Hideo Kojima

Progressive Game Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim, Carly A Kocurek (Illinois Institute of Technology USA), Jennifer Dewinter (Worcester Polytechnic Institute USA)

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English

Bloomsbury Publishing USA
16 November 2023

Individual designers; Media studies

Series: Influential Video Game Designers

An exploration of the influential work of Hideo Kojima, creator of cinematic titles such as the blockbuster Metal Gear Solid franchise, which has moved over 50 million units globally, as well as Snatcher, Policenauts, and Death Stranding.

As the architect of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, Kojima is synonymous with the “stealth game” genre, where tension and excitement is created from players avoiding enemies rather than confronting them. Through the franchise, Kojima also helped to bridge the gap between games and other forms of media, arguing that games could be deep experiences that unearthed complex emotions from players on the same level as films or novels.

Drawing on archives of interviews in English and Japanese with Kojima and his team, as well as academic discourses of social/political games and cinematic narrative/world-building, this book examines Kojima's progressive game design as it applies to four key areas: socially-relevant narratives, cinematic aesthetics, thematically-connected systems, and reflexive spaces.

By: Bryan Hikari Hartzheim
Edited by: Carly A Kocurek (Illinois Institute of Technology USA), Jennifer Dewinter (Worcester Polytechnic Institute USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9798765101681
Series: Influential Video Game Designers
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 16 November 2023
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

List of figures Acknowledgements Preface Foreword Notes on Translation and Names 1. Introduction: The Cult of Kojima 2. Enter Konami: Designing Experiences for the MSX 3. Small Teams, Big Worlds: Playing Detective in Snatcher and Policenauts 4. The Progressive Franchise: KojiPro’s Collective Design in Metal Gear Solid 5. Live Ops: Building Connections in Open Worlds 6. KojiPro’s Legacy and Future Gameography Notes Works cited Index

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim is Associate Professor of New Media at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.

Reviews for Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding

In this work Hartzheim offers a compelling, nuanced portrait of Hideo Kojima (and crucially, his collaborators) as auteurs. Going further, Hartzheim borrows from Kojima's bag of tricks and breaks the shell of the digital game medium, proposing: Kojima and his team are transmedial auteurs, drawing upon the language of cinema, television, music, and other entertainment to deliver their unmistakable signature. This novel claim is backed by at times enthralling attention to detail and a masterful grasp of concepts from media, cultural and film studies. A must-read for not just Kojima fans, but anyone interested in the very notion of authorship in the first instance. * Steven Conway, Senior Lecturer in Games & Interactivity, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia *