I never played Metal Gear Solid 2 (mostly because I don’t really play video games) but watching this documentary was very interesting to me. One of the things that came as a surprise to me while watching the documentary was that the makers of the game were Japanese and that got me thinking about the influence of Asian creators in American Pop Culture (which eventually becomes World Pop Culture). I saw an episode of the Netflix series, “Love” and in that episode there was a Korean Director in it that was directing a movie in the series and apparently he was award winning. The phenomenon of Asian creators in Pop Culture just makes think of the amount of Asian creators in various popular media I have experienced but am completely oblivious to.

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          I was also intrigued by the amount of influences/tributes/appropriation that went into the creation of this movie and I was quickly reminded of the “Everything is a remix” video that I watched a couple of weeks ago. So many creative works copy from other creative works but nobody talks about it. I feel that appropriation in ‘original’ creative works should be talked about more often so that people know that even their best pieces of media are rife with appropriation.

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          Another thing that I liked about the game/video was amount of symbolism that went into it. The character designs symbolized something (Who knew that white hair meant that the character was a new player to the game, I just thought things like that were arbitrary),  the tributes to the various things: Titanic, King Kong, Godzilla, Pinocchio, etc.  The act of symbolism in this game, personally, makes the game a lot more worthwhile because it is nice to know that there is a deeper meaning to the situations/scenarios than meets the eye.

    In general I am also very intrigued as to who the project manager for this piece of work was, that person must have had to do a lot of work.

    

        Watching the behind the scenes of Metal Gear Solid 4 was a different take from Watching the behind the scenes of Metal Gear Solid 2. It showed a different aspect of game making than the MSG 2: The technical side. I have several questions as a result of watching the video:

• Do all bosses of big projects have to be perfectionists? (I personally loathe the term ‘perfectionism’ because a lot of the time, a lot of people use that to impede the goal of a project).

• What skills do you have to have as a person to oversee the creative and technical aspects of a big project?

 

        Comparing the two videos, they obviously showed different concepts of planning/creating: The ‘philosophical’ concept which talked about the meaning of things in the game and how things in the came came to be where they were...and the technical concept which showed the nitty gritty of the creation of the game.

        Personally, when I create things, I like to focus on the ‘philosophical’ aspect of creating them because this aspect reflects a phase that you can dream and a lot of things are possible. While I have to undergo the technical aspect for the creation of my products, it is not my preferred aspect because it actually involves doing the actual work and iterating a project (which take a lot of time and effort).