Script 2 of 2! How Does Metal Gear Solid's Codec Actually Work?

As stated in the last post, here's script 2 of 2 for the month—again, the video portion should hopefully be coming in the next week, and again you won't be charged for it when it's done, as this script will be going through as a paid post instead (basically means I can actually work on this stuff and sleep knowing I can pay my rent next month, haha).

This one was fun though, and parts of it might make more sense when the video portion is done, but it uses the codec from Metal Gear Solid (I've had these games on the brain lately) as a jumping off point to examine our tolerances for contrivance and inconsistency between different forms of media. What starts as an examination of a very specific feature of a specific game, ends up widening to broadly examine the concept of "winning the battle but losing the cutscene," and how interactivity changes what we're willing to look past. I had fun writing it, and hopefully you'll have fun watching it when it's done.

I seriously cannot thank you all enough for your continued support and patience—I really would not be able to do this work without it. You allow me to keep going with the channel and I am eternally grateful for that.

Now though, I've basically been stressing, writing the equivalent of a dissertation (as well as working on several other scripts, including this one) for what feels like forever now. I'm going to take this opportunity, now that I have made these posts to update you on where things are, to sleep for a long time... before getting right back to work, haha.

Thank you so much once again. You rule!

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As you can tell from a video I uploaded recently, I’ve had Metal Gear on the mind a lot lately. Honestly, going through the games again has been a thoroughly joyous experience – a couple of these represent some of the earliest games I ever fell in love with, and that love has absolutely endured. As much as some angry commenters might argue otherwise, I feel like I know this series inside and out.

And yet, despite that familiarity, that enthusiasm for the series that has lasted for basically a quarter of a century at this point, this recent playthrough saw something catch my eye in a way it hadn’t previously – something that in all my years of playing I’d always taken for granted.

It’s the codec. A foundational part of the franchise’s storytelling – variations on which, throughout the series, have seen our protagonist crouching down to communicate with home base and the wealth of other individuals involved in whatever mission they happen to be on.

It seems pretty simple on the surface – it’s a radio. What more is there to talk about? But for some reason a question burrowed itself into my brain on this playthrough, that ended up sending me down a particularly wild rabbit hole of a thought experiment, that got me thinking about the medium and how we interact with art more generally. That question being… how does the codec actually work? What are its rules?

See, in the original Metal Gear Solid, the codec is explained as a device which supposedly stimulates the bones of your inner ear, which I suppose is meant to mean that there isn’t some kind of speaker system involved - enemies around you can’t hear what you’re saying unless they manage to tune into your specific frequency.

It’s sometimes referred to as nanocommunication thanks to the injections of nanomachines our protagonists are routinely subjected to, and the seemingly increasing role said technology seems to play in facilitating this kind of covert networking (among many, many other things, to the point that it has long since become a meme), and as such it is frequently touted as a more secure means of talking to someone else – one away from prying ears. Once switched to, there are instances in which someone who was previously eavesdropping is suddenly cut off from what’s being said.

In that sense, it seems as if the codec facilitates a kind of… mutual mind-reading? But there are also multiple instances in which people are just normally talking over the radio? I mean, Iriquois Pliskin is able to tell Raiden is “wired with nanomachines” based purely on his interaction with the colonel after their first encounter with Vamp.

Plus, you’d have to imagine that these panels of the characters speaking aren’t actually visible to the characters themselves, because it’s basically just a regular phone call, right? One going on inside a person’s ears? Except… it’s not, because there are instances where plot points and story twists are revealed primarily through the codec’s visuals, like the reveal that McDonell Miller is actually Liquid Snake, or when Snake tries it on with Mei Ling. I’ve seen talk that the novelisation explains this by saying there’s a separate device worn on the wrist that has a video component, but at no point is this referenced or even remotely visually hinted at in any of the games.

And also, time just seems to stop as these conversations take place, because they can be activated during battles, with people giving you information on that specific battle supposedly happening  the confines of this radio environment.

I mean hell, in Snake Eater we aren’t even talking about some potential future tech here – Snake is wearing, talking through an actual, physical radio. It’s not like there is zero thought given to the various conundrums brought up by this confusing technology – in that third game the devs rely far less on mandatory radio conversations to break up gameplay, instead trying to find ways to better convey the information via other, more potentially plausible means.

And so, with all of that information in mind, how does the codec actually work? Well… it doesn’t. At least not in any manner that explains away any of these glaring narrative issues. But also… that’s fine. Hear me out.

