A Design For Life / The Messerschmitt Twins

Electron micrograph of Bacteriophages, Public Domain

Today is exactly a decade since I finished my first play of Metal Gear Solid 2. Or it would have been if I had finished this for the 17th of March.

To begin with, we're not quite what you'd call human.

Back in the 90s I had a lot of shareware and (unbeknownst to me) pirated games. When the PS/1 was replaced with an Aptiva in 1998, I set about porting my stuff via floppy disk. The instant A Drive engaged the screen cut to a blue and red DOS prompt warning me that a virus had been detected. To put it mildly, this was not the most encouraging thing to happen with the brand new computer, as I had a legacy of breaking the old one. This was my first experience with an anti-virus programme and I had never even considered that all those dodgy floppies might be riddled with anything other than the files I put on it. The particular viruses that were detected by Norton (of cross-armed fame) are long forgotten, but in the following years I was captivated by the idea that there's something almost alive in the digital world - unseen technological analogues to our organic processes.

The pre-installed edition of Norton came with a large database of known wild viruses which I quickly devoured. Not much more than a year later the ILOVEYOU worm was all over the news. I had already been messing about with Visual Basic Script in Windows 98 and by this time I was being taught TrueBASIC in school, so I tried my hand at writing viruses. It goes without saying that I didn't create anything elaborate with that literary background - word went round my computing class I was a virus writer, but I never progressed beyond self-replicating batch files that could append themselves to autoexec. For the most part I was writing pseudocode and thinking about how biological viruses could be paralleled in digital form. Like many of my mental diversions it was primarily a thought experiment - I've still got a folder full of decade old text files and half finished .BAT files. Throughout my last year of school the project was how create a digital prion - somehow using a reversed polymorphic engine to bend programmes into replicators rather than modify the virus - all theoretical, in hindsight nonsensical, and far beyond my means. Despite all that, I did get excited when I read this Slashdot story because it reaffirmed my sense that the global networks and the lifeless scripts and programmes flowing across them form something a lot like an extra-spatial ecosystem.

It's not unlike the way life started in the oceans four billion years ago.

Of course, no-one would consider the malware plaguing the internet to be alive. Biological viruses are similarly though of as 'not alive'. Note that while the opposite of 'alive' is 'dead', viruses like the dust building up in my computer's CPU fan were never alive to begin with. The antonyms to 'animate' which thesaurus.com suggests - inanimate, inert, idle, lifeless, motionless, etc. - all describe something more akin to states of dispossession or perpetual absence of anima or psyche - themselves words in search of meaning. No crystal grows without motion and no virus is idle (except when latent). As with languages and dialects, and the light spectrum; there's no neat line cleanly differentiating the gamut of modes of existence. The definition of life rests on the meeting of a number of proposed criteria and viruses fall foul of at least one - that while they operate on the same biological principles as other organic life, they lack the mechanisms to independently operate without parasitising a secondary organism that can direct the chemical processes necessary for life. How something not-alive comes to function as or close to living obviously presents a seeming contradiction unless we consider life a ladder with more than one rung. The self-assembly of lifeless molecules into living organisms would reasonably require a 'guiding hand' if one ignores the fact that the finite possibilities of chemistry make it an inevitability. DNA, RNA, etc are simply sets of instructions for particular chemical interactions and reactions. Hence, 'genetic code' is not simply a stock phrase. The three traditional sciences are often spoken of as a hierarchy of application - biology as applied chemistry as applied physics. These patterns of behaviour predictably occur because biology is organic chemistry and all possible chemical combinations are already fixed and defined by universal constants (ie, the laws of physics). All resultant complexities arise from these primal numbers.

But there are things not covered by genetic information... human memories, ideas. Culture. History.

