Get to around the 1:49 mark of the clip and you’ll see that somebody on the Chrome team likes their coffee. And their Kojima Productions crew. And we also find that Snake would be far more punctual, if only he subscribed to Google’s particular brand of task management.

[thanks Re-l!]

That is according to Jeremy Bolt, who is Anderson’s co-producer on Resident Evil: Afterlife. Visiting that film’s set, the site ShockTillYouDrop.com says it spoke to Bolt, who “told us this morning that Paul W.S. Anderson is still circling video game adaptation Castlevania at Rogue Pictures and that they are waiting on a script.”

“Bolt added that he and Anderson would like to adapt Konami’s Metal Gear Solid for the big screen at Columbia Pictures,” ShockTillYouDrop.com added.

You can check out Paul W.S. Anderson’s filmography here but he ain’t no Bergman. Please note that none of this confirms Anderson has anything to do with the Metal Gear project.

Paul W.S. Anderson Still Circling Castlevania [ShockTillYouDrop.com]

No idea on an exact release date or price, but don’t expect this to be either widely available or cheap.

3A Toys Metal Gear Rex [Toyark, via Tomopop]

That’s according to a release from Japanese artist network pixiv—pretty much the overseas equivalent of deviantArt—which has tapped Kojima, Evangelion character designer and manga creator Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, and Twilight manga artist Ryuji Gotsubo to judge a Twilight: New Moon fan art contest.

Kojima, who I’d wager aligns himself with Team Jacob, is reportedly a “huge fan” of Twilight, according to the Anime News Network’s translation of the release. He’ll contribute his expert opinion as well as a signed copy of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, apparently, to the list of grand prizes.

If you’ve got some Edward Cullen fan art lying around—perhaps in the Yoji Shinkawa style—you might want to get a Japanese speaking friend to register with pixiv and submit it on your behalf. Otherwise, expect this contest to be an “only in Japan” kinda thing.

The more cynical of you may see this as an attempt to broaden the exposure of things like Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker to a very passionate fan base. But I’m betting you’re way, way off. Way off.

Eva, Metal Gear Creators Judge Twilight Art Contest [Anime News Network via GameSetWatch]

Matthew Kaplan of GameCritics thinks games have a lot of growing up to do, especially as the median age of gamers inevitably gets older. His essay argues that games, which often involve superhuman or at least athletic protagonists capable of amazing feats, rarely deal with the issues of aging and if so, typically as a limitation only.

But placing a game in the context of someone’s advanced age would deepen both its story, its characters, and the relationships players form with them, Kaplan argues. He goes so far as offering Prototype as a theoretical example, and it wasn’t at all as silly as it sounded at first.

This isn’t an issue of inclusion to the degree that ethnic diversity is; the elderly, right now, don’t game in huge numbers, of course. But there is a difference between growing old and evolving, and for games, including the elderly more would be the latter.

Ah, to be OId and Fragging: Roles for the Elderly in Video Games [GameCritics, Oct. 27, 2009.]

As the median age of gamers continues to rise, I wonder how this will be reflected in the character creation choices made by players. I can only speculate that concern over the seeming physical disconnect between the actions demanded of that character and those we consider typical of the elderly will cause even the oldest players to mold younger, more “able” characters.

Yet this is precisely why we need to re-examine what it means to be “able” or an active agent in an escapist fantasy. I ask that aspiring designers consider the following questions with regard to roles for the elderly:

1. Why can’t physical trials reflect the obstacles inherent to growing older while still maintaining their end result of power in addition to experience/success? For instance, why couldn’t Prototype’s Alex Mercer be an elderly man or woman who must wrestle with the newfound power brimming inside them as it conflicts with what they previously considered to be an aging body? Certainly, that is a far more interesting set of physical boundaries for the player to immerse himself/herself in than simply playing as “generic, muscular young male X.” I think the only game that did this even marginally well was Metal Gear Solid 4, but that game addressed age as a constraint more than as a natural characteristic of its protagonist (which makes sense, given that Snake’s aging between Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4 was mostly artificial).

2. Why are the objects of desire in games typically younger males and females? Isn’t an older man or woman worth fighting for? Relationships don’t simply stop after youth.

3. What sort of interesting introspection and character development can come from the dilemmas faced by older men and women? Why can’t a journey of discovery be just as compelling if the character doing the discovering is elderly? More pertinently, why is growing older considered the end of a journey rather than the beginning of one?

Of course, there is always the question of whether an idea for a video game is marketable. However, I ask that creators and storywriters not fall into the trap of stereotyping for the sake of pushing what the nebulous and questionable “market” considers “attractive.” What I have found is most often attractive to gamers is that which most pleasurably defies their expectations.

And when it comes down to it, the word “pleasure” is at the heart of this issue. For all the patronizing glories we confer upon the elderly, we often associate growing older with a descent of condition, away from pleasurable activity and towards death. Surely the process of growing old is not always a pleasurable one, but there is nothing about old age that makes growing up and having fun mutually exclusive.- Matthew Kaplan

Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Here’s what the eminent games designer had to say:

President Obama, who declared ‘A World Without Nuclear Weapons’ in Prague, has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Has the era at last started shifting? The start of the Peace Walker plan? I hope that comes to be.

