It’s easy to forget that the same digital tools we use to share our lives, find community, and stay informed have also become a kind of fog machine, deliberately obscuring the difference between what’s real and what’s merely being repeated until it feels real. Hideo Kojima, the visionary game designer behind Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, has been thinking about this fog for decades, and he’s increasingly worried about how it’s settling over our daily lives. After the release of his latest cinematic project, Digger, a film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu—the acclaimed filmmaker behind Birdman and The Revenant—Kojima sat down with Iñárritu for a conversation published by Gizmodo. The two creators, who clearly share a fascination with the darker currents of modern existence, didn’t just talk about the movie. They talked about how social media has turned into what Kojima bluntly calls a “cesspit” of false information, and how the endless amplification of lies is pulling us further away from any shared sense of reality. The conversation was not exactly cheerful, but it was honest, urgent, and deeply human in its recognition that we are all drifting in an ocean of half-truths designed to keep us angry, distracted, and divided.
The most striking part of the conversation came when Kojima reflected on his own history as a kind of accidental prophet of the digital age. Back when he was creating Metal Gear Solid 2, a game released right at the cusp of what would become the social media era, the internet was still a place of dial-up connections and chaotic message boards. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no algorithmic feed feeding you outrage before breakfast. Yet Kojima’s story imagined a world where misinformation is deliberately spread by AI networks, controlled by a shadowy elite, and used to manipulate public perception on a massive scale. For years, people called that plot paranoid, or brilliant, or both. But now, Kojima says, it’s simply our reality. He points out that Digger, Iñárritu’s film, explores the same terrifying possibility. On social media, he says, false information keeps amplifying, and there’s no telling how far it will go. The scariest part, he adds, is that this noise has the power to influence politics and the most ordinary parts of our daily lives, from how we vote to how we talk to our neighbors. What felt like science fiction in 2001 is now the texture of every single day, and the creators who once imagined it are now watching it happen in real time, helpless in the face of their own foresight.
Kojima, being Kojima, didn’t stay on the level of abstract politics for long. He brought the problem down to something he knows intimately: video games. In a world where everyone has an opinion and every opinion is amplified to the point of distortion, even simple, harmless facts about a new release can become tangled up in a web of lies. He used his own Death Stranding as a perfect example. To this day, there is a persistent belief among gamers that Death Stranding is essentially just a walking simulator—a fancy interactive movie where you trudge across endless empty landscapes delivering packages. The game has a memorable tutorial section that does involve a lot of walking, but once you get past that, it opens up into a rich, strange, and mechanically complex experience. It isn’t just walking. And yet, Kojima notes, people who have never even played the game still confidently repeat the same old line, over and over, as if they’d completed it themselves. That, to him, is what makes the whole situation so frightening. It doesn’t matter that the truth is easily accessible. It doesn’t matter that a playthrough takes hours and can be found in seconds. The lie, once repeated often enough, becomes the reality, and the people spreading it don’t even feel the need to check what they’re talking about. If this can happen to something as trivial as a video game, imagine what happens when those same engines of misinformation turn to bigger, more consequential subjects.
Iñárritu, who directed Digger, jumped into the conversation with his own sense of unease. He explained that social media has fundamentally severed people from what he calls a “shared reality.” Once upon a time, even if you belonged to different political parties or came from different backgrounds, there was some common ground—a set of basic facts that everyone could agree on. You could have disagreements about what those facts meant, but at least you were sharing the same planet. Now, algorithms are designed to show you only what you already agree with, only the things you like, only the opinions that confirm what you already believe. Iñárritu says he finds that absolutely terrifying. Instead of a shared reality, everyone is getting a “fragmented truth,” a scattered collection of pieces that fit neatly into their worldview and refuse to let in anything disruptive. He applied this directly to his own film, noting that many people online are forming strong opinions about Digger based not on watching it, but on what they’ve heard about it. The same thing that happened to Death Stranding is happening to their work as filmmakers and creators. The conversation becomes about the noise around the art, not the art itself, and the truth is ripped into fragile fragments that no one is holding together. It’s a melancholy observation from two men who have dedicated their lives to telling stories, only to watch the telling of those stories get drowned out by an endless flood of commentary that has lost all connection to the source.
This isn’t just something that affects famous artists, of course. The level of misinformation surrounding video games and movies is just the most visible, and in some ways the most harmless, form of a much larger problem. In recent years, we’ve seen entire campaigns built around outrage, with groups using terms like “anti-woke” as weapons to smear games and films they haven’t actually experienced. Every major new release seems to be met with a hate campaign, a review bomb, or a stream of lies invented entirely for clicks and engagement. The people spreading these lies don’t care about the product. They care about the attention, the ad revenue, the thrill of watching a narrative spiral out of control. The same dynamic applies to politics, where misinformation is not just an annoyance but a direct threat to democracy itself. Lies about elections, public health, and even basic facts are not only tolerated but encouraged by the algorithms that reward engagement over accuracy. And the saddest part is that we have all become so used to this that we almost expect it. We read a headline and automatically assume there’s a hidden agenda. We watch a story unfold online and wait for the moment when it turns out to be completely false. We have lost the ability to trust what we see, hear, and read, and in its place we have built a world where the loudest voice wins, no matter how disconnected it is from reality.
So what do we do about it? That’s the question that hangs over the entire conversation between Kojima and Iñárritu, and it’s a question they don’t pretend to answer. How do you fight against a system that is designed to exploit your attention? How do you convince people to slow down and check their facts when the whole point of the platform is to reward rapid and unreflective reaction? Kojima’s point about Death Stranding is a powerful starting place. If the lie persists even when the truth is right there, then the only way to counter it is through direct, personal experience—by actually playing the game, by actually watching the film, by actually reading the article. That’s harder to fake than a tweet, and it’s harder to manipulate than a comment section. But the responsibility can’t fall only on the individual. Creators, platforms, and journalists all have a role to play in rebuilding a shared reality, one based on evidence and empathy rather than outrage and division. It may seem impossible, especially when you look at the landscape in which we find ourselves. But the alternative—a world where false information keeps amplifying until none of it matters anymore—is simply too horrible to accept. Maybe the answer is as simple as remembering that behind every piece of information, there’s a human being, and behind every human being, there’s a life that deserves to be seen in full, not just in the fragments that fit our feeds. It’s not a solution, but it might be a place to start.