After a rather depressing interlude wandering round dank, gloomy caves, the sight of sunlight pouring through a hole in the roof is quite dazzling. Speleology, I decide, is not for me. Slowly I emerge into a greenish-yellow haze under a gorgeous forest canopy. I can almost feel the fluid pressure of the thigh-deep water against my legs as I wade wearily to dry land. I’m tired, and hurt. I salve and bandage my burns, and eat a tasty rat I knifed back in the caves. Now, what do I do about a bullet bee that is still burrowing into my abdomen?

Somebody once said the political is personal, and Hideo Kojima has found a graphic way to illustrate this idea. The Cold War plays itself out not just in a remote corner of the Soviet Union, but on the muscles and viscera of the hero himself. The body itself has become a battleground. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Metal Gear Solid 3 is the way it presents Snake as an ordinary human with a body that becomes fatigued and hungry, and gets injured in numerous different ways - partaking richly of “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, as Hamlet put it.

I’ve always been particularly fond of Snake because of the way his totally uncool hairstyle somehow makes him seem more real, more human, than most digital action heroes. But now it’s gone much further than that. The way each possible injury demands a different course of treatment - styptic and sutures for a cut (Snake’s stoicism while doing this makes John Rambo in First Blood - which might well have provided the inspiration for this aspect of the game - look like a girl); ointment and bandages for a burn - raises the game’s impressive physicality far beyond the run-of-the-mill RPG where you are playing with potions and numbers. Freshly killed wildlife, meanwhile, can range from disgusting to delicious, and, unlike generic videogame food, it can even betray you, if some serpent meat goes rotten and gives you food poisoning.

This is a novel sort of psychocorporeal immersion. Snake’s body is more complex and interesting than the regular videogame avatar with a single health bar; it requires more nurturing, and so we come to feel more protective towards it, and mentally closer to its various travails. This is extended by the brilliant touch in which Snake regains stamina during the times you are not playing the game and the console is switched off - a wonderful example of Kojima’s beloved counter-immersive postmodernism, but also a very logical way further to entwine the feelings of player and character - if you and Snake are tired at 3am, just go to sleep and turn off the PS2; and when you return to the game next day both you and Snake will be refreshed and ready for action.

Of course, MGS3’s injury system also works to further Kojima’s project of extending the notion of hurt in videogames. Games can show us explosions and fiery death, but rarely have they been interested in showing us suffering. The disconcerting realism of the inky blood that pooled around a shot guard’s head in MGS2 was part of this process of stressing the consequences of violence in Kojima’s games; and so now is the fact that a bullet wound to Snake doesn’t just trim a discrete length off the health bar, but goes on causing him pain until he does something about it, even if it means digging around in his own flesh with a knife to extract the projectile. By appealing to our sense of self-preservation and even fear, Kojima makes a shoot-out all the less appealing, especially at harder difficulty levels, and so cleverly nudges us further towards playing the game as a true sneak-’em-up.

With all this management of wounds and food, not to mention the camouflage system and the occasionally tiresome backpack management for the soldier’s tools, Metal Gear Solid 3 is in one sense closer structurally to a driving simulation, in which you must replace a car’s components and possibly see them fail during a race, than to most action games. And games that share its level of character management, such as Deus Ex, do so only on a far more abstract level. Here, you can *see* Snake get tired and woozy, and it matters more.

It’s a strange path we have travelled. Once upon a time, we didn’t have bodies in videogames at all. We controlled little clumps of pixels that were more or less representational, but in our actions we were pure mind. Then Donkey Kong made us human, and later Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider were milestones of animation, but the body was still homogeneous. Now the bleeding and digestion of Metal Gear Solid 3 appear alongside the apparently opposite phenomenon of using our real bodies to control games, as with EyeToy or GameTrak. But they are similar developments: trying to situate us, embody us, ever more solidly in illusionistic worlds. Mens sana in corpore sano - in games as in life.

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