There are two species of aliens in Crysis

Some notes on the dynamics of race and Asian representation in Crytek’s classic game Crysis

So, I just finished Crysis Remastered.

When I was a kid, Crytek’s Crysis had a somewhat legendary status. Mainly because of its gorgeous graphics that no computer could run, but what caught my interest was the idea of having the nanosuit and the ability to turn invisible. But I’ve never had the chance to play it; and, even though I heard it wasn’t that good, I’ve always been curious about it. I’ve even seen a few gameplay scenes before, and it looked okay.

Recently, I was listening to a podcast where a game narrative designer I admire was talking about narrative in games and mentioned how Crysis’ fast introduction with only a really brief tutorial was really cool. I decided it was time for me to try it, so I bought the remaster for Switch.

I knew the story had something to do with aliens and, well, North Koreans. Of course, I expected anticommunism in a game about being a “hero” from the US Special Forces, but maybe the narrative had something to offer. Long story short, it didn’t. Neither did their characters with incredibly sterile personalities who could be replaced by white walls and you wouldn’t notice. Gameplay isn’t great either, but maybe it was back in 2007? I don’t know.

Anyway, there must be plenty of resources online where these things are discussed. I actually wanted to talk about something else that, although I did find a few comments on, I couldn’t find anything that goes beyond the very surface.

Now, I’m a Japanese-Brazilian person. We’re a privileged group here in Brazil, but we still have to deal with a lot of specific racial issues, including discrimination, the model minority myth, the yellow peril myth, orientalism and being considered a foreigner in your own country. We, East Asian people, are seen as these alien objects that serve as a target for white people’s fantasies, aggressions and projections.

See how I used the word alien there? Yeah, that’s intentional and has everything to do with Crysis.

I started the game and something caught my attention while I was still choosing the difficulty setting: the language that the enemies spoke is considered a factor of difficulty. They would speak the language I chose for the game on easier settings and Korean on harder ones. Maybe I’m a bad player but having the enemies language set to English made absolutely no difference for me, gameplay-wise. When in combat, they only had a small set of different sentences, like ‘Reloading’ and ‘Where are you?’. Isn’t it interesting that the devs would somehow associate enemies that spoke a different language as being… deadlier?

Now, there are three easy, obvious design choices when you’re developing a game with characters that speak other languages: either everyone speaks the same language; each character speaks their own native language and you’re given subtitles; or you give the player the choice to decide whether they want the first or the second option, in the options menu. Making it necessarily associated with the difficulty settings is not an obvious choice that aims at accessibility. It’s an arbitrary design choice, it was made for a reason that is specific to this game. It gives off a message. And, having played this game for many hours, I can think of no other possible message than “people who speak Korean are dangerous.”

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Language is interesting, I actually used to study it in college before I dropped out and got into Computer Science. It is intrinsically connected to power. United Statians, for example, have a great resistance to overcoming the 1-inch tall barrier of subtitles, and I’ve seen many of them screaming “SPEAK ENGLISH” to strangers on the street.

Fanon’s Peaux noire, masques blancs begins the discussion of colonialism with language. Speaking Japanese was forbidden in Brazil during World War II and our then president Vargas’ project of “whitening” our population. Any East-Asian language here will be mocked by being reduced to a sequence of gibberish phonemes like “xinxanxou.” The structures of power, domination and hostility always manifest themselves in language and the way we treat it. Yes, the language of the enemy makes them deadlier because it means you have less power over them.

The game begins and you’re Nomad, a proud American soldier in a futuristic supersuit. You’re equiped with state-of-the-art weapons and must invade an East-Asian island and kill thousands of dramatically less equipped Koreans. They have no supersuits (except for a few here and there wearing “cheap knock-offs”), no amazing guns, no amazing vehicles and no amazing buildings. Your mission is to save some archaeologists from the claws of the yellow, evil, wacky, treacherous and dumb commies who are, at the same time, extremely poor and underdeveloped but also capable of filling an entire island with cars, boats, tanks, helicopters, explosives, ammo and guns overnight. Fortunately, the island was evacuated of civilians somehow and you don’t have to feel bad for killing every single living human being you may find, like a proper American male.

After a few hours, murdering the same 5 Asian models over and over again gets really tiring and they’re replaced by aliens. There are no real changes in mechanics here. Killing aliens and killing Koreans is about the same (except that the aliens can fly). Their intentions are also the same: they threaten the Western civilization. You and your comrades fight them with the same heroism that left behind that trail of Asian bodies throughout this island where you forget that you are the foreigner.

Believe it or not, I’ve been Asian all my life. I’m intimately familiar with the yellow peril discourse and could smell it from the first scene: at no point should you feel that you killed any human being. All you killed were aliens. Most of them were from the same species as you, but aliens nonetheless. And when the actual aliens came, there was no difference at all, they killed and died the same way the yellow aliens did. And the same way that the actions of the Koreans morally allowed you to invade that island at the start of the game, the actions of the actual aliens morally allowed you to nuke it at the end.

I wanted to end this piece with a curious observation. Cevat Yerli (AKA Crytek’s founder that didn’t pay his employees for months and had to step down as CEO) is Crysis’ creator, director and producer. He is a man of Turkish descent. He knows what orientalism feels like, he knows what it is to be the descendant of people who are discriminated against, dehumanized and demonized constantly in popular media, treated as moving targets in war games and movies. And yet he decided to become a spokesperson in videogames for the same whiteness that produces these discourses.

Race is a political matter. It’s full of contradictions and complex discussions and, in the context of videogames in a post-gamergate world, it’s even more difficult to talk about it. But I think we must go deeper than common sense and discuss it in games not only as we usually do, but using the tools given to us by anticolonialism, historical materialism, semiotics and other methods. Hopefully, someday, no other games like Crysis shall ever be made or acclaimed.