“Smell that? Shit storm’s a-comin’.”
I think everyone likes a good clusterfuck. Like when the trailer for Bevery Hills Chihuahua hit, it was like watching a train full of syrup barrel down the tracks toward a stalled truck full of turkeys. Horrible? Yes. But yet you await it with a kind of nervous anticipation that is not at all unpleasant. A part of you just wants to watch a great disaster unfold.
Thus, Capcom has just released what has seriously got to be the most politically incorrect two minutes of video in the history of everything. It’s the brand new (released yesterday) trailer for the zombie survival horror/African genocide simulator Resident Evil 5.
If you’re confused, you may not remember last year when the first teaser trailer appeared and drew some outrage because, well, it depicted a strong, muscular, handsome white man killing hundreds and hundreds of mindless African savages.
Well, this trailer makes it about ten times worse.
This is so hilariously, amazingly wrong. I am told the Japanese just culturally don’t have a grasp of why this sort of thing (or casual racism in general) is a problem. But there have to be people inside the company patiently explaining why the symbolism there isn’t going to fly. And I’m picturing programmers staring back with blank stares and saying, “But… they’re zombies! And of course they’re black! The game takes place in Africa!”
Well, right… but you made that choice, Capcom. Same as if some game took place in a girl’s school, and the premise of the game is that all the little girls are possessed by evil spirits and the only way to defeat the demons is with your penis. It would be laughable to defend level after level of sodomizing children by quoting the fictional framework that set it up (”But.. they’re possessed by demons! It’s the only way to save them!”) as if it was completely out of your hands.
YOU are the ones who set things up so the child raping would happen, and you’re the ones who created a scenario where the gamer finds Africa to be full of bloodthirsty savages with sticks and stones, and the only way to win is to mow them down with your state of the art weaponry.
If this game becomes a hit - and judging from the buzz, it’s going to be a monster - then the shitstorm that erupts over this game is going to be something to witness. See, there’s an x-factor here, too, and you can only get it by actually watching the video linked up there. These people you’re killing are absolutely photo-realistic. They may be the most realistic humans ever killed in a game.
It won’t be until the next generation when we really get there, to women whose blood gets matted and clotted in their blond hair when you blow their brains out, and men who twitch and shit their pants as they lay dying, air whistling as they try to suck breath into a punctured lung, stray bullets that kill toddlers. And, hell, maybe that’ll be the point where the upward surge in realism flattens out, where publishers realize we only want so much of it in our games.
But first, we have 2009 to look forward to, which is when RE5 comes out, and the mainstream news media will do their usual clumsy, laughable job of trying to cover anything gaming related, only with the added bonus of endless civil rights activists fighting over camera time, most of whom will have never touched a console controller in their lives.
It should be awesome.
May 31st, 2008 at 11:56 am
Why’s it any different to when Resident Evil IV had us shooting Spanish people portrayed as blithering idiots? Why wasn’t that racist? I think this article is a little over the top.
May 31st, 2008 at 12:32 pm
If you can’t see the difference between one european man shooting a bunch of other european men and one strong, muscular white mand mowing down wave after wave of black savages, then you need your fucking head checked.
Seriously. That’s like watching a video of a guy beat the hell out of a bunch of women, then complaining that it was never ’sexist’ when Buffy beat up men. You’re so wildly out of touch with the history of social power dynamics that it’s laughable.
Or it would be, if it weren’t so horrifying.
May 31st, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I just think whites are so scared of being racist these days it’s backfired and gone the opposite way. If the game featured a black person mowing down white savages I bet there wouldn’t be half the uproar. And REIV wasn’t a European shooting Europeans, it was a big strong American with lots of technical weaponry shooting down Europeans with axes.
May 31st, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Ha! That trailer was horrifically racist (and horrifically bad, to boot). Most amusing was the ending lines, which I think were a throw-back to RE4, but which sound like “hurr most women aren’t strong enough to kill black people.”
May 31st, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Malice, do you realize how little sense that makes? How is that chick saying she can hold her own the same as saying women aren’t strong enough to kill black people? Even within the context of the video thrown in it makes no sense.
And its a throwback to the original Resident Evil when he said he had a female partner once, as Chris and Jill were partners.
June 1st, 2008 at 2:57 am
Hmmm.. I don’t know.. I’m probably just blind but it seemed like almost half of those zombies were white.. I guess my eyes are just fucked though.
June 1st, 2008 at 6:50 am
It’s the light…it makes their skin appear pale. They are clearly meant to be black, though.
June 1st, 2008 at 1:54 pm
“And REIV wasn’t a European shooting Europeans, it was a big strong American with lots of technical weaponry shooting down Europeans with axes.”
Also, the Spanish in RE4 spoke in MEXICAN accents.
“If you can’t see the difference between one european man shooting a bunch of other european men and one strong, muscular white mand mowing down wave after wave of black savages, then you need your fucking head checked.”
Both groups are portrayed as “savages” in their respective RE games. Also, while this may be because the Persians in 300 were portrayed as a magnificent empire, controversy surrounding the black vs. whites portrayal of Thermopylae in that film was pretty minimal (and complaints I observed were exclusively from white people). While I don’t know where to find the data to back this up, I do believe several Pacific Theater WWII games actually did reasonably well in Japan, despite the fact that they were playing as white people killing their ancestors. If true (I think Penny Arcade did an old strip about this), then it’s pretty unsurprising that they wouldn’t see a problem with this.
“You’re so wildly out of touch with the history of social power dynamics that it’s laughable.”
PWNED!
June 1st, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Nobody’s getting pissed that you have to shoot dogs? BLACk dogs?
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Through history there has been huge and widespread violence against blacks by whites. Hispanic race-hate can’t even begin to compare. Surely this should be obvious.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:37 pm
And anyway, what point are you people trying to make? That Capcom is excused simply because they did something similar but less extreme in the past?
June 8th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I never got what the problem with this is. I mean, setting the game in Africa is a pretty controversial choice, but its not like you play as a white supremacist on a quest for a wicked killboner. I doubt they actually believe the population of Africa have the ability to split their face open like a suped up version of one of those pussymouth vampires from Blade 2, or maybe rip a fleshy fuckrod through their heads.
Unless they actually do think that. In which case, yeah. Racist.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
I say that we as a culture have a really bad case of mixed priorities if we can no longer enjoy a good wholesome mass-murdering slaughterfest just because the victims happen to be of a negroid ethnicity.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:21 am
“I am told the Japanese just culturally don’t have a grasp of why this sort of thing (or casual racism in general) is a problem.”
I agree with the Japanese. These days skin color is a lot less of a problem than thin skin.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:37 am
I just checked out the trailer and I really don’t see the big f’ng deal. What is it? Do we now have to make sure that we have zombie hordes that “look like America?”
Wong, you’re 10 kinds of awesome, but you’re way off on this. Your girl’s school analogy would only hold up if the only way to kill African zombies is by lynching, or maybe a fried chicken gun or watermelon grenades.
I can see: O.K. they were stupid to set it in Africa, because there are a lot of idiots who will endeavor to take offense and Capcom or whoever will pay a dear price for their failure to adhere to prevailing politically correct literary rules, no matter how stupid those rules happen to be.
But to make the claim that the concept or the designers themselves are actually “racist,” based solely on the above media, is just dumb.