What I learned from playing games

The name of this game is Metal Gear Solid V; The Phantom Pain.

It is one of the games in open-world genre and I was quite impressed by the design of the environment, subtle details and complementary soundtracks to the situations planned to occur along the game. Let's get to the point which led me to write this so called article.

Games are not always merely about violence, at least some games are not, in fact sometimes the worldview intended to be conveyed to the player, laid under the skin of these meaningful games, is quite influencing.

Having said that, this game is about questions like:

What is nation? what is our language? do we change if we speak with another language?

Imagine you were obliged to study and read about these topics, what a boring thing isn't it?

But what if I tell you that fortunately there is game which has Masterfully put these questions in perspective? yeah, as you know, I am still talking about this game. I am talking about The big boss, who is you. He neither can remember his past after waking up in a hospital after 9 years of being in coma, nor he knows his real name. Awful, but not yet!

But how can a game address such philosophical questions?

Few hours into the game, you will find out there is a bad guy in the game, as always!

The goal of big boss is simple, to stop Skullface, the antagonist, from conquering the world by his way. But how skullface is going to achieve such ambitious goal?

well, I am not going to describe every single thing, it would be boring to read.

The game is possibly in the distant future, where technologies are high developed. That is, we have something called parasite in the game, tiny Synthetic creatures, created to infect people with deadly illnesses which will definitely kill their hosts. This hosts are individuals who speak in a particular language, in fact, the parasite adheres to the vocal cords of the infected person, provided that he speaks the language which the parasite is sensitive to that.

The process of infection was quite convoluted, believe me.

With this in hand, the antagonist is determined to decolonize current linguistic colonies around the world, all speaking English, which is not their native language. The aim is to eradicate English and everyone who speaks it. English is weaponized in this game against itself and it arose from its mounting prevalence across the world. As you might expect there are dozens of languages in the game, namely Kongo, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian and etc. So what you might guess is one of the key elements of any person in this game is their language.

Read this precious quote shown at the beginning of the game:

The point is clear, yet you might have some reservations on this matter, now take a look at this:

This all, have ignited the notion of mine of where is our nation really?

Is it only supposed to be a geographical area, which we are born in and spend most of our lives in there? or rather, it is the language we speak, the one thing we should preserve it from being forgotten through the history?

What if one day English becomes that universal language which everyone regardless of their mother tongue ought to learn and speak it?

What if our national identity is nothing but the language we speak?

Perhaps, through the history of myriad countries the one thing has never changed was their language, contrary to the area of their grounds which they might have gone through battles to secure them.

Think about it and if you wanted to get in touch with more materials in this concern, read this ACADEMIC article based on this game, published in 2018.

https://www.ledonline.it/index.php/transmedialiteracy/article/download/1125/1151