Imagine: Metal Gear for Facebook

Being in the Facebook game industry, I'm often looking for parallels between the rise of the consoles and the rise of the Facebook gaming world. Seeing as I just had the chance to finish the excellent Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker title for Sony's PSP, I thought I'd use this week's Imagine series to look at what Hideo Kojima and his team at Konami could do if they were to create a Metal Gear game for Facebook. Right off the bat, this game won't simply be about porting the Metal Gear Solid games to a web portal like Facebook. I imagine Kojima would look for inspiration within the platform, and within Facebook the ultimate inspiration is the social graph. The social graph is a very personal collection of data about you, your friends and your interactions between each other. This is a theme that is prevalent within the Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4 games, and I think making a game on Facebook would be an opportunity to play with the idea of a game leading you down a predetermined path based on your social status and data. So with these types of themes, what's the essence of the game? I think in this game, you'd play a United States government data expert, Sneak (a play on Snake, of course) who is tasked with retrieving certain data within a system from Facebook. To get access to the data, Sneak needs to enter a virtual world that Facebook has created as a way of managing their immense amounts of data. Fortunately, your real-world counterparts have stolen you a login that corresponds to a high clearance avatar, which coincedentally corresponds to your real world self (in my example, he'd be named Neil) and you must use this avatar to proceed to the high clearance area. This first section would consist of avoiding or incapacitating the other agents that are playing the game as you get to your destination. These other people are Facebook agents that are doing their daily business, and are aware that your avatar is off limits in the system. Once there, you realize, strangely (as strangely as other Metal Gear games), that the high clearance area is just like a Metal Gear game. The odd thing here, is that the enemy characters all have faces and names corresponding to your real world Facebook friends (meaning you as a real world person, breaking the fourth wall completely). As you proceed deeper into the clearance, you start to notice the environment becoming more and more about you, until you inevitably get to the final high clearance area and get the data. You open the vault and discover a picture of your real world self, and a password pertaining to it. Sneak is told to turn off the game immediately and head to "KojimaFacebook.com" and enter the password, and log in with Facebook Connect. As soon as Sneak does this, he sees a flood stream of images and information from your life, and Sneak is told that in fact, the Neil he was playing is in fact an avatar representation of a real "Neil", who exists on a technological plane above Sneak. This Neil controls the world Sneak lives in, and Sneak must accept this or be terminated. He accepts, and the game ends... But in a final bit of text, Sneak explains that he will not be controlled, and promises to start his own system, outside the system. So what does this kind of game look like? I'm thinking the game would leverage Unity3D, and attempt to bring a 3D world into Facebook. The view would be top down, similar to the first Metal Gear Solid for Playstation, and the controls would be ultimately simplified. Arrows to move, control to shoot and space bar to act. The 'act' button will allow you to hide against walls. The gameplay would be a simpler version of the "cat and mouse" game that Kojima so famously models Metal Gear on. I think a game like this, with a story and a rather 'meta' experience, could be a powerful experience for players, especially as their own social context starts to appear in the game and mess with their heads. This kind of application of Facebook data is something I've been thinking about for a while, and if I had a budget, I'd make it!

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Imagine: Metal Gear for Facebook

Neil Vidyarthi

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Neil Vidyarthi