Authorship as a Joke? Reading Bryan Hikari Hartzheim's Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim's Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding examines the games Hideo Kojima directed or took part in producing, following a range of media theories. It also trains an intensive light on the trajectory of Kojima—who has been read, or has induced himself to be read, as a storyteller who consistently holds to anti-war, anti-nuclear thematic concerns, as "the one responsible for directing everything," and as a celebrity of the game industry. Hartzheim mainly presents Kojima's interviews and books, the documentaries he appeared in, and reviews from the time of release, diagramming how Kojima sought to push through his intentions and in what ways he intervened in the production process.

As one can guess without difficulty from the book's title, Hartzheim has a pointedly intentional design: to read the game designer as the source of the "authorship" within a game. I was a relatively recent fan, having come to Kojima's games through Death Stranding, and because I have no direct experience of how a game designer's authority operates in a commercial game produced through large-scale collaboration, I approached the book curious about how this design would unspool. Because it surveys Kojima's games chronologically, from the 1980s through the 2020s, reading it through also lets one trace the history of console hardware alongside the process by which Kojima's control over collaborative work expanded. As a theory for showing how Kojima's control over collaboration links to authorship, Hartzheim directly cites and grounds his design in the current of auteurist film criticism led, above all, by Cahiers du cinéma in the 1960s. A question is bound to arise about a setup that discusses games by reference to a particular current of film criticism; but this is less because Kojima himself draws strong inspiration from film, or because the use of cinematic cutscenes within his games is distinctive, than in order to compare production practices within the game industry with film production.

By the author's account, contributors to auteur theory held that the "dissidence and singularity of commercial film," set against film-production practices within the Hollywood system, originate from a director who forms a consistent visual style and inner meaning. The leap of borrowing from film theory to explain games rests on the commonality that both games and film were media carried out as large-scale collaborations, under pressure to anonymize the producer and to orient toward marketability. The game designer's name, hidden as an "Easter egg" in a secret room, makes one recall in a suggestive way the old convention, in both the video game and film industries, of not foregrounding the creator's name. Hartzheim discloses the limitation that the critical current called auteurism "has been criticized for overvaluing the director's subjectivity and slighting the many other people involved in the particular context of production and the creative process," but he still regards that authorship as a valid and strategic tool for pinpointing and identifying the unconventionality that appears in collaborative work (Hartzheim 25–26).

Along with this, the concept of "disruption" the author employs is drawn not from the language of film criticism but from Mary Flanagan's concept of Critical Play, encompassing innovations in game design that tend to subvert or weaken the system, and the invention of genre that follows from them. The author's approach carries the aim of expanding the concept of "critical play"—which tends to apply only to "games that seek to reform the present situation, artistic games, and the critical self-reflection they provoke; that is, only to games that hold a strong oppositional and critical stance toward commercial games"—so that it can apply as well to "commercial games" themselves, or to game designers working in the commercial game industry (Hartzheim 31). Through analysis of the production process, reception, reinvention of genre grammar, systems, and storylines of Snatcher, Policenauts, and the Metal Gear series, in which Kojima took part as planner, the author organizes Kojima's game design into four broad elements, and with these characterizes the critical play of Kojima's games that causes "disruption" to "the conventions of existing games." By mixing "elements of fiction and the real world into a linear narrative," they create a generic fable about the contemporary, and attempt a "remediation" of audiovisually oriented media such as animation, live-action film, or motion graphics. They build a "ruled system" that becomes the axis of "emergent play," and finally attempt the insertion of a "space for metafictional purposes" (Hartzheim 73). Here the author identifies two directions: the expression of the social consciousness the game designer holds as an author, and the creation of a formal mechanism that seeks to redefine the boundaries of play.

