On Fan Work, or, Second Floor Abasement

I had the idea of turning Brian Gilbert's Kojima Generator worksheet into interactive software almost as soon as my buddy Chris sent me the link to it shortly after it was published last November. I never actually did the worksheet myself, as I didn't want to go through the trouble of filling out eleven pages and referring back to sections and all that jazz. And yet, I did think it would be a great exercise for me to turn it into a Unity project where I could learn about logging user inputs. One can't find a better illustration of ADD than a willingness to spend weeks turning a worksheet into a series of ones and zeroes rather than twenty minutes of just filling the worksheet out.

I was tinkering with a different game project at the time, and so I put the idea on the back-burner. And there it stayed, until last month. I had just released Impress Conference and was looking for another, even smaller, project to get some practice with, one that didn't deal in such up-to-the-minute, depressing subject matter as the United States' spiraling pandemic. I quickly came back to this idea: quick, relatively easy, fun. It ended up being a little more complicated than that.

I decided on using Metal Gear Solid's Codec screen as basis of the visuals at the beginning of the project. The idea was slightly more "ambitious": I would create all my art assets as a tribute and imitation of the original game, so that it could be its own standalone work. That obviously ended up not happening. Originally this was because of time constraints. This was intended to be a quick and easy project. I only wanted to spend as much time as was necessary to get it out the door, and since my main purpose was to simply adapt the worksheet into a usable interface, original artwork was beside the point and would only delay its realization.

Once the interface was up and running and generating names, however, it didn't feel "done." I've become adamant about seeing projects through to completion, and this wasn't something I was content to just be an exercise in shifting data around. Coming from a writing background I tend to shortchange the importance of visuals,  and I wanted to be sure this got the polish it deserved.  I had been developing theMGS theme as I developed the piece--the ending, particularly, jumps off from the worksheet into even more solidly MGS territory--and by the time it came to make a title screen I thought: why not just make everything an MGS1 piss-take? Although this is a Kojima name generator and not an MGS name generator, it is with that series, and specifically that game, that Kojima became the closest thing gaming has to a household name. It seemed right to play it as closely as possible, to help highlight the absurdity of the names the player is creating. 

Yet I couldn't get all the assets, nor did I necessarily want to. This was still, at heart, fan work, not a replacement for the game. Rather than try to hide that, however, it made more sense to lean into that uncanny valley of recreation. So where original assets could not be found or wouldn't make sense to use (like the title screen),  I opted to either make parodies of varying elaborateness (the branding, the cadence of Colonel Campbell's frantic yells on the Game Over screen), or else to lampshade the fact that these are not the original assets. Rather than scrounge up some generic sound effects that would never sound "right" when combined with the original game's graphics and music, I simply recorded myself saying what those sounds are or represented ("Beep," "Static crackle, open") with an intonation that suggested the original sound effect, thus strengthening the link to the original work even as it highlights that it is not that and could not be that.

So there's that ADD paradox again: the decision to save time by using the original MGS graphics and music led to me spending even more time making sure that everything surrounding them functioned in some kind of harmony. I spent quite a bit of time on turning Yoji Shinkawa's concept art for other Kojima games into Codec portraits that integrated reasonably well with the ones already in use. One of the most-time-consuming aspects was the "Game Over" screen that spells out the player's Kojima name. It took several tries, and several days, to get the lasers and light flashes to fire reasonably in-time with the letters being spelled out, and it's still not quite perfect.

The question remains: why? Well, it's a fan work. It's a piss-take, but it comes from a place of deep familiarity and affection for the source material.  I played the original Metal Gear Solid when I was fifteen, and it was revelation: not just for the narrative possibilities it suggested in the way it pushed the limitations of PS1 technology to aim for Hollywood-blockbuster storytelling , but for the way it more radically insisted on being a game, in ways that it could only be a game: the fourth-wall-breaking Psycho Mantis boss fight, the button-mashing torture scene, the lengthy Codec conversations that were often completely optional. I've always been a sucker for formal invention, in utilizing the the uniqueness of a given form or medium, and to me Kojima's toying with game conventions and grammar has always been his strongest asset as a creator.

I'm not really a part of "fan culture," as I've always been a bit neurotic about throwing too much money and mental space at corporate creations. And yet I've always felt a twinge of envy for people that let themselves get so wrapped up in something they love (the ones who don't turn into toxic, gate-keeping assholes, of course). The closest I've come is my enduring fondness for the Alien franchise, but if spending a month on a parody of Hideo Kojima and Metal Gear Solid isn't a fan work, then what is? The Kojima Name Generator started as an exercise built entirely on two other peoples' work, but in fleshing it out it became something a little more personal, as perhaps all fan work is.