Playable Deniability: Biracial Representation and the Politics of Play in Metal Gear Solid
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Published:April 2024
Keita Moore, 2024. "Playable Deniability: Biracial Representation and the Politics of Play in Metal Gear Solid", Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us, Christopher B. Patterson, Tara Fickle
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Chapter 4 considers the Metal Gear Solid series (Konami, 1998–2015), which follows several covert agents as they infiltrate terrorist bases and active war zones. It analyzes the player character Solid Snake as half-Japanese and half-white, locating Snake’s biraciality in the context of Japanese racial formations. The chapter argues that Snake’s racialization premediates the games’ antiwar and antinuclear message in ways that absent Japan itself from the series’ overall critique of global militarism. In so doing, it develops the concept of “playable deniability” to describe the formal processes that allow play to appear free from the historical politics around militaristic violence in Japan. In the end, this research speaks to the ways that specific representations of biraciality preserve the primacy of play—the political inconsequentiality of action—via a racial logic that mediates play.