Repelling the Invasion of the "Other": Post-Apocalyptic Alien Shooter Videogames Addressing Contemporary Cultural Attitudes

Ryan Lizardi's analysis examines post-apocalyptic alien invasion shooters, including Halo, Gears of War, Killzone, Resistance, and BioShock, as allegories for enduring American cultural attitudes. Rather than reading these games solely through the lens of post-9/11 politics, the study frames them within Xavier's historical allegory theory and Shohat and Stam's concept of ethnocentrism, arguing that the subgenre reflects a longer-standing American tendency to view the nation through its own cultural perspective and to cast outsiders as inferior "Others" to be violently subdued. The author supports this claim partly by noting that these games sell substantially better in the United States than abroad, suggesting a distinctly domestic preoccupation with the themes they embody.

The analysis rests largely on close textual readings of specific games rather than quantitative data. It identifies design choices that code alien enemies as culturally Other: their physical resemblance to humans, their use of language, and first-person or over-the-shoulder perspectives that invite players to identify with the human side. Western-coded settings and Insider/Outsider rhetoric reinforce this framing, which the author connects to Tajfel's social identity theory to explain how such in-group and out-group distinctions operate.

A central finding concerns narrative reversal. In many of these games, the alien enemies were already present on the planet before humans arrived, which positions the humans as the true invaders. The author reads this irony as revealing, suggesting that the games expose the justifications Americans have offered for foreign intervention while still portraying war against the Other as necessary and persistent. Overall, the study concludes that the subgenre's recurring themes of ethnocentrism, Othering, and unjustified yet enduring conflict allegorize ideological attitudes embedded in contemporary US culture.