Tag Archives: racism

Square-Enix has offered a response to allegations that one of its NPCs represents an African-American racial stereotype.
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Remember when everyone went mental over Resident Evil 5 featuring a buff white man murdering black men in grass skirts? Capcom does too.

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Hopefully this’ll be the last word on the subject. The New York Times is the latest in a string of publications to say that Resident Evil 5 isn’t racist. Please let this be the end of it.

Let’s get this out of the way: Resident Evil 5 is not a racist game.

For at least a year some black journalists have been wringing their hands about whether the game, the latest in the seminal survival-horror series, inflames racist stereotypes because it is set in Africa. The answer is no…

So Resident Evil 5 exposes the perhaps uncomfortable truth that blacks and Arabs can become zombies too, just like anyone else. Blacks and Arabs do not have a secret anti-zombie gene. And just like all the thousands of white, Asian and Hispanic zombies that have been dispatched in innumerable other games before them, the African zombies must also be destroyed, or at least neutralized.

That it? Really? Get a lot more words through the link.

VG247 has it on good authority that some British Resident Evil 5 reviewers have been specifically told to avoid writing about, taking video of, or image-grabbing the island section from the game’s third chapter.

We’ve been told that players encounter spear-wielding Africans in the specified section.

The instructions were given in the form of a covering letter sent with review code.

The game has been constantly accused of racism, a debate kicked off in earnest by Newsweek journo N’Gai Croal last April, who said it contained “classic racist imagery”.

Producer Jun Takeuchi has defended the project at every turn, even going as far as to say there are black members of the game’s Japanese development team.

IGN is going live with the first review – an agreed exclusive, we’re told – at 4.00pm PST today. The general review embargo lifts on Monday.

We’re unaware if American journalists have been put under the same restrictions.

We’ve contacted Capcom for comment.

Update: We’ve been given some of the wording from the letter this morning. Apparently, it says, “Please don’t mention any action/story/enemies from the Native Village,” and, “No screenshots of the Native Village”.

Also, UK reviewers have been told not to show screens of unlockable costumes.

There’s an interesting interview with a leading expert on racism, Glenn Bowman, posted on Videogamer, discussing whether or not Resident Evil 5 is a racist game.

The senior lecturer at the department of anthropology at the University of Kent said he thought it was “silly to call it racist.”

“It is about using Africa as threat, but they’ve got to use somewhere as threat”, he said.

“And as far as I know from what you’ve told me the last game used rural Spain as threat. Basically if you want to make a frightening scene you take whatever characteristics of that scene are salient and turn them align.

“So you get vicious Spaniards who I suspect are running around with knives or whatever. Here you get infected Africans. Maybe they’ll make the next game happen in Finland and you’ll have a whole series of Inuits and the like being really scary and running around with Walrus heads on. I think it’s silly to call it racist.”

He did say, however, that it has the potential to be much more racist. But isn’t.

“I don’t think it actually is racist. I think what they’re trying to do is say this is a shit scary space that you’re in and it’s full of anger and furthermore also people hate Americans”.

The rest of the interview is through here, and it’s well worth the read.

Speaking to MTV, Resident Evil 5 producer Jun Takeuchi has yet again answered questions on the subject of racial stereotyping in the game, and has said that members of the development team are black.

Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal had previously opined, “Clearly no one black worked on this game,” again in an MTV interview.

“We were quite surprised by the reaction that came out. I think everyone understands that we never set out to with the intention to make anything that was racist — that was never our intention. We think it was a bit of a misunderstanding when we published the first images of the game back in the day,” said Takeuchi, speaking at E3 last week.

“And we think that as we move along and allow people to see more the game and more of what’s going on and more of the story, people will get a better idea of the game. I think you can see that that reaction has started to die down a little bit. To answer the question that was posted on your blog, there are black members in the development team. We do have staff working on the game, who are aware of the historical background and we are constantly checking these kinds of things with them.”

Full thing through the first link.

It’s not going away. Speaking on the Young Black Writers blog, author Tolu Olorunda has raised similar concerns over Resident Evil 5′s imagery that troubled Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal after seeing footage of the game.

“What I witnessed [in the trailer] was nerve-wrecking, painful, mind-numbing and heart-racing,” said Olorunda. “It wasted no time in capitalizing upon the long history of blatant depictions of Africans as savages and helpless imbeciles. The trailer featured a Caucasian male mutilating African villages, along with Africans. With the not-so ancient history of colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa, the issue of racial insensitivity and indifference must be brought to the centerfold.”

More on Game Politics.

Former Microsoft game user research head Bill Fulton – who previously worked on games like Shadrowrun for the company – reckons the general behaviour of many gamers online is “drastically reducing our sales”.

“Of all the ways I spend my free time, playing games online is the only one I would describe as ‘frequently barbaric’,” he said. “Insults of all kinds, including racist and homophobic slurs, are commonplace.

The women I know who play online avoid anything that would identify them as female – including voice communication – in order to avoid the unwanted, and frequently negative, attention. And that’s just how players are intentionally insulting – what some people do while playing online can also be aggravating.”

Not sure where he’s getting this from. All our online gaming involves pleasant chit-chat and flowers. More rather sobering quotes through the link.