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Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” turns a teenager’s game session into an imagined attempt to rescue his father and uncle from family trauma. The story appeared in The New Yorker online on December 30, 2019, and in its January 6, 2020 print issue. You can read the story at The New Yorker.
What happens in the story
The story addresses its protagonist, Zoya, as “you.” He saves money to preorder Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and retreats into the game while his family seeks his attention. At home, his father carries memories of work, displacement, torture, and the murder of his younger brother.
The game’s fictional setting in Afghanistan gives Zoya a landscape that feels bound to his family’s past. He imagines rescuing his father and uncle before the violence that hurt them. But the fantasy does not offer a clean triumph: family members call him back to the present, where his living father is at his bedroom door. The story’s emotional pressure comes from the gap between the past Zoya wishes he could change and the relationship he must face now.
Why Metal Gear Solid V matters
The game is more than a reference or backdrop. Its Afghanistan setting lets the story place a player’s imagined actions alongside memories of war and family loss. Zoya can try to intervene in a fictionalized past, but that imagined rescue cannot undo what happened to his family or substitute for answering his father in the present.
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- What's included: Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes + all DLC, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain + all DLC, Metal Gear Online + all DLC, $20 of Mother Base currency
- Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is the first segment of the Metal Gear Solid V experience and prologue to the larger second segment, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
- Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain provides players a first-rate gaming experience as they utilize tactical freedom to carry out open-world missions
- Metal Gear Online is built around a dedicated squad-based competitive multiplayer structure, which has been redesigned with the familiar gameplay and aesthetic styling of the Metal Gear Solid series
That contrast also shapes the story’s use of perspective. A player controls a soldier in the game; Kochai’s story addresses its protagonist as “you,” drawing the reader into Zoya’s position. In a conversation reported by The Verge, Kochai connected the second-person perspective to the disjunction of playing as a white soldier while encountering Afghan enemies who resemble his father or himself. It is a literary choice that makes the distance between the game’s point of view and Zoya’s family history difficult to ignore.
The family history behind the fiction
The story is fiction informed by Kochai’s reported family history; its invented events should not be treated as a literal account of the author’s life. The Verge reported Kochai’s account that his father’s younger brother was murdered as a teenager during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and that the loss haunted the family and was central to their departure from the country.
Speaking to The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, Kochai said: “His story has haunted my family for many decades now and was at the heart of our departure from Afghanistan, but I grew up hearing only bits and pieces of it.” The remark describes the family story as Kochai encountered it, through fragments and inherited grief; it does not establish that every detail of the short story happened as written.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Where to read it—and what to expect
Read “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” on The New Yorker’s story page. It is a work of short fiction, not a review of the game, and the article does not require familiarity with the game to follow Zoya’s family conflict. The game supplies the imaginative terrain; the story’s focus is the uneasy meeting of play, memory, and a son’s relationship with his father.
Quick Recap
Best Value
- THE POWER OF FOX ENGINE - Ground Zeroes showcases Kojima Productions' stunning FOX Engine, a true next-generation game engine which revolutionizes the Metal Gear Solid experience.
- INTRODUCTION TO OPEN WORLD DESIGN - The first Metal Gear Solid title to offer open world gameplay. Ground Zeroes offers total freedom of play: how missions are undertaken is entirely down to the user.
- UNRESTRICTED STEALTH - Imagine classic Metal Gear gameplay but with no restrictions or boundaries. Players use intelligence and cerebral strategy to sneak their way through entire missions, or go in all guns blazing.
- MULTIPLE MISSIONS AND TASKS -Ground Zeroes boasts a central story mode and Side-Ops missions ranging from tactical action, aerial assaults and "covert" missions that will be sure to surprise.
- REDESIGNED INTERFACE - Ground Zeroes users will benefit from a clean in-game HUD that shows the minimal amount of on-screen data to give a more intense gaming experience.
Rank #4
- Open-World game design allowing players ultimate freedom on how to approach missions and overall game progression
- Fox Engine delivers photorealistic graphics, thoughtful game design and true new-generation game production quality
- Online connectivity that carries the experience beyond the consoles to other devices to augment the overall functionality and access to the game
Rank #3
![Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience (Playstation 4) [UK IMPORT]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Yvx2kAAML._SL160_.jpg)
- THE DEFINITIVE EXPERIENCE will give players an opportunity to play the complete MGSV experience
- Includes METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES
- Includes METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN
- Includes METAL GEAR ONLINE
- Includes a selection of DLC for each product, as well as additional Mother Base currency
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