Edition thirteen of the wonderful column is now up, in which I deliver a response to Hilary Goldstein of IGN's
editorial on the
Resident Evil 5 racism controversy. It is an attempt to be imitative of IGN; so, naturally, I went to an old laptop and culled the majority of the words found in the column from assignments/writings I did from way back in high school.
Anyways, I read this editorial a few weeks ago—and I was absolutely offended, not only by how horribly written it is, but that someone with such an elementary knowledge of the historical, sociological and other miscellaneous factors that make this a controversy would so irresponsible as to take it upon themselves to speak on behalf of a community on the topic. Goldstein's argument has already been torn to shreds many times over (I add to that count following this sentence), so I felt that I needed to show a mirror to what IGN is actually doing for gamers.
The videogame industry has seen its share of controversy, almost all of which centers around sex and violence.
So, what is that whole thing about the arguably intentionally addictive qualities of games?
It's a rare thing for a game to be labeled as potentially racist. But that's what it's come to for Capcom's Resident Evil 5.
Misrepresentation, the crux of the controversy is not that is malicious—but that the game presents saliently insensitive imagery.
The potty mouth of the main character Chris Redfield isn't an issue nor is the excessive blood and routine decapitations.
Actually, the latter is an issue for me. About four or five years at the San Diego Comic-Con, Nintendo’s booth had a setup with a playable
Resident Evil 4 and a huge screen disturbingly proximate to the Pokémon, kid-focused section. I saw kids as young as four or five slicing the limbs off these eerily realistic Spaniard caricatures (yes, some of us were actually offended by the xenophobia of the previous game too!). And the series has never sat with me right since.
What's drawing the ire of many outside the industry (and raising the eyebrows of some within it) is who you kill in RE5.
Controversy about stuff you kill—our medium has come so far!
Set in Africa, because (as revealed in Resident Evil: Code Veronica) that is where the Progenitor virus originated, your primary targets are native Africans.
The abominable, turgid mess that is the plot of the
Resident Evil series is not an excuse for anything; there is little reason why Capcom could not have retconned by changing Chris Redfield’s skin color and origins.
With the release of the first full RE5 trailer in 2007, numerous journalists and social commentators raised concern that RE5 depicted Africa as a nation of savages and that the game itself would reinforce unhealthy stereotypes.
So, I see you share the same geography teacher as the nine-year-old who told me a decade ago, “Nevada is the capital of Boston.”
The game begins with Chris Redfield walking through an African village that appears uninfected. He sees some men kicking something in a sack. The implication is that even before the infection, these are bad people. If RE5 were set on another continent and these characters had white skin, no one would give it a second thought.
In a village on another continent? I’m pretty sure that still would be objectionable.
Typical "village full of bad guys" gaming clich?.
That is a cliché that, depending on context, could entail classism.
While I personally didn't find the imagery in RE5 racist or offensive, others will. That's because the majority of racism in our society is subconsciously projected and perceived. We can all identify overt racism and prejudice, none of which appear in the first half of RE5. There are no fire hoses pushing back ordinary African citizens, no crosses burnt on the lawns of the infected, no Africans singing or dancing or playing basketball or eating watermelon or any of a dozen other blatantly racist images. The offensiveness of RE5 is subjective.
You cannot be this stupid, right? You do understand that derogatory depictions of African-Americans are not the same as derogatory depictions of Africans, right?
In today's culture, where an African-American has been elected President of the United States, most racism occurs below the surface. This less quantifiable prejudice can be seen in the quality of education provided in inner-cities versus predominantly white suburbs, in wages, or the disproportionate number of African-Americans in jail.
A person cannot
quantify prejudice—there no scale for bigotry. And yes, those are certainly issues that
need to be discussed more frequently in our discourse, but they have nothing to do with your argument—and the game is made in Japan.
One thing that seems to be neglected in the recent criticism of RE5 is that your AI partner, Sheva, is African. She is smart, helpful and equally willing to shoot her infected countrymen. … Sheva is more skilled than Redfield, is an integral part to the story and is not saddled with any racial stereotypes. Add to this the fact, again often ignored by critics, that there are other non-infected Africans who assist you throughout the game. None of these characters are portrayed any differently because of the color of their skin.
I guess you haven’t seen the criticism from inside the gaming community.
While RE5 might be guilty of being insensitive in an over-sensitive world, at least it shows Africa the respect of making it a real place with the very real problems of poverty and disease. That's not a stereotype.
This is a
Resident Evil game, not
What Is the What. And that is still a stereotype.
Though the publicly released RE5 demo includes a run through a shanty town, there are other environments, such as a massive oil refinery, that show Africa's modernization.
I wouldn’t call an oil refinery modernization.
The storyline, which has non-native white men experimenting on the African populace, is not much of a stretch. From 1932 to 1975, 400 African-Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama were unwillingly participants in a government study on the affects of syphilis. A 2005 Fortune Magazine article revealed that "Pfizer administered doses of its experimental drug Trovan to children [in Africa] without their parents' consent." There are numerous other documented incidents of pharmaceutical companies setting up shop in the poorest areas of Africa to conduct low-cost experiments. Is it racist for Resident Evil 5 to create a similar, fictionalized account?
I know nothing of the game’s production, but I can assure that nowhere near that amount of thought went into this game.
Resident Evil 5 is not the first game set in Africa, nor the first to feature a white lead killing blacks. The recently released Far Cry 2 is also set in Africa and as the lead character you kill endless strings of bad guys, many of whom are black.
I didn’t like the game, but Ubi Montreal clearly thought about the setting—and one can choose to play as a character who is black.
In Sony's Uncharted, you play a dashing Caucasian hero who spends a good deal of his time killing dark-skinned mercenaries in South America.The very popular Gears of War co-stars Cole, who raps, speaks "street," is a former professional athlete and talks like the amalgamation of every stereotypical black thug ever featured in a movie or game.
I guess you missed those controversies.
Yet none of these games received the same negative attention as RE5.
One is a non-controversy—and the others are belated and not arising out of promotion.
But I don't believe that vilifying Capcom for its artistic vision is appropriate.
If that is artistic, then me using a nail clipper to clip my nails is fucking masterpiece. Can I vilify you for that thesaurus you have open in your browser?
Electing an African-American President doesn't suddenly wipe away the past few centuries of prejudice, nor does it create a level playing field for blacks in this country. But attacking a videogame isn't going to fix these things either.
What does this have to do with your thesis? It is, in a way, facetious, and most certainly a straw man and a false dichotomy.
Perhaps it's time to let go of what a game represents to us individually and move the dialogue to a more significant issue: How do we create a world where opportunity is not merited by the color of one's skin?
That is most certainly a red herring.
