Very interesting information! Thanks!

G’night

Chew on this – Would it be less offensive if the shooter was black?

I think it would make a big difference, yeah. One of the tricks here is that this game kind of is a little bit of a break from the previous games, in that we have some kind of super soldier being dropped into a foreign city to face some kind of threat. This is the way they did it in RE4, but it’s different from most of the early games in the series. The early games in the series did all follow one person against an entire city, but it was always their city. The heroes in the early games were all local police officers who just happened to show up to work on the day the zombie outbreak happened. They had a personal stake in the area where the game was set. The people and city that were being killed and blown up in this game were all something that the character, and thus the player, actually had some kind of connection to, not just a bunch of alien foreigner inhumans to plow through to get to the next screen.

It seems to me that if they repeated the same trick in RE5– make the protagonist be some kind of local law enforcement from a nearby city or government official from whatever country the game is set in, in other words have the protagonist actually be African– that would dramatically change what these screenshots seem to be saying. If nothing else, the “hey, we’ve had american zombies and french zombies, setting the game in Africa is just equal opportunity for zombies!” argument would be way more convincing if this equal opportunity were being extended to player characters as well. It’s not.

On a separate note, something possibly to be aware of is that as far as I know this game is being developed completely by Japanese people. They may simply not have the cultural reference points necessary to understand how this game is going to be received elsewhere– at the least this game is not going to “trigger memories of so many awful stereotypes” for the people who are designing and developing it, because they don’t have the same cultural memories of awful stereotypes we do. (Japan does have its own historical racism issues, but not the same ones.)

Good looking out, but they have made at least 3 other Resident Evil games before this one, all set in non-black locations: Spain and the US, I think. This is simply a change in venue, with no hate intended. Plus, I belieave the game developers are from Japan, a little removed from the racial dynamics of the US.

Will racists live out their fantasies with this game? Sure, but they can do that with any shoot-em-up with a diverse cast.

It doesn’t help any that my whole blog persona is built around the concept of village and villagers!

peace,
Villager

The argument about racism and the argument about overhyped violence in video games are technically two distinct arguments. The fact that the game designers in this case didn’t make the connection could be seen as either a very ignorant and shortsighted development, or — ironically — as a positive: perhaps racism just didn’t pop into their minds?

Glass half full, glass half empty… either way, to send a message in return: don’t buy the game if you find it offensive, and mention it to others if you feel strongly about it. Nothing defeats preconceived notions like open-minded conversations.

So, a game that stars a white man killing a lot of people who are all Black certainly is not a game I’m going to buy. But, it’s also terribly irresponsible and malevolent of the producers of this game to produce such a hate video in the first place. Are they TRYING to foment violence between and against people of different skin-colors?