The attitude of trying to discover a kind of dissident insistence in the direction of dismantling and breaking with formal conventionality is also an attempt to transpose into games the authorship that had been the critic's place to lean on, within a discourse that has defined the so-called "progressive text" as the opposite term to the classical text. It is a belief that if the game designer can be placed in the seat of the film director—a subject doing critical, experimental work within commercial constraints and material—then the properties of that experimental work, too, can be identified as a consistency attributed to the game designer. Hartzheim borrows the expression "progressive film genre"—which Barbara Klinger pinpointed as "formed not only on the ideological plane but by the words of progressive critics seeking rupture within the film form and structure of the time"—to form the concept of "progressive game design." Reading this as progressive game design, transformative game design, will pose no great difficulty for understanding (Hartzheim 28).

Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design lays out, clearly and in order, the various modes of the progressive game design the author has defined, examining the systems within Kojima's games, the conditions that were necessary to produce those games, and the patterns of reception by studios and players. One passage not sufficiently explained is the context in which the expression "progressive film genre" was used in Klinger's original article, "'Cinema/Ideology/Criticism' Revisited: The Progressive Text." Klinger holds that the "classical text" that exists as the opposite term to the progressive text is in fact more aptly called the "classical text system." In Klinger's words, this system is produced "from an unstable combination of imbalance (excess, difference) and balance (containment, repetition)." Genre is a "tense permutation" of the system "that thrives on a play of variation and regulation," and a provider of "regulated variety." Presenting an economy of variation rather than rupture, genre permits "the (regulated) forms of excess and the (regulated) forms of display of that process," domesticating and besieging excess within itself (Klinger 43).

The reason Klinger, in explaining genre as the "tense permutation" of the classical text system, proposes a far more continuous "variety" rather than dramatic events like disruption, rupture, and articulation is so as not to soft-pedal the powerful force of normalization. Klinger warns that a reading that overemphasizes, on the side of subversiveness, signifiers that seem to constitute a rupture from existing norms can result in underestimating the system's means of "negotiating a normalizing function even onto the most foregrounded, progressive, and deviant tendencies." In the face of the view that progressiveness and transformativity are determined as signifiers isolated within the text, and of an attachment to readings that can reinforce such a view, Klinger seeks to keep a critical distance. She points out that the critical perspective forming the "progressive film genre" presupposes a counterpart called the "classical text," one that can be articulated and ruptured by the transformativity of intratextual signifiers alone—and by this she poses the question of whether the term designated as classical and normative is really so homogeneous and uniform an object.

When Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design borrows the analytical frame of "progressive game design," it regrettably does not deal deeply with the critical implication latent in this primal naming. The author does, of course, examine games' capacity as an interactive medium that is never one-directional or fixed and always mediates player, reception environment, and technical conditions. Aided by archival materials that let one confirm how Kojima's games were received in their day, he examines not an analysis isolated in the text's inner meaning and formal articulation, but how the player forms meaning by interacting with the personality of the system that induces their action and with the technical conditions. That said, under an analytical setup in which Kojima expresses consistent authorial themes as he diverges from the established methods of the commercial video game industry, and in which those authorial themes generate this emergent divergence, "transformation" risks degenerating into a rhetoric that assumes a uniform "essence" in its opposite term. A passage like the following could serve as an example.

Furthermore, if even the singularities that appeared as transformation or departure can be absorbed into commercial logic or generic inertia, then caution toward a "transformative" generic reading needs to be revisited once more. In particular, compared with film, the contemporary community of game reception, creation, and response tends to make the institutional engines driving universal canonization and classicization look unclear, while triggering almost simultaneous mutual reference; and so the distinction between "existing games" and "transformative games," and the identification of "authorship" grounded on that distinction, becomes an even more complex and subtle problem.

But I am not trying to argue that it is better to discard the entire concept of authorship in games; I want to say that a kind of authorship is needed—one not established on the basis of hierarchization. Here I would like to refer to Im Ga-young's "Games and the Author," which likewise notes that authorship has been kept in a perpetually precarious place owing to the "withdrawal" of the author that arises because the game designer makes a game rather than gameplay, and owing to "players' consumer-centrism, and the common notion that sees the game as an industrial and technical product and a mere amusement." It hopes to "rediscover the author as a precarious and dependent being" in just this way, and to return the game to a place that becomes a "dialogue" between player and author, rediscovering the relationship the author forms with the player. Her essay finds the author in a voice that, having withdrawn into "agential distance" and "hidden itself," "steps out to greet" the player. The scene in which this gesture of withdrawal and welcome constitutes an author who addresses the player in a "direct voice" came to me as lovely and as important. This is probably because, in a medium captured between the admonition to root itself in entertainment and service and the stigma of being harmful because of that very root, I could feel all the more intensely the obstinacy of wanting to be more than, or less than, a commodity—the helpless necessity of an "it had to be this way."

