Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

by Jamil Jan Kochai

A Jamil Jan Kochai story published in the January 6 2020 edition of the New Yorker magazine.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, School, Read For School, English Literature, Pakistan

4 pages, ebook

Published January 6, 2020

About the author

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. Currently, he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Reviews

[Hester]

I'm far to old to be a gamer but the way this story is written took me back to moments in my life watching WW2 films about the Atlantic Convoys with my dad , who'd lived that experience and had left a huge part of himself in the chaotic churn of that ocean . I knew he'd hold the faces of the drowning, of the burning somewhere I couldn't reach or heal . Difference is that now the gamer can contract a parallel reality to reconstruct a version of war where the child is the rescuer .

[Caroline]

I think this is one of my favorite short stories. The juxtaposition of the narrator trying to process his family’s trauma while also shutting them out is raw and honest. Also the way he put the reader into the brain of a middle eastern American seeing themselves portrayed as a villain while wanting to be a hero is good exposure

[Michelle]

Painful and beautiful at the same time. I could not escape the world he created until the last punctuation mark. This was my introduction to Kochai and I will be looking for more of his work.

[layla .ᐟ]

Jamil Jan Kochan’s Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is incredibly immersive and impressive.

Zoya is possibly one of the most flawed narrators I could imagine. He is so disconnected from reality that the story is not even be written from his perspective but is instead written in second-person because this is how most video games are conveyed. It is even more interesting that Zoya had once had plenty of hobbies outside of gaming: basketball, jogging, chores, family time. Now, however, he is locked away—barricaded—inside of his room so as to avoid his own family. Which makes one wonder why he would go through such lengths to save his father from his past when he cannot even care enough to listen when he talks about it.

“He is about to tell you a story that is either upsetting or horrifying or both, which isn’t fair, because you are a son not a therapist.” (Kochan, 4). If Zoya truly cared about his father, he would not mind being the keeper of his father’s confidence. So it is truly odd that he would sacrifice his in-game life for his father—the life which feels more real to him—but cannot spare a few minutes of conversation.

[Ethan]

geen idee wtf er gebeurde

[Dora Desloovere]

ik was net als Ethan in de war

[Haneen]

I find myself coming back to this every year. A must read.

[Lisa]

Finishing this story, I'm not even sure what the intent was. I felt like it was a crossover between a real-life experience and a video game, but I felt like it was disjointed and I had a hard time following. I'm not sure how this story ended up in a "Best Short Stories of 2021" collection - my only guess would be there were slim pickings.

[Eli]

Had to track this down after seeing that a work of (god help us) New Games Journalism about Metal Gear Solid had been published in The New Yorker and hailed as “the greatest piece of video-game-related writing of all time”.

It’s not a *bad* piece of fiction by any means, and clearly peppered with details of great personal significance to the author, though it also, I have to say, piles on in its elongated opening sentence alone an almost-parodic checklist of motifs you would expect a critically acclaimed piece of millennial diasporic ethnic literature published in the New Yorker circa 2020 to have:

- an Earnest, Nonthreatening author avatar

- whose thoughts we are privy to in a Didactic Stream of Consciousness

- who is Poor, yet Scrappy

- and torn between a thoroughly Americanized identity and his Third-World, Old Country Roots

- with a Big Ethnic Family

- as represented by a Disapproving and Traditional yet Haunted Father Figure

- who is Oppressed by Whiteness, Capitalism and America

- as dramatized through the consumption of a Lowbrow Nerd Fetish Object (about which Kochai can freely lie or exaggerate without his New Yorker readers being any the wiser)

This is, again, all in the first sentence, before the story proceeds to namedrop Allah and Harry Potter Hagrid, insert Pashto words into English sentences as signifiers of Ethnic Authenticity, delve into a magical realist narrative of MGSV transporting the protagonist into a ghostly confrontation with Generational Trauma, before describing war as “strung together by the invisible wires of beloved men who will die peacefully in their sleep” in yet another ponderous, comma-intensive paragraph-length sentence.

