The Metal Gear Solid Series

This collection, arriving in the wake of the 25th anniversary of 1998's Metal Gear Solid, provides scholars and fans alike with a wide-ranging selection of critical essays on the franchise from diverse disciplinary and thematic perspectives.
With the conclusion of Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid video game series only recently behind us, it is now both possible and essential to study this critically, commercially, and culturally resonant series as a whole. The essays contained in this volume, which are all new contributions from both established and emerging scholars, take up this crucial opportunity to consider and reconsider the cultural, historical, political, philosophical, and aesthetic impact of the Metal Gear Solid games in analyses spanning the series' canonical entries, adding to the understanding of both well-studied installments and under- examined ones.
These contributions connect themes that emerge from the games-such as sexuality and queerness, rhetoric and ethics, and subjectivity and embodiment-while also demonstrating how the series opens up broader questions about ecology, race, gender, militarization, pedagogy, and game design, that demand continued analysis and application. Each essay develops new avenues for theoretical, rhetorical, and political exploration of the Metal Gear Solid series, for Game Studies, and for the study of Popular Culture writ large. As the first collection of critical inquiries into the Metal Gear Solid series, this volume serves as crucial exegesis of and critical companion to any future study of the series by celebrating, critiquing, and critically interrogating its entries' rich cultural and disciplinary import.

Steven Kielich is pursuing a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, USA, and has held Visiting Scholar appointments with the University at Buffalo, USA. His research focuses on representations of violence and the intersections of psychoanalytic thought with 20th-century literature, film, and popular culture. He has published on animated television, the Metal Gear Solid series, and is currently performing research on Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
Chris Hall is Assistant Professor of English at the University of the Ozarks, USA. He works in media studies, literary studies, and critical theory and has published on immigration, COVID, and fascism, as well as on the Metal Gear Solid series and other works of popular culture.