketing.”
Yet our enemies have no time for our bullshit or reason to go along with our self-delusion. And so it is often our enemies who feel they can openly speak to the things we’re doing wrong, or where we’re being irrational.
“The agreement of opposition” is another way of speaking to the narcissism of small differences. You’re in the figurative arena because of a shared love and level of conviction. Opposition is a mutual connection.
Love Will Tear Us Apart
“The opposition of agreement” is a bit muddier, but here goes — in one sense, it reflects the tension between two positions that creates the demand for agreement in the first place.
An agreement is meeting in the middle, deciding what terms are mutually acceptable. In fact, we often don’t actually reach some shared perspective, but in fact acknowledge that there is sustained disagreement but forward progress is needed nonetheless: “disagree and commit.”
We also sometimes agree with something to signal opposition to something else — see the phenomenon of tribal signaling. We will rapidly take a stance one way or another when we know others care about the issue and our friends and enemies have already made it known which side of the line they fall on.
What looks like agreement often plants the seeds for future conflict. One or both parties didn’t actually get what they wanted, only a set of tradeoffs they could justify tolerating in the here and now.
And so, because we love someone, because they are not our enemy, we will concede to their views, come to some temporary agreement. And down the line, when reality comes crashing down, it can tear us apart.
Relative and timeless enemies
Kojima famously ends his games by having antagonists deliver speeches transmitting the central themes and thesis to the protagonist and player.
At the end of Metal Gear Solid 3, the protagonist’s mentor The Boss delivers her treatise on the nature of conflict and enemies:
The foibles of politics and the march of time can turn friends into enemies just as easily as the wind changes. Ridiculous, isn't it? Yesterday's ally becomes today's opposition.
And this Cold War? Think back... When I was leading the Cobras, America and Russia were fighting together. Now consider whether America and Russia will still be enemies in the 21st century. Somehow, I doubt it. Enemies change along with the times, and the flow of the ages. And we soldiers are forced to play along. I didn't raise you and shape you into the man you are today just so we could face each other in battle. A soldier's skills aren't meant to be used to hurt friends. So then what is an enemy? Is there such thing as an absolute timeless enemy? There is no such thing and never has been. And the reason is that our enemies are human beings like us. They can only be our enemies in relative terms.
The set of people we consider to be our enemies is always in flux. It shifts with the times because the things we care about — the things we love — change, and we change with them.
We only have enemies while we are drawn to opposition, for how it makes us feel and the positive effects it has on us.
If anything, we secretly wish we could have timeless enemies. Kojima’s commentary on America and Russia in the twenty-first century reads differently post-Ukraine conflict than it did in the mid-2000s. Back then, it felt like we were moving on from conflicts with major peers to never-ending imperialist conflicts framed as pruning bad actors.
Setting aside those who simp for Putin, didn’t it feel like Americans in some sense enjoyed having a “big bad” enemy to go up against in 2022? It gave us someone we’re morally better than, that we can use to demonstrate our strength by crushing by proxy. It gave us nostalgia for an American self-image we haven’t felt in a long time.
Moving from MGS3 to its sequels, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain, I was struck that he doubled down on these themes of relative enemies and the appreciation we ought to have for them by translating them into central mechanics. Going beyond merely providing players the option of challenging themselves by playing through their stories without killing enemies, the Fulton Retrieval mechanic lets you airlift unconscious enemies from the field and bring them over to your side.
Kojima is telling his players: if you can overcome the desire to stand in permanent opposition, if you can overcome what it makes you feel about yourself, our enemies, who care about something dear to you as much as you do, could be our allies. It’s our choice.