In this connection, I would like to close this piece by mentioning the excess of "paratext" that this book deals with throughout. In Kojima's games, the paratext appears by way of the technical possibilities and memory limits of the day, packaging practices, and the functions of physical interfaces such as the console and input device; the author explains the definition and function of paratext by citing Gérard Genette and Jonathan Gray.

Jonathan Gray's words hint at a deep linkage between interactivity and the situation in which matter external to the narrative overflows into the narrative's interior. On the flooding of paratext, the author notes that in Metal Gear Solid 2 the game's physical package not only contains various setting materials about the world but also affects gameplay. Examples are the scene that, within gameplay, instructs you to use the decoding table printed in the game manual, and an interaction that mentions finding the frequency to tune the codec to in "the photograph on the back of the game software package" (Hartzheim 93). This is also a strategy frequently used in board games—which actively make use of physical elements—at moments of unexpected discovery. The "Find the home!" note one can find on the victim's body in Snatcher is also intriguing. This reads as if it means "the victim's house itself," or "examine the 'house model' in the dining room of the victim's house"—but in fact it is a literal answer: that you can press the "Home" key on the keyboard to decode the cipher (149).

Through such depictions of paratext, the book restored, for me—someone who came to most of Kojima's games through emulation or remake editions, without using the game hardware of the time or encountering its packaging—jokes that I could not understand or whose context had dropped out. On the side of a game design that mediates and invites the player outside of play while expanding the play domain, the author cites Kojima's words: "If film is a medium that makes a person laugh, then in a game one's own action must be what leads to laughter." "Making the player laugh through their own action" reminds us that the player is "at once spectator and performer" (Hartzheim 148). Hartzheim sees this overlap as leading to an extension of the distancing effect that prompts the player's action within everyday life. Here I would like to add the layer of the sheer, unsublimated snigger when one is made "to laugh through one's own action," of an unavoidable becoming-slapstick-comedian. At this point the player physically encounters, first, a different kind of authorship—not the control that devises the totality and style of a game so as to put a critical distance between the player and an auteurist figure, that is, an ideological product. Something more like a mischievous stub of rock, a protruding threshold, that makes you suddenly plant your nose into the floor of the makeshift stage, bowing for no meaning whatsoever. The whole distinction between what lies outside gameplay and what is irrelevant or relevant to the virtual chain of meaning suddenly seems to turn trivial—and then, as if nothing had happened, it sends you back to immersive gameplay. This vividly reveals not a "meta" subsumed into self-reflection, but the occasion of the sitcom: getting right back up, returning to the act, playing innocent as though nothing had happened. Our protagonists, who brazenly cross between heavily armed soldiers with a flimsy cardboard box upside-down over their heads, or who start throwing punches at the screen when the player, sovereign over the camera, zooms in on their crotch. The authorship marked by Kojima's face, which haunts and drifts through this community as the punchline of a circulating joke or as a memetic sign, seems to me, after all, to be of this kind.

References

Hartzheim, Bryan Hikari. Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding. [Korean translation: Kojima Hideo-ui Geim-ron, trans. Mun Seong-ho, AK Communications, 2026.]

Im Ga-young. "Games and the Author." Munjang Webzine, May 2026, Korea Arts Council Literature Platform, https://munjang.or.kr/board.es?mid=a20105000000&bid=0005&list_no=110333&act=view.

Klinger, Barbara. "'Cinema/Ideology/Criticism' Revisited: The Progressive Text." Screen, vol. 25, no. 1, 1984, pp. 30–44.