It’s all very MFA program A+ content, very technically proficient, and hey, it *does* capture something sort of interesting about video games as tools of reliving/revising memory-spaces and immersive mirrors of social alienation, along with familial tensions that I’m sure are very real for many diasporic communities. But also, like, this is a *little* hacky, right? Are we allowed to say that? If boomer and Gen X white men writing brilliant but self-destructive literary alter egos wallowing in the liminal fringes of late capitalism is a worn enough bit to fashionably complain about, surely the woobie millennial victimized-by-the-white-man diaspora kid with an identity crisis story has worked more than hard enough to catch up? Do we not think the writers telling stories like this in the New Yorker are ferociously conscious of their audience? Is this not a smidge performative? Like this is speaking someone’s truth out there, I’m sure, but we’re not truly obligated to call it the pinnacle of the written word, are we? Please?

[Ahsan]

As a child of immigrants to the United States, I often feel I have an uncomfortable relationship to my own family history. In school I studied an American history of which I am now a part -- the revolution, manifest destiny, a civil war -- but my family was never present for any of it. My family has their own history -- of revolution, partition, a civil war -- in a country that I have nver lived in. Jamil Jan Kochai negotiates between his American identity as a teenager excited to play the latest Metal Gear Solid and his family's history of tragedy, survival and immigration in this remarkable story. Although my American identity is omnipresent growing up in this country, my family history was often shared to me in fragments and murmurs at family gatherings or late night conversations growing up. Language barriers, hazy memories and the reluctance of our parents and grandparents to delve to far into the past keeps these memories murky for us. But the desire to find our place in those memories persists.

In his story, Jamil Jan Kochai narrates in the second person, letting the reader play as the main character in the manner of a video game protagonist. Navigating the story as a second person, second generation immigrant will be jarring for some readers, experiencing life as an ousider. But the dissonance is similar to the out of body experience many South Asian gamers experience sniping and murdering charcters in war games who look like themselves.

Kochai's story lets readers experience an immigrant child's simultaneous longing to save his family from having to make the tragic sacrifice at their center of their history, while in reality he is pushing away members of his family one after another. It is one example of the universal experience of trying to make sense of our place in the world, our dual identities and our obligations to the family that brought us to this country. In this case, a teenage boy, through video games and weed, tries to fix his family in the virutal world, where the clumsiness of his words and the the barriers of his family's culture can be hurdled past by tapping the "X" button.

You can read the story here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

[Lieze Steenkiste]

It might not be for anyone I can admit. But I personally really enjoyed it since I have also played games in the past. I like how there is a very obvious crossover with some interruptions in between to really signal and symbolise reality vs. Virtual reality. Very beautiful how he plays with cultural heritage and generational trauma.

[Hank]

The writing style is so unique and suits the story well. Interesting use of 2nd person that adds to the raw emotion expressed. Great exploration on the broken identity of a son of immigrant parents and how war can impact generations.

[Sufiyaan]

WOAH 🤯🤯🤯

[Olimpia Ioana]

As a gamer myself, I love how he used that medium in order to rewrite the story of his father in an attempt to avoid generational trauma.

[Caitlin]

Absolutely haunting- the kind of story that sticks with you. A teenager’s endearing, consuming gesture to fix his family’s past while blatantly ignoring them in the present.

[Sara]

Life a big game we live in it.but here mix tragdy life in war time to pakistan family in eyes of one child how can mix all and put it in his shoulder and faight what cross his road.

[nina ✩]

never thought i’d be reading a short story about metal gear solid for uni but here we are and it’s beautiful and sad and scary and suddenly i’m him

[Riley]

whoa

[Kate]

Rip GameStop

[Janice Chung]

absolutely loved this. the plot is like a vortex and you can really feel sucked in with the narrator.

[Sam]

loved this story, it was so intense and had you entrenched into the generational trauma within immigrants through video games reminded me a bit of my dad and i

[Hooked_onbooks]

Read for writing workshop

[Erin Ye]

the best and shortest story

[Lucy Gould]

I had to read this for school and I did not enjoy.

[Pooja (Penningtales)]

For EN1001 - An Introduction to Literary Study