More than a statement; MGS feels almost like an elaborate troll. It's a game that seems to dare you to like it. At every turn, it practically mocks the player. Every inch of the game revels in deceiving its audience, from the basic premise of the story to the interlocking Celtic knot that is its plot to the marketing that surrounded the game from its debut. The MGS2 narrative consists of 10 hours of ruses, double-crosses, shocking revelations, and subversions. It was sold to audiences on very nearly false pretexts.
And that's the entire point of MGS2. It inveigles the player as a means to make a statement, one that seems remarkably prescient a decade later. Ultimately, MGS2 isn't about saving the President or preventing the proliferation of super-weapons; it's a missive about the mutability of information in the digital age. When all forms of communication are digital, everything exists as data, and data can be altered. Text can be edited; video can be manipulated; audio can be masked and sampled. Digital information is unreliable, and as a video game MGS2 consists entirely of digital information. It is inherently untrustworthy, and its producer played up this fact by weaving falsehood throughout and around the game.