Interview with MGS2 Translator

[Irrelevant]

http://hardcoregaming101.net/metalgear/agnesskaku.htm

 

"...JS: He also lives in Japan.

 

AK: "If you ever come to town the three of us should get together."

 

JS: That would be cool. We could all trade war stories. Do you want to share anything else?

 

AK: "Something I do want to say is that, regarding my criticisms, I won't say my criticism comes from place of love, because I don't love Metal Gear. But Greg Egan said in one of his stories, which is rather great, and that is: 'If a medium doesn't have a language as powerful as that medium, the result is an unearned suspension of disbelief...to me a kind of a nightmare.'"

 

JS: There's not enough critical thought or appraisal of games today.

 

AK: "It's like a molasses it's been caught in all this time. I think in the early days the medium was quite limited, so the language you used, whether it was graphics or game control, or just the actual text, was in line with that. All was kind of good. But very quickly the medium outstripped the language, and in the meantime it's just continued to gabble in this stuff grabbed from poor movies. Or just arbitrarily stuck-in comic book pieces. I don't know when it's going to get out of this. I'm sure some people have experimented, but as long as everyone sits around... A polite way to say it is a mutual congratulations society. As long as this keeps going on it's not going to get better guys, it's really not.""

 

-

 

"...JS: Yeah, the industry is so different today. It's why I like hearing stories from developers who worked in the 1980s - where four guys could rent a house and make a great game, like MULE. It was a more innocent time.

 

AK: "Before, I remember, people used to make shareware games, and making good enough money at it. But it meant they had lives, they weren't necessarily that young, and they'd gone through college, and they'd had a job, and had to get along with other people, and they had friends and other hobbies, and were married, and some of them had kids..."

 

JS: Yeah, the games they were developing was their first experience of videogames. Today young designers have only grown up with games.

 

AK: "Yes, and they haven't done anything else. You know that's something rather shocking to me, is that you have these very similar types of people, across international divides, involved in games, and most of them have never handled a real weapon, but they're doing all these games, and if they have it's only at a shooting range. And nobody ever told them that holding a gun is a huge responsibility, or that it practically breaks your arm when you fire it. Or if you have a kid around, you don't even want to talk so much about guns, because they might get the wrong idea."

 

AK: "I mean, how are you supposed to write a romance if you've never been in love, or never even had a semi-successful relationship? You have these people writing about these globe trotting, kind of soldiers of fortune types - but if you dropped them in LAX they would be scared. I don't think you can be creative unless you've done a hell of a lot of things with your life - you know, kind of mucked around.""

Edited January 25, 2012 by Irrelevant