‘Peace will not walk to you’

‘You must both walk towards one another.’

Pretty bold plug of one’s game, I’d say.

ノーベル平和賞 [Kojima Productions via Go Nintendo]

Written and directed by some guy named Giacomo Talamini, the fan flick claims to be totally non-for-profit and has CG graphics, military vehicles, exotic locales and even a gravely Snake voice.

Though, Metal Gear Solid Philanthropy? Really?

Full flick in the link below.

Metal Gear Solid Philanthropy [Official Site]

During a half-hour backroom chat with Kotaku and Kotaku Japan at the Tokyo Game Show on Friday, sitting beside Metal Gear character designer Yoji Shinakawa and a publicist cos-playing his next game’s female characters, one of gaming’s most celebrated creators amiably discussed his latest works, a curious detail of his past and his hopes for the future. Much of the conversation, covering all three eras, involved Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear series, of course, a series the Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker will continue but not complete.

“I think the Metal Gear story will not end until I pass away,” Kojima said. “But, even then, young people of the next generation will continue the story as they would a classic. It’s basically the story of a master and an apprentice.”

Kojima’s latest Metal Gear is Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a portable adventure that supports multiple players and tells the pivotal story of the master, Big Boss, who would become the nemesis for the hero of the next generation, Solid Snake.

“In Metal Gear Solid 3, Naked Snake became Big Boss, but, in reality, he’s not really the Big Boss yet,” Kojima explained. “Eventually he’s going to become the enemy of Solid Snake. I want to tell the story of how Big Boss began and what changed him.”

Peace Walker is the game that will tell that story, a PSP experiment that finally puts Kojima in direct charge of one of these portable adventures of his Metal Gear heroes. It’s also an early test of a theory he has. “I basically think that the future of gaming is less about platforms and more about cloud-computing, with a super-computer and people connecting to that,” he said. “We wanted to experiment with the idea early on with Peace Walker and have a portable game.”

(Yes, Kojima believes that cloud computing, the technique of users engaging with digital content that is stored and processed far away, is on the rise, “more of a long-term thing before cloud computing is the mainstream of games”. But, no, said Kojima, who has seen his words turned into hyperbolic headlines, “That’s not the main part of this article. That’s just my idea on the future of gaming.”)

We moved to discuss the importance of cardboard boxes as they relate to Peace Walker and his own past.

In Peace Walker, up to four players can participate in missions co-operatively. Among the co-op manoeuvres available, two players can hide together under the series’ signature cardboard box. “I think the cardboard box is what represents Metal Gear in a way, of stealth,” he said. “This time I wanted to emphasise the co-op part through the cardboard box by having two people in it.”

The cardboard box has been an unlikely device for Kojima to utilise to think about things differently. Long before Solid Snake or Big Boss ever hid under a box in a Metal Gear game or trailer, their creator did. He was young. “There was a story in Japanese literature called the Box Man, and, kind of an as an homage to that story, I used to hide under cardboard boxes when I was little. That Box Man book is basically about hiding under a box and looking at the world through that box and having a different point of view. I wanted to experience that, though I’m not sure if it worked.”

Few who have followed Kojima’s work would say he has failed to see the world a different way. He is a fan of a different stripe of video games, saying the only games that interest him at TGS are the non-Japanese ones: Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin’s Creed II. (Well, he admitted, he liked Konami dating game Love Plus, too.) He is the designer of a different kind of game, maintaining a standard of dramatic storytelling and quirky gameplay unique to the Metal Gear series.

And, with Peace Walker, he’s hopeful to promote a different kind of multiplayer emotion.

Multiplayer games was originally cut-throat, the developer explained. “In multiplayer gaming, especially in online gaming, first it was about competition with each other. Then the next level was co-op. But it wasn’t really about friendship. It was about benefiting from your teammates, a give and take kind of thing. But, this, time I want to take it to the next level and to give a feeling of sharing.

“I want players to feel the joy of helping each other out. For example, there’s the game’s life bar. When players are close to each other, it becomes one. Even if one player is dying or weaker, they can help each other. We want to express the strength of friendship through that.”

Huddling under the box might bring the players closer too. But the box can’t fit all four players supported by Peace Walker. Blame PSP memory restrictions, Kojima quipped. “I wanted to have it fit four,” he said before naming a non-programming justification for fitting only two. “In reality, there is not a cardboard box that fits four people. Maybe if it’s a next-gen console I can do four or five or 10 people. And then it probably doesn’t need to be a cardboard box.”

A Kojima mention of the next-gen platforms might stir memories of his other Metal Gear announcement of this year, the development for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 of Metal Gear Solid: Rising. While Kojima was happy to speak about Peace Walker, he chose to reveal little here at TGS about Rising. He referred to it simply as a “next-gen Metal Gear”, a game he said is designed to apply his team’s Metal Gear know-how to a revamped engine and new development system. He said the game is “far from completion”.

