To be blunt: our ability to enjoy (or at least not be repulsed by) Metal Gear Solid 4’s characters is shot in the head due to how fucking easy we find it to fry a fucking egg in the real world.

One of the characters — Sunny, a little girl who dresses inexplicably in Harajuku fashion, in what might be a conscientious shout-out to the closeted pedophiles lurking in the Japanese shadows (conscientious because if these people had to go twenty hours without seeing a simulated little girl, they’d have to rape a real one) — tries her best to cook eggs for Snake and Otacon. She asks Snake, “Would you like some eggs?” And he says “Uhhh . . . no thanks”. She makes him eggs anyway. She brings the eggs downstairs and sets them in front of Snake. She takes a cigarette from his fingers just before he can put it in his lips. “No smoking in the plane!” she says. She goes back up into the kitchen. Snake looks at the eggs. “Otacon, can’t you teach her how to fry an egg?” Otacon shrugs. “Do I look like someone who knows how to fry an egg?”

Are you fucking serious? Neither Snake nor Otacon nor this little girl knows how to fry an egg? The only person who does know how to fry eggs is the genome-expert science-genius female? You’d think that the one person who would not know how to fry an egg would be the determined, professional, full-grown woman. Otacon is a lonely bachelor, and Snake — for fuck’s sake — is a trained US Ranger, the most elite force in the goddamned world, called “Snake Eaters” because they’re capable of eating raw snakes if they have to. You figure, if Snake couldn’t make eggs for himself, he’d at least be able to stomach disgusting ones. More than this, what’s so disgusting about the eggs? Are they too runny? Are they burnt? Rocky, in the movie “Rocky”, drinks raw eggs for breakfast, so Snake should be able to handle runny eggs. And burnt ones? See the “Snake Eater” comment. Do they need salt? We realize that Sunny is a girl with a troubled past, a dead mother, and many rape innuendos, though how painful would it be, really, to explain to this girl — a computer genius, by the way — that some people like their eggs cooked differently than other people, that there exist a myriad of possible ways to cook eggs? The girl can likely multiply seventeen-digit numbers in her head with a snap of her fingers — she’d probably be open to the permutations of egg-cookery.

It’s apparent, here, that Hideo Kojima can cook eggs by himself. He’s probably been able to prepare eggs delicious enough for his own standards for several decades. He’s probably never given any thought to whether or not he ever found egg-cooking to be difficult. Chances are, he arrived at the blank pages preemptively marked “Mission Briefing Script” in need of a metaphor, and just plucked one out of thin air: “Lots of people probably find it hard to fry eggs!” It almost looks, at a point, like the egg metaphor had been constructed out of a hare-brained assumption that Kojima himself was a genius for being able to fry eggs so well without instruction. It’s conceivable, in the shadow of the moment, that Kojima saw himself as stepping down from a pedestal, getting real with his audience, and sympathizing with their inability to cook eggs. This is evidence that the fuel for Kojima’s fiction may not actually come from Experience in the Real World. Like, say you’re in line at the grocery store and you add up the total price of all your purchases while the old woman in front of you is fumbling with her checkbook, and you make sure to have the precise amount of post-tax cash ready: do you assume that this is something only you can do, simply because you’ve never seen someone else do it? Do you go ahead and make it the defining character trait of a character in a piece of fiction? For serious, one thing we’re taken to screaming at Videogame Industry Professionals, these days, when they say things like “being able to buy ammunition from the menu must be a good idea, because Metal Gear Solid 4 did it” is that they should probably quit their jobs making videogames and work in a fucking convenient store for a couple of years. You know, to study the looks on actual human faces when they buy beer, or potato chips, or Marlboros.

It’s also obvious that Kojima doesn’t smoke. If Kojima smoked, there’s no way Snake would let that little girl snatch his cigarette. He’d be all like, fuck you, if I want to smoke, I’m going to smoke. The man has the energy to traipse through jungles and tundras with a machine gun; he’s Meters From Death. He has a right to not give a fuck.

Much of Metal Gear Solid 4’s surgically irremovable tumor of a plot indulges in fierce second-guessing of the player’s expectations and an even fiercer insecurity complex, where you feel the writer falter, assuming he’s not being clever enough. These complexes make for terrible fiction; we’ve already established that no high-ranking officials in the videogame industry are competent judges of narrative, so there you have it. Little, vaguely embarrassing moments pop up that make us consider the phrase “Kojima Done Right” — like when Drebin, our weapons specialist, radioes us after each boss fight to explain the gruesome past of that boss character, and why she ended up turned into such a monster. By the end of the game, we will realize that each girl’s story is essentially the same. In addition to making us recall Alfred Hitchcock’s opinion that an artist only ever tells the same story over and over again, it also seems perfectly in line with the conceptual core of videogames: we might as well make a series called In Which One Guy Shoots A Bunch Of Other Guys.