If organic life can flourish from a puddle of slime of the right composition, what else might form in new analogues of primordial soup? The newest slurry is our own minds, an evolutionary base swirling with observations of causality from which new connections and conclusions emerge. Just as a virus latches onto a means of reproduction, an idea (or meme) propagates from the mind that spawned it through linguistic communication - a broadband mode of transmission relatively new in the history of the human species. With the advent of language emerges human culture; both often spoken of as alive, at least metaphorically, where viruses are considered to fall short. An individual gene is not alive, yet all operate under a system of selection and responsive adaptation that forms a key part of definitions of life. It must be possible to progress incrementally from 'un-alive' to 'alive' simply because all existing life is descended from a common ancestor that must have done just that. This is similar to the paradox that a computer faces at startup - with no instructions in memory the computer cannot begin loading the operating system. The booting process is a sequence in which increasingly more complex code is retrieved and executed to enable the next progression, leading to the final step of loading the operating system itself.

If a virus could take another step up the ladder of life it would necessarily lose its parasitism and cease to be what we term a virus. And if somehow memes escaped their domain and became independent, would a free post-meme behave any different from a host mind parasitised by that meme? Could a computer programmed to execute a set of behaviours and endowed with the capability to simulate its environment, and following by extension a model of itself in that environment (ie, sentience), be just another type of person?

But is that even your own idea... or something Snake told you?

···

For me and many others, MGS2 set itself apart in that while the story arc could be transferred to another medium such as film, the lesson of the game requires the interactive experience in order to deliver the message. This is because the game itself is an example of the system of control (S3) The Patriots establish within the story:

The S3 is a system for controlling human will and consciousness. What you experienced was the final test of its effectiveness.

You accepted the fiction we've provided, obeyed our orders and did everything you were told to. The exercise is a resounding success.

Your persona, experiences, triumphs and defeats are nothing but byproducts. The real objective was ensuring that we could generate and manipulate them. It's taken a lot of time and money, but it was well worth it considering the results.

The player and the character (Raiden) are both shown to have been puppets for the duration of the game. The shared identity prominently breaks in the final cutscene when Raiden throws away his dogtags bearing the player's name. All the kiddies, and even media publications, moaning that they didn't get to play their favourite bad-ass Snake evidently did not understand. Either the game aimed too high or the audience was too low. It was sad to see Kojima pandering to the hate by adding Raidenovitch Raikov into the sequel whose one trait is that he's gay. The rest of the series has suffered as the design choices of Sons of Liberty are desperately retconned into an almost conventional franchise narrative.

Time to discuss the fourth game, which being a PlayStation 3 exclusive excuses me for being late to the conclusion of the infamously convoluted story of the series. There were highs and lows in Guns of the Patriots. The high point, without doubt, is revisiting Shadow Moses and piloting Rex. I didn't play MGS1 until 2 was nearing release and didn't complete it until 3 was being previewed. All the same, when Snake crested the hill overlooking the entrance to the base and The Best is Yet to Come started playing through the snow drift I nearly cried. The low point was the villainisation of the supporting characters from Snake Eater. I don't know whether I've missed something by not playing the PSP games, but I thought the reveal of Zero as the bad guy came out of nowhere. There were also two details that bugged me (a potential third would be the legendarily long cutscenes). The first was the treatment of Solidus, the actual (anti)-hero of the second game, as a decoy and spare parts bin for the second problem - the return of Big Boss. I honestly thought the final scene of Big Boss making amends with Snake was a Jacob's Ladder ending. The entire time Foxhound talked about the "remains of Big Boss" I always thought they were talking about a few test tubes of DNA samples for the treatment of the Genome Army and the rest of him was in an urn that they wanted as a sentimental demand. This is what I mean when I say the demand to tie up a decade of loose threads through retroactive continuity starts to do more harm than good. That said, I did play through a second time soon after completion. At some point I'll need to attempt a back-to-back playthrough of the entire series, but that's like my long standing intent to watch the first two seasons of 24 in realtime.

Based on drafts May 2011 and March 2012
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