Associate Professor Bryan Hikari Hartzheim has published Hideo Kojima: Progressive Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding (Bloomsbury 2023).
Hideo Kojima: Progressive Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding is an exploration of the influential work of the game designer Hideo Kojima, creator of cinematic titles such as the blockbuster Metal Gear Solid franchise, which has moved over 50 million units globally, as well as Snatcher, Policenauts, and Death Stranding.As the architect of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, Kojima is synonymous with the stealth game genre, where tension and excitement is created from players avoiding enemies rather than confronting them. Through the franchise, Kojima also helped to bridge the gap between games and other forms of media, arguing that games could be deep experiences that unearthed complex emotions from players on the same level as films or novels. Drawing on archives of interviews in English and Japanese with Kojima and his team, as well as academic discourses of social/political games and cinematic narrative/world-building, Hartzheim argues that Kojima’s contribution to video games stems from a “progressive design” that is critical of social issues and industrial representations, but must work within the affordances of commercial games. While such a stance reveals its own set of limitations, Hartzheim argues that Kojima’s ambition for games to be taken seriously while still remaining playful has expanded the boundaries for games as an expressive and persuasive medium.
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