In extending Skull Face’s implications of English as a destructive power into real-world situations of language-based oppression, the paper shows how MGSV creates opportunities for interrogating the role of the English language in constructing reallife colonial worlds. By applying the rhetorical approach to videogame analysis of Ian Bogost, this project investigates the interpretive potentialities for spoken English as a lingua franca (ELF) made possible by MGSV’s “procedural representation” of language, especially regarding English as a weaponizable force ( 2010).
This paper explores both how language is used to construct, in Marie-Laure Ryan’s terms, the “storyworld” of MGSV, and how the spoken word comes, through Skull Face, to threaten that world (2014). Even as it is used to build the world around protagonist Punished “Venom” Snake, spoken language becomes a weapon in the hands of nemesis Skull Face, who deploys a species of deadly parasite that attacks its host’s vocal cords, with the eventual aim of destroying the English language and all who speak it.
In the final installment of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series, 2015’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, language takes on a function entirely outside of its longstanding role in constructing artistic worlds.
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