Making Malaysian creative content for the world
Over the last few days my daughter has been playing a video game called No Straight Roads, about how a rock band duo is trying to beat the odds to gain respect and recognition. The two characters live in a city where electronic dance music rules the airwaves, and the powers-that-be try to stop any other kind of music from being played.

The thing is, my daughter is thoroughly entertained by it because many of the characters and settings in the game are indubitably familiar to her. The game is produced by Metronomik, a Malaysian company, and while it’s not set in Malaysia, the designers have incorporated a lot of things that are distinctively Malaysian, and that was what caught my daughter’s attention.

Many of the characters slip into Malaysian-accented English, and some sound like they may be Malaysian or some funny export of a British education. Other references are more subtle – for instance, the central power source is called Qwasa, and “kuasa”, of course, means power in Malay.

Perhaps the most indepth local reference is a character called DK West who engages in rap battles and slips into full-blown Malay for quite a while; dikir barat is a form of traditional music from Kelantan, and DK’s raps are inspired by it.

When I asked my daughter which was her favourite character in the game, she said it’s Mayday, the lead girl guitar player, who is noisy and not shy about getting stuck in. Is Mayday Malaysian, I asked, because her English seems to sometimes swing between international and Malaysian accents, and my daughter replied with a definite “Yes – she feels Malaysian”.

It’s great to celebrate Malaysians as a Malaysian yourself. Last year, many column inches and much airtime was spent on how Tan Sri Michelle Yeoh had done this country proud (by winning the Best Actress Oscar for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, in case you weren’t on the planet at the time), and in the process reignited debate over what Malaysia can do better to emulate countries like South Korea, which has managed to turn its creative industry into an international phenomenon.

Everyone likes to see themselves represented on screen, and Yeoh is very much still a Malaysian at heart (famously, with local accent intact in sci-fi TV series Discovery). Yet the content that she is involved in isn’t very Malaysian. Both people like her and even people like Crazy Rich Asians and Raya And The Last Dragon scriptwriter Adele Lim are known more for being Malaysians who create content than creators of Malaysian content for a global audience.

Of course, the box of worms I’m opening up here is, how exactly do we define what is “Malaysian culture” or “Malaysian content”?

The Malaysian government funds lots of filmmakers who do projects intended for overseas markets, but they obviously have to go through a process of evaluation. Unfortunately, this means that that culture needs to tick the check box that what is on show is “correct”. For example, there has been recent criticism of 2023’s La Luna, about a woman trying to sell women’s lingerie in a kampung, for being disrespectful of Islam (and presumably not appropriate for that aspect of Malaysian culture).

Meanwhile, you can also have globalised Malaysians who lean too hard in the other direction and lose that Malaysian “feeling”. For example, if you take a movie like KIL (a 2013 film about suicide and winner of Best Film at the 26th Malaysian Film Festival in 2014) and compare it with Istanbul Aku Datang! (a 2012 romcom set in Istanbul), I would recommend KIL to somebody who wants to watch a movie that feels Malaysian.

I put it to you that it’s possible to represent Malaysian culture in a casual way, a sprinkling of the essence, as it were – it doesn’t always have to be a provocation about who we are. Think of it as adding a bit of sambal to your tuna sandwiches.

In No Straight Roads, many international fans think DK is Jamaican and is speaking some kind of West Indies patois – and as far as the game is concerned, it doesn’t matter too much. Yet Metronomik is very much a company that is sharing Malaysian culture with the world, in a substantial way, as the game permeates the day-to-day life of the many people who play it.

And that is no accident. Wan Hazmer, the cofounder of Metronomik, was previously the lead game designer of Final Fantasy XV who included food like roti canai and satay in that game during his time with the Japanese production company. If he left it at that, perhaps it would have just been a nice cameo. But he wanted to also capture the comfortable and casual feel of Malaysia, saying “Everyone is laidback, enjoying food and talk, enjoying the weather” about those local touches.

So there is a difference between stories about Malaysia and stories by Malaysians, as well as stories that are intrinsically Malaysian. I believe that last one is maybe the hardest to get right.

But like how No Straight Roads tries to make the point, it doesn’t matter what kind of art you are trying to create, as long as it’s done with passion – that’s what’s important. We absolutely should not try to define what is “good” or “bad” Malaysian culture to show the world, but just let it percolate through as and when it feels right.

What prompted all this are the points made by Cord Jefferson after he won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction on March 11: “A story with black characters that’s going to appeal to a lot of people doesn’t need to take place on a plantation, doesn’t need to take place in the projects, doesn’t need to have drug dealers in it, doesn’t need to have gang members in it, but there’s an audience for different depictions of people’s lives.”

So I’m happy to see games like No Straight Roads, and books like Hanna Alkaf’s Queen Of The Tiles (about Scrabble and panic attacks), that explore a Malaysianess in stories that don’t need to be Malaysian, but because they are, they come across as being fresh, interesting, and – most importantly – engage with the audience because of the detail, and not in spite of it.

In his fortnightly column, Contradictheory, mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi explores the theory that logic is the antithesis of emotion but people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at lifestyle@thestar.com.my. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.
Contradictheory,Movies,Dzof Azmi,creative industry,Malaysian content,video game,Metronomik
There is a difference between stories about Malaysia and stories by Malaysians as well as stories that are intrinsically Malaysian.