10 Video Games With Questions You Won't Want To Answer

7. Is Nuclear Annihilation Inevitable? - Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

- Spoilers for MGS: Peace Walker -

Peace Walker is easily the most underrated of all the Metal Gear games, centred on the Cuban Missile Crisis and nuclear warfare, both tackling the moral ramifications of what it means to pull the trigger on catastrophic actions.

In real life, the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima came not from a President or planner, but two pilots, Charles Sweeney and Paul Tibbets, who would comment to varying degrees as to how being directly responsible for this action weighed on them over the years.

With that in mind, what if the human element could be removed? Here, the Peace Walker mech and A.I. program is designed to retaliate against any initial nuclear strike automatically, circumventing the thought processes and judgement calls that go into continued nuclear war. Character Hot Coldman (yes, really) states that nuclear deterrence is not a viable model for the longterm as humans will ultimately protect their own species rather than follow through on what they've created, which is one hell of a "you've made your bed, now lie in it" fatalistic comment.

Through Hideo Kojima's lens, the only thing keeping us all from going extinct is empathy towards one another - a trait that as we've seen in the past, isn't as ironclad as we'd like.