One of Kotaku Japan’s bloggers asked Kojima to react to some Japanese gamers’ concerns that the developer’s announcement of Rising at an Xbox 360 press conference was a betrayal of the PlayStation 3. “I don’t make games for platforms,” Kojima said. “I make games for players, and it’s because of the players that I’m able to be here.”

Kojima has a full plate of Metal Gear projects ahead of him to ensure he’s busy. But I noted to him that some of our readers have clamoured for Kojima to work on something other than Metal Gear. He gets the message.

“Not only the Kotaku readers but I myself am interested in doing something besides Metal Gear,” he said. “But, right now, I am working on Peace Walker. Eventually, after the project is done, I might think about it.”

He joked: “If you write that ‘Kojima-san doesn’t have to make Metal Gear any more’ every day on Kotaku, and write to the CEO of Konami and tell him that, then it might be easier for me to make non-Metal Gear games.”

That could free him from the Metal Gear box, perhaps. But from within it, for now, he will continue to see the world differently. With Peace Walker, he’s got room for more.

Of course, the game doesn’t call it torture. I think the term they use is “extreme interrogation tactics”. But when is something “interrogation” over “torture”? Is it just how badly you beat somebody up, or does it matter what you’re trying to get out of the person/NPC?

In Brink, this is what happens: You’re playing as a military operative in a futuristic setting. During a firefight, you sneak behind enemy lines and happen upon an injured rebel writhing on the ground. An option pops up, prompting you to press X to interrogate the guy and it looks like if you select it, your character pulls out an iPhone-iish device. Your character then shocks the heck out of the guy until he screams, “Okay! I’ll talk!” Then your objective screen updates and a new icon appears on the map.

In the grand scheme of violence in video games, it’s not graphic. It’s actually similar to what happens to Snake in the first Metal Gear Solid when Revolver Ocelot has him strapped spread-eagle style and shocks him (as the player, you press buttons to Resist or Submit—Submitting kills Meryl and I couldn’t hit that button fast enough). The difference in Brink is that my character is doing it to someone else. So on a gut level, I don’t want to call it torture because I’m the “good guy”, right?

But then there’s the Punisher game with interactive torture. That’s torture because I think the game goes so far as to call it so, but as a player I’m comfortable with it because I’m playing as the Punisher. Yeah, he fights for justice, but he’s not what people would call a “good” guy. So it’s okay for me as a player to play as him torturing somebody because that’s what the Punisher would do—never mind what I would do. Besides, they were probably bad people who deserved it anyway.

Now think about Red Faction: Guerrilla where you’re playing on the side of a rebel faction. Like Brink, it’s a wartime situation and gaining information is crucial to the success of missions. In one scene, explored by Stephen Totilo, an NPC sidekick “interrogates” somebody for said information. With knives. Is that torture? If you’re not sure, apply the same line of questioning to Killzone 2 when Rico gets a little “extreme” when interrogating an enemy.

To confuse you even more on the subject of torture, think about situations where it’s not about information—it’s about control. For example, there’s the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City mission, Death Row and the Ransom mission in Grand Theft Auto IV. In both cases, somebody is deliberately hurting someone else for revenge or just because they’re violent by nature. That’s really easy to spot as torture—but at the same time, in GTAIV, you’re playing as Niko, the guy that hits a woman tied to a chair and then takes a picture of her. You don’t really want to call that torture, do you? It’s easier just to play it down as no big deal or write it off because it’s not an interactive part of the game—so “you” didn’t torture anybody.

Lastly, let’s talk about torture being inflicted on you, the player. In these cases, you probably wouldn’t think of what you’re going through as “torture”, (unless it’s a Saw game), but by definition, a game is deliberately inflicting suffering on you. Example: Missile Command. The game is about mutually assured destruction in the Cold War era, but at the same time, it’s a psychological exercise that tortures the player: by design, you cannot “win” Missile Command. Sure, a lot of early arcade games were un-winnable—but by forcing the player to realise that no matter how good you are at the game, no matter how many quarters you sink into it, you cannot save six cities from a nuclear holocaust, the game is deliberately messing with you. A more obvious example of mental anguish inflicted on the player would be Fable II—because it’s not just that your character is being electrocuted, it’s that you’re losing all of that XP you gathered and racking up evilness (which is torture to a goody-two-shoes gamer like me).

So what’s really going on in Brink? When I zap the guy with my iPhone-looking device, am I committing torture or just “extreme” interrogation? I didn’t see an option to just question the guy before shocking him. I’m not sure if there were other ways to get the information that the subject had. I do know that if the game actually called it “torture”, I’d be way less inclined to play as that class of character. For me, that would be the worst kind of torture: role-playing as a character that I want to play as benevolent, and then being forced to do something I’m not okay with because the game has other ideas about where the line between torture and interrogation lies.

P.S. You want the line clearly drawn? Check this game out.

Image Cred — GTAIV
Image Cred — The Punisher
Image Cred — Fable II
Image Cred — MGS