Hideo Kojima has once again connected the concerns running through his games to the anxieties shaping modern media culture. In a recent discussion with filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, Kojima reflected on the environmental themes of Iñárritu's new film Digger, its difficult commercial reception, and the tendency for audiences to form firm opinions about a work before experiencing it in full.
For Kojima, the conversation naturally led back to two of his best-known projects: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Death Stranding. The former has earned a long-running reputation for anticipating aspects of the internet age, while the latter spent years battling a reductive "walking simulator" label that became widespread almost immediately after its launch. Kojima's point is not simply that audiences can be harsh. It is that online systems can encourage shallow judgments, reinforce them through algorithms, and make it increasingly difficult for nuance to break through.
The discussion also arrives at a moment when generative AI, social platforms, misinformation, and automated recommendation systems are all central to everyday public life. Those subjects are especially familiar territory for Kojima, whose work has repeatedly explored how technology changes human behavior, identity, communication, conflict, and our relationship with reality itself.
Digger and the spirit of Metal Gear Solid 2
Digger, which is currently playing in cinemas, stars Tom Cruise as an oil tycoon whose actions cause extensive environmental harm. Kojima viewed the film as sharing a creative impulse with Metal Gear Solid 2: using the present day to warn audiences about a future that may be approaching faster than expected.
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That comparison makes sense within the larger history of Kojima's games. The Metal Gear series has always been interested in the fallout of military power, resource extraction, technological escalation, and political systems that treat human lives as expendable. Even when its stories become deliberately strange, comedic, or spectacular, the series tends to return to the idea that the consequences of innovation are rarely distributed equally.
Metal Gear Solid 2, originally released in 2001, took that concern in a different direction. Its story examined the overwhelming circulation of information, the manipulation of public perception, and the ways digital systems can shape what people believe to be true. At the time, some of its ideas seemed unusually abstract or far removed from the day-to-day internet experience of many players. Over the years, though, the game's themes have been revisited as social media, algorithmic feeds, data collection, disinformation, and AI-generated material became more prominent.
Kojima said that generative AI makes the ideas in Sons of Liberty feel even more immediate. The game was not a literal forecast of today's technology, but it did wrestle with an enduring fear: that people may lose control over the information environment that shapes their understanding of the world. The concern is not only that false material exists. It is also that people can be directed toward it, surrounded by it, and discouraged from questioning it.
In this light, Kojima saw a similarly bleak undercurrent in Digger. Neither work necessarily offers a clean, comforting answer to its central problems. Instead, both confront audiences with the uncomfortable reality that some threats cannot be solved by one individual simply discovering the correct solution. People still have to live inside systems that are damaging, complicated, and difficult to escape.
The danger of reacting without context
Another major part of the conversation centered on the way people can discuss films, games, and other art without engaging with the complete work. In the case of Digger, commentary has circulated among people who have not seen the film. For Kojima, this reflects a broader cultural issue rather than a problem exclusive to one movie.
Social platforms reward speed, certainty, and easily repeatable reactions. A short clip, a screenshot, a headline, or an out-of-context claim can spread much farther than a measured interpretation. As more people encounter a work through fragments rather than through the work itself, they may inherit opinions that originated somewhere else. Those opinions can then harden, especially when recommendation systems repeatedly supply similar takes.
Kojima described the fragmentation of shared perception as frightening. The concern is heightened by AI-generated falsehoods and by the volume of information competing for attention every day. Context is easily stripped away, while conviction can remain. People may feel they know what a game, film, event, or public figure represents despite having only encountered a small and potentially misleading portion of it.
It is an issue that intersects directly with the subject matter of Metal Gear Solid 2. The game's narrative is deeply preoccupied with selection: who decides what information is preserved, what information is amplified, and what information disappears beneath the noise. Its vision of the future was unsettling because it suggested that an abundance of information would not automatically create a better-informed public. In some circumstances, the opposite could happen.
More than two decades later, that warning has acquired new weight. Online spaces give audiences access to a remarkable range of voices and perspectives, but they can also isolate people within feedback loops. A label can become accepted wisdom not because it captures the thing being discussed, but because it is simple, memorable, and endlessly repeated.
Death Stranding and the persistence of a label
Kojima used Death Stranding as an example of how quickly this process can unfold. Following the game's release, it was widely described as a "walking simulator," including by people who had not played it and were making judgments from trailers, streams, clips, and early conversation surrounding the game.
The phrase was not entirely disconnected from the experience: traversal is undeniably a major mechanic in Death Stranding. Players spend substantial time planning routes, managing cargo, balancing across unstable terrain, navigating harsh weather, and building infrastructure that can help other players. But the label also omits much of what the game is doing. Its traversal systems are linked to resource management, asynchronous cooperation, combat, stealth, delivery work, construction, narrative discovery, and its wider themes of connection and isolation.
Reducing the game to a single phrase made it easier to communicate an immediate reaction, but it also risked obscuring why movement mattered within the design. Walking was not merely empty space between story scenes. It was part of the game's central argument about effort, distance, interdependence, and the value of helping strangers whom players may never directly meet.
The description has endured long after the game's debut, demonstrating the durability of a strong early narrative. Once an idea becomes embedded in search results, social feeds, video recommendations, memes, and casual discussion, it can be difficult to replace. Players who have not tried the game may encounter the label before they see any detailed explanation of its systems or its themes.
That does not mean criticism of Death Stranding is invalid, or that every player needs to enjoy its deliberately unusual structure. Kojima's concern is more fundamental: criticism has more value when it comes from genuine engagement. A negative response based on completing or seriously playing a game is different from dismissing it based on an inherited online shorthand.
A familiar concern for Kojima's work
Kojima's reaction to Digger is consistent with ideas he has explored throughout his career. His games regularly ask players to slow down and consider perspectives that are not immediately obvious. They often hide vital context behind conversations, optional material, mechanics, or later revelations, making snap interpretations particularly unreliable.
That approach can make his work divisive, but it also helps explain why it remains so widely discussed. Metal Gear Solid 2 initially confused many players with its structural choices and its thematic density. In the years since, it has become a frequent reference point for conversations about digital culture. Death Stranding likewise generated polarized reactions, yet its cooperative systems and post-isolation themes have continued to resonate with players who found meaning in its unusual pacing.
For Digger, the current box-office result may not be the final measure of its cultural life. Films, games, and other creative works can find new audiences over time, particularly when the issues they explore become more recognizable in the real world. Kojima's comments suggest he sees that possibility in Iñárritu's film, even if its message is difficult and its commercial path has been challenging so far.
Looking ahead to OD and Physint
The discussion also offers a useful reminder of what fans may expect from Kojima's future projects. Kojima Productions is working on OD and Physint, though substantial details about both games remain limited. OD is being developed in partnership with Xbox, while Physint has been presented as a new action-spy project connected with PlayStation.
Neither title has yet been fully explained, but Kojima's remarks make clear that his interest in the human consequences of technological and social change has not faded. Whether he is exploring the damage caused by environmental exploitation, the spread of destabilizing information, or the way communities form around shared systems, he continues to return to questions with no easy resolution.
In the meantime, revisiting Metal Gear Solid 2 may be more timely than ever. Its ideas were never meant to be comfortable, and modern technology has only made many of its anxieties feel closer. Kojima's defense of experiencing art before judging it is a simple request, but in an era built around instant reaction, it may also be an increasingly radical one.
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