A Story I Loved: "Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” by Jamil Jan Kochai
- Staff Writer
- Nov 9
- 4 min read
Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima’s magnum opus and most lucrative franchise. I love Kojima as much as any game lover—liker, even—would love him and maybe any writer might distrust him, if only to say that I love him recklessly and, despite my better judgement, love MGS’s storyline as well. There isn’t much you need to know about the games in order to enjoy this piece to some meaningful extent; what’s necessary to divulge I will, and will try to keep brief.
All this is to say that just the title of this story had me biased from the jump. It has many of the elements of what I don’t tend to admire in fiction, with baggy excess, recursive tangents, and a run-on accumulation of clauses, but still I was drawn in.
Here’s the story: the son of an Afghan refugee, Zoya, is a gamer, maybe like any teenage boy is. So, when MGSV drops, he bikes to and from Gamestop, picking it up, plugging it in, and losing himself in Kojima’s open world of 1984 Afghanistan— specifically, the Soviet-Afghan War. Already, the game is fraught: he plays the mercenary soldier as a Soviet in this digitized desert, but this is his father’s terrain, his father’s war, the Soviet occupation of Logar Province rendered in simulation, pixel by pixel. So, when he encounters, seemingly, his dead uncle Watak and his young father within the game, it becomes truly real.
The narrative, in this way, is deceptively small and also somehow daunting in its ambition. It’s about a video game, sure: all this action, all these replays and checkpoints, demonstrate Kochai’s maximalist prose but are nothing remarkable on their own. His sentences stagger, reload, charge again—like the character himself. These sections, when broken, however, open into something strange, tender. The ghosts of his uncles, his brothers, his sister. His father, soft at the door. He has to keep going.
The story certainly isn’t easy to read through a skim, pulling you instead into its manic rhythm willing or not so. Its structure mirrors the gameplay itself. Each clause feels like a respawn, each paragraph an unfinished mission. The reader becomes complicit in this cycle of failure and return, which feels deliberate and punishing and right. And then, suddenly, we are, in fact, playing Metal Gear Solid. As the narrator slips deeper into the sprawling landscape and its algorithmic violence, we are him in every gesture: we play it and are the character being played. The character on the screen is you and not you, because this control—illusory, mechanical—is in every way our own but in no way that matters, in the way we are him and are not him, and this is an opportunity to save them that will never allow them to be saved.
I’d say it works. There’s an honesty to his excess, one that you must wrestle with a bit but that I can ultimately appreciate in its sincerity. The story is and is not what you may call “geek lit”; a cheap term, maybe, but it fits in the sense that the story uses this nerd-beloved game as its scaffolding. Too often referential fiction flatters the in-crowd: this story pushes the boundaries of this, but what I enjoy is that the piece turns this instinct on its head in somehow the same way Metal Gear Solid did in the first place. It reflects the same anti-war sentiments the video game has been praised to death. It’s impossible to say the specific denouncements of violence in this story were exactly what Kojima had intended, and it is the same the other way. What is true to say is that MGSV was, story-wise, the weakest of the franchise, which makes this story even more striking—this “series finale” of sorts was meant to close out a decades-long mythos on the horrors of war and vengeance, but fell short in terms of the semantics of feeling, of the touch and the reckoning with these ghosts so violently made. Kochai’s story feels like the truest ending in this way: this son picking up the controller, becoming his father in this way by turning it into his own battlefield, his own phantom pain.
I don’t know if Kochai set out to rewrite Metal Gear Solid V into something greater than what Kojima delivered— really, I’d be disappointed if he did, because I feel the story is too indulgent in the self to be anything but that. The force of the story is in how personal it is, how intimate, how unrepeatable outside this one father, this one sone (being that one singular aspect of the thousands of stories within the long and tangled horrors of war). We are him and are not him, you being you in your room and you in the screen, the present, and this is not and cannot ever be what MGSV was made to be, but in this moment, for him, you, it serves as what it must. It is a similar story to many immigrant tales in many ways, symbolic of whatever generational mantra that has been passed down as such, and yet it cannot tell us anything about victory, about forgiveness, in its cyclical, claustrophobic familiarity, because this story isn’t meant for it. There is a big idea that cannot be a big idea, in some sense, because Kochai’s story isn’t for a big idea at all.
Kochai as a writer isn’t my favorite, but I respect the reach of his experiment. For me, as well, this may be a slight saving, a salvaging of memory, creating these scenes anew to replay. This last line here asks a question in its statement: what is it to be saved? Because to see yourself staring back at you through that screen, what you see is again what you know, what you’ve known. To find this saving is to be remolded to these inherited molds, and maybe through that cave, this pain can only be lengthened, carried forward.
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