Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid is one of the most popular video game franchises of all time. Since 1987 its sprawling narrative has interrogated the possibilities of biogenetic reproduction, military espionage, off-shore para-states and the formation of private task forces charged with wresting power from the world’s collapsing democracies.

Despite the bizarre nature of its postulations, Metal Gear speaks adequately to a post-truth, post-human milieu. In a political atmosphere thick with conspiracy and foul-play, the social and intellectual mobilisations of an increasingly martial right-wing touting cheap philosophies of race realism and ethno-nationalism chime ominously against the game’s fantasies of bloodlines and separatism. Indeed, Metal Gear‘s distinct imagery would even come to furnish the meme economies of an emergent populism.

Artists and writers Larry Achiampong, Kitty Clark, Sam Keogh, Hardeep Pandhal and Jamie Sutcliffe will gather at Primary to discuss and share their thoughts on the contemporary resonances of Kojima’s game, the mania of fandom, and what the thrills of ‘tactical espionage action’ might be able to warn us about the paranoid present. 

The Shadow Moses Incident has been conceived by Hardeep Pandhal and Jamie Sutcliffe and is supported by Primary in collaboration with the Micro Social Cultures programme at Bosse and Baum.