It's the rule of the jungle. I'm not sure if it was Buckminster Fuller that said it first or that hot robot chick from Ghost in the Shell, but this much is true; When it comes to evolution, overspecialization leads to extinction.

Wait! Wait...Don't click back or refresh the main page yet! This IS gaming related. Just sit back and indulge me a second.

Specialization in evolution is a means of survival, just take Darwin's crazy ass birds or the wild and untamed Crocostimpy. But when a species becomes specialized to fill a niche to the point where they cannot adapt, small changes within that niche can kill the species off.

Now, lets take a look at the following games; Megaman, Metal Gear Solid, Legacy of Kain, Psi-Ops. What do they have in common? It's a certain trope, a certain meme that's the heart of the post: It's the idea that the maverick, the Jack-of-All-Trades will ALWAYS beat the specialist. Overspecialization leads to extinction, and whether it's Naked Snake in a sniper battle with The End, Megaman Offing Gutsman with a pair of scissors to the dome or Raziel plunging his evil, glowing, demon sword into his former brothers, the message is the same: Adapt or die.




Just look at the enemies in those games. In each instance, they become emblematic of a certain trait or quality that is admirable. Gutsman is strong. The End is good at distance. That crazy psychic vampire is good at...well...crazy psychic vampire shit. They have adapted to fill their niche (or, in this case, stage), but they do so at the cost of adaptability. If an outside element is introduced that can adapt to them or worse, exploit their specialization, then their biological strengths get turned into weaknesses and they face death.

Coincidence? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

The funny thing about this whole strange metaphor is that it doesn’t stop with the hero; evolution is nothing without competition. In all of those instances, what boss is the hardest, tougher-than-a-fistful-of-nails bastard on the block? Which one runs the evil three-ring circus in town? Which boss is always going to give you a run for your money? The Jack of All Trades, your match that's who; Megaman has Protoman, Raziel has Kain, Snake has Liquid. The only thing that can defeat a maverick is another maverick.

But it can get deeper if you want it to. There is the Megaman trope: the idea that the hero adapts as he goes along, that he uses the tools of his fallen foes to better adapt to the situation at hand.

It’s funny, as I was thinking about this idea I was listening to a wonderful speech by the late Douglas Adams. He can put it better than I can.

“Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we'll come and we'll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who's a tool maker, doesn't have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert - he even manages to live in New York for heaven's sake - and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn't have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says “I'll have it off him”.

Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better.”

In that sense, perhaps the main character is allegorically early man trying to survive against the harsh and unyielding climate. Perhaps what makes us “heroes” is not our drive towards being just but our willingness to act intentionally, our humanity, our spark of consciousness.

So there you have it. If you are like me and like to make mountains out of molehills, than this particular kind of design in games can be seen in a very strange way as a symbol for the biological principals that underpin survival of the fittest or as an allegory for the struggle of early man to survive in the harsh world. I doubt that Inafune had that in mind when he made Megaman.

Kojima on the other hand…