Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” turns the game’s fictional Soviet-Afghan War setting into a way for a teenager to imagine rescuing his father and uncle from family trauma. The story is a work of fiction, not a review of the game—and its emotional center is the distance between trying to change the past on-screen and answering a living parent in the present.
What the story is about
Published by The New Yorker on December 30, 2019, and included in its January 6, 2020 print issue, the story follows Zoya, a teenager who saves money to preorder Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. He also avoids relatives seeking his attention. As the game places him in Afghanistan, its landscape begins to overlap with the places and losses he knows through his family.
Kochai introduces Zoya’s father through a history marked by work, displacement, torture, and grief for his murdered younger brother. In the game’s fictional world, Zoya sees his father and deceased uncle within the landscape and imagines reaching them before the violence that shaped their lives. That imagined rescue does not become a simple triumph: his family calls him back, and the game’s peril and his memories blur as the story moves toward its end.
Why Metal Gear Solid V matters
The game is more than a reference or backdrop. Its Afghan setting gives Zoya a place to project a wish that real history could be changed. But the contrast that gives the story its force is between that imagined power and his difficulty responding to his father in the present. The game lets him act inside a version of the past; it cannot undo the family’s loss or spare him the demands of the people still around him.
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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
What the second-person narration does
The story addresses Zoya as “you,” placing the reader close to his experience. The Verge’s January 7, 2020 recommendation connects that choice to the disjunction Kochai described: playing as a white soldier while encountering Afghan enemies who resemble his father or himself. The form makes the reader inhabit that uneasy perspective rather than observe it from a comfortable distance.
How the story relates to Kochai’s family history
The Verge reported Kochai’s comments about the connection between the fiction and his own family. He said his father’s younger brother was murdered as a teenager during the Soviet occupation, and that the loss haunted the family and was central to their departure from Afghanistan. Recalling what his father told him, 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.”
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That context helps explain the story’s emotional stakes, but it should not collapse fiction into biography. Zoya and the imagined rescue belong to the story; Kochai’s remarks, as reported by The Verge, describe the family history that informed it.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Do you need to play the game first?
No. The game’s setting and the tension between its action and Zoya’s memories matter to the story, but the central situation is understandable without prior play. The piece is best approached as fiction about family, inherited grief, and the limits of imagining a different past—not as a game review or a guide to the title’s editions.
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Best Value
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