I spent most of last week playing “Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots”. This is because I was bedridden and a game which is accused of having extremely long cinematics by almost all reviewers seemed to be a good game to play (or watch) while I was sick.
There are many things to be said about the game, and many people have already said those things. This is mainly because Metal Gear Solid as a series is quite similar to a train wreck involving a Japanese bullet train, a vintage European steam locomotive, five cars, three helicopters, a truck full of trinitroglycerin, and a bike carrying an unspecified number of ostrich eggs in its front and rear baskets. That is to say it’s most certainly awful, but awful in a very interesting way so that the viewers are usually unable to divert their gaze from the grotesque spectacle. There are many, many things to say.
One of the worst problems with the series, however, is the illness I’d like to call “twist-mania”. Sadly this illness is not unique to Metal Gear series. It’s a horrific disease shared by many video games and by movies made by M. Night Shyamalan.
What is a twist?
A twist is a plot device which usually comes in form of previously unrevealed and unexpected information. This information changes the audience’s understanding of the narrative, the characters or both. A famous example would be Darth Vader’s announcement at the end of Empire Strikes Back. We learn that the antagonist is in fact the protagonist’s father. Therefore our understanding of the narrative changes, our theories about the possible resolution of the story need revising and many things that previously didn’t make sense suddenly do. In short, it is a surprise; something that catches the audience off guard.
When it’s done well, it’s a very nice thing. It can motivate the viewer to go through the narrative once more. It makes the audience go “Wow, I never expected that.” And because it’s usually one of the most memorable parts of a story, people will keep on talking about it. Therefore many inexperienced authors think that the most important part of a story is the twist.
It isn’t. It’s just one of the many devices the author has at his disposal to tell a story.
If we think of the narrative as a multi-layered cake, the twist would be the secret, small, cherry sauce disc hidden in the middle. You will be pleasantly surprised upon reaching it. You will enjoy its taste and tell your friends about it. However if the cake itself tastes awful, no amount of cherry sauce will save it.
The very definition of a story requires that you as a writer have something to say, something to tell. Building a story around a twist is a very risky thing. In the process you might accidentally end up with something good to tell. But more often than not you will make the story a vessel for the twist. And more often than not this results in no story at all, because without the twist, the story becomes meaningless.
A simple method to verify the presence of an interesting story would be to remove the twists from the narrative and reading it again. If the story is still worth reading, then you can rest easy knowing that you have written a good story.
There is a pretty good twist at the end of the movie “Fight Club”. It’s a twist which affects the narrative in far more ways than Luke Skywalker’s parental issues. We learn that one of the main antagonists of the story does not exist at all. But even if you remove this twist, the story remains interesting enough. I have seen people saying that “Fight Club” was like two movies in one and they would have liked both of those movies separately too.
On the other hand, “Sixth Sense” is pretty much written exclusively for the final twist. Bruce Willis is actually dead. If this information is known to you from the start of the movie, the story becomes very boring and not really worth watching, while “Fight Club” would still be an interesting movie with its main twist known.
By now everyone in the gaming community is probably aware of the “Would you kindly?” twist in Bioshock. For everyone who played “System Shock 2” I guess the whole “Bioshock” experience in terms of storytelling was like a prolonged déjà vu. Apart from all the things we expected to happen, does the “would you kindly?” twist really save the horribly patchy storyline? Does anything even remotely make sense? Wouldn’t it be better if the designers focused on the cohesion of the story itself, instead of the -oh so shocking- twist ending?
In the case of “Metal Gear Solid”, things are even worse. If you remove the twists from “Metal Gear” series, you won’t end up with a bad story. Instead you will most probably end up with nothing at all. That’s because Mr. Kojima, like many video game authors, constructed his story entirely out of twists. From the famous “I’m your father!” to the infamous “None of this was actually real!” he uses every single twist in the book. This may sound ingenious to some of you; building an entire story out of twists. But then you’re missing the point.
The point is that the twist is a surprise. Part of the definition of surprise is that you don’t even know it’s coming. When you start bombarding the audience with surprises they will soon start to expect them. And surprising someone who’s expecting a surprise is much like killing a dead person.
So probably the biggest problem of “Metal Gear Solid 4″ is Hideo Kojima, its designer, who happens not to be a writer. Most video game designers naturally don’t know the first thing about writing a story. There is no reason they should.
So the moral of the story is that people should stick to doing things they are good at. When it’s a story you want told, perhaps it would have been a good idea to let it done by a storyteller.