See, I don’t think that we as players particularly mind that there’s no definitive throughline explaining every single aspect of this technology, primarily because our tolerance for contrivance in games is different to that of other media.

And by that I don’t simply mean that games are somehow lesser than other artforms, more prone to plot holes, or more juvenile in their writing or whatever, and that there’s inherently some failing of games to account for all of this stuff – I really do mean that the contrivances we excuse in games are just different to those found in other art. All art, to greater or lesser extents, is contrived – it’s just that the interactivity of games definitively changes the rules on what we’re willing to let go of and that which we aren’t.

Look, in games there’s this loose concept of “win the battle, lose the cutscene.” It’s this idea that you fight particularly hard to whittle down a boss’s health or successfully escape or whatever, only for the subsequent cinematic to show your character giving up or taking a severe blow or generally being brought low in some way. These represent moments in which the player’s control is taken away from them, only for something terrible to happen in the ensuing chaos.

These moments often represent key points of dramatic tension, in a very traditional sense – you know, what is drama without conflict? Without struggle? A character simply emerging victorious in every situation would be boring – you need to be able to surprise an audience, introduce peril and stakes to get people emotionally invested in what’s happening on screen. In film and TV, these moments might make for some of the most pivotal, effective moments in the presentation.

But in games, as a player, there’s the added issue that you’re also looking at these scenes through the lens of the mechanics, the rules that got you to this point. That is to say, why could my character endure a million gunshots before now, but this one in particular happened to have a different, much more severe effect? Why is my character suddenly tired when my health was full? Why wasn’t I given a chance to keep going? Hell, it could be something as simple as a player character giving into the whims of another, when everything about that character’s personality and your interactions with them suggests that they would do otherwise, and yet you’re given no choice in the matter.

In a similar vein, imagine if The Last of Us TV show had Pedro Pascal trying to endure and carefully navigate the noxious tension of being vastly outnumbered in a scenario where he had to stay as quiet as possible, and yet Bella Ramsey was frantically sprinting about, directly in the line of sight of enemies with no one batting an eye. That would stick out as decidedly odd.

That’s not to say this situation is entirely without dissonance in the game - it’s certainly a thing many players have commented upon. But when the controller is in our hands there seems to be a subtle recognition, a kind of wink and nod contract between player and developer, that this is a necessity of the technical framework we’re all interfacing with, and as such this moment of potential unrealism nonetheless serves as a better workaround than the alternative – in this case the tedium of an escort mission in which you maintain constant responsibility for a person entirely outwith your control.

And control really is the key word here.

The thing is, if the codec was to exist in its weird form in a TV show or film then, well, it would probably back up the assertion made by MGS2’s English translator that Kojima would get laughed out of any writers room. It’s daft, it’s inconsistent – as with so much about the series’ storytelling, it later gets explained away as nanomachines, son.

But we’re not operating in the realm of non-interactive media, and as such consistency of how you interact with something ends up being far more important than making sure its intricacies can all be thoroughly exposited away.

I certainly enjoy these kinds of thought experiments – there’s clearly a market for people digging into the weird eccentricities of games; those elements that exist in the periphery of the experience, that people decide to delve into and construct all kinds of theories as to what their function, their purpose might be in the context of the grander worldbuilding, even though as a developer these kinds of details likely never crossed their mind – it was a means to an end. Elements like this are testament to the fact that when it comes to games, it’s all potentially narrative. Our agency over how we experience whatever aspect of the game we choose to focus on is a key part of the art.

The technical reality is that the codec works because it’s a means of allowing for the great swathes of complicated expository dialogue that Metal Gear Solid is known for, without the need to animate a bespoke cutscene for every single line. The visual component exists primarily to bridge that mental gap, to give players something, anything to look at, a character emoting rather than just a black screen for minutes at a time.

The codec works because you press the select button and know that you’ll be taken to a menu where you can guarantee that time stops and you can’t be spotted. Even though those metaphysical properties aren’t consistently explained if at all, the mechanical rules of how you interact with it remain basically the same throughout the series – and in interactive art, those technical realities are always going to take precedence. Like a game character consistently shrugging off injuries that would represent absolute peril in other media, the audience can fill in the blanks on all the other stuff if they really want to.

In short, for so many reasons, the codec doesn’t work. It doesn’t make total narrative sense. But, as with so many other similarly contrived features of countless other games, it doesn’t have to. In fact, that ends up being precisely why it works.