http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/2 ... gin&oref=slogin
全文不翻译了，大家应该都看得懂。。评论结尾部分比较搞。。halo与之相比只是个让你疯狂按动按钮杀人的游戏而已。

Ideas & Trends
The Shootout Over Hidden Meanings in a Video Game Konami/Associated Press, left; Joao Silva for The New York Times
Prepared for Combat A scene from Metal Gear Solid 4. Is there a message about American domination? At right, real life in Iraq.

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: June 22, 2008
         If there’s a subject that’s as contentious as war itself, it might be a video game about war.
      It’sbeen just over a week since the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns ofthe Patriots, the latest chapter in the popular video game series abouta covert military agent named Solid Snake. And already, fans areexchanging rhetorical fusillades on the Internet, teasing out what theunderlying political and philosophical messages of Metal Gear Solid 4might be.
Encrypted within this discussion is a moresophisticated argument about the nascent medium of video games. Can ittell a story as satisfyingly as a work of cinema or literature?
Isthe Sisyphean mission of Solid Snake — to rid the world of a roboticnuclear tank called Metal Gear — a parable about the futility of war orabout its necessity? A critique of America’s domination of the globalstage? A metaphor for the struggle between determinism and free will?If the creator of the Metal Gear Solid series, Hideo Kojima, hasanswers to these questions, he isn’t telling.
“He doesn’t interview very much,” said Leigh Alexander, an associate editor at Kotaku.com,a video game blog. “Sometimes he will speak about it, and other timesit’s left to the critical peanut gallery to disassemble what hisintentions might have been.”
Devoted players have no shortage ofopinions about what Mr. Kojima’s games are saying. The original MetalGear Solid, released in 1998 for Sony’sPlayStation console, combined stealth combat with cinematicintermission scenes, full of dialogue and imagery that directly invokedthe bombing of Hiroshima and the birth of atomic weapons. The gamecalled attention to the scourge of nuclear proliferation, and forcedplayers to consider the morality of their own lethal actions.
Thesemessages were complicated by a pair of sequels: Metal Gear Solid 2:Sons of Liberty, released in late 2001, introduced a shadowysupernational group called the Patriots, so powerful that even thepresident of the United States answers to it. (A commentary on thedisputed 2000 election? The cabal theories of post-9/11 politics?) AndMetal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, released in 2004, explored the coldwar origins of its characters, whose personal stories are intertwinedwith the rise of the military-industrial complex.
“This is ajust-off-center world that gamers can almost believe in,” said RobSmith, the editor in chief of PlayStation: The Official Magazine. “Allthe important world history of the 20th century matches up in ways thatsay, ‘If we’d gone down this path then, this is what we’d now befacing.’ ”
Metal Gear Solid 4, released for the PlayStation 3console, further upends traditional notions of heroism and villainy: inthis game Solid Snake (think James Bond meets Rambo) has agedconsiderably, as have several of his archenemies; the forces he battlesare not the soldiers of identifiable nations but the mercenaries on thepayroll of private military companies. “The issue of good guys and badguys doesn’t exist anymore,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s just: here’s theguys.”
Even as gamers ponder what this symbolism means (an allegory of war in the era of Blackwater Worldwideand stateless enemy combatants?), they are also debating whether thestory of Metal Gear Solid 4 is a satisfying one, and if itsstorytelling techniques are used effectively.
“You get socaught up in just figuring out, Does this story need to be here?” saidStephen Totilo, an MTV News reporter who covers video games. “That’snot a question you wind up asking yourself when you’re reading a novel.Of course the story needs to be there! Otherwise you don’t have anovel.”
Players like Shawn Elliott, the senior executive editor of the gaming Web site 1up.com,have criticized the game for its preachiness, and for its reliance onlengthy cinematic interludes that can run 30 minutes or longer.
“Itcan basically become a movie for long stretches,” Mr. Elliott said.“It’s not necessarily a game catching up with movies, but a game kindof cheating and using a language that isn’t native to its own medium.”
Othersobject to the sheer density of the story, spanning seven games releasedover 20 real-world years, that players are asked to master. “Let’s justsay it’s not something any of us gamers are nearly as used to doingwhen we’re playing a game as when we’re reading a novel,” Mr. Totilosaid.
Players can skip over the storytelling elements in Metal Gear Solid and still play the game.
But unrepentant fans like Ms. Alexander of Kotaku.com argue that,coherent or not, the narrative of Metal Gear Solid 4 is an inseparablepart of the “package experience” that makes it an evolutionary stepbeyond fare like Halo 3, a first-person shooting game designed to soothe itchy trigger fingers.
MetalGear Solid, Ms. Alexander said, “has the characters and the narrative,the symbolism and the metaphors, and all of the lore that ties ittogether,” whereas Halo is popular “not because of any of itsperipheral elements or anything else about it, other that you shootpeople.”

[ 本帖最后由 wuqu 于 2008-6-23 16:23 编辑 ]

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