Hideo Kojima : progressive game design from Metal gear to Death stranding /

Hartzheim (new media, Weseda Univ., Japan) pens the fourth entry in the "Influential Video Game Designers" series, this one on legendary designer Hideo Kojima. Kojima is perhaps best known for the long-running Metal Gear series and the recent hit series Death Stranding. Hartzheim draws on an impressive catalog of texts written by and about Kojima as well as the games on which Kojima built his fame. All of this emphasizes how Kojima has defined stealth combat video games, which plays up tactics and subtlety instead of the guns-blazing approach of traditional first-person shooters. Hartzheim accurately places Kojima as influential not just to the stealth combat genre of video games but also to video games as a new media worthy of academic study. Hartzheim emphasizes the cinematic influences and, thus, the flow Kojima brings to his games, providing a direct link between film studies and video games. This text is well suited for media studies and game design studies, and for fans of Kojima's works. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty. --Brendan Aucoin, State University of New York at Oneonta