Does Playing Resident Evil 5 Make You A Racist?

You are about to kill all these black people.

At midnight last night, I walked over to the local GameStop with a friend of mine, kicked the door in, stared the clerk in the eye and said, “Give me your finest video game.” The man, unnerved by my wayward eye and the six-inch stiletto I was tracing up and down my palm, clumsily flopped his hand behind his back trying to grab some – any – game off the shelf. The game he picked up was Resident Evil 5, the newest zombie-killing offering from Capcom, following Resident Evils 1, 2, and 3. Our game in hand, my friend and I made a pit stop to 7-11 for the proper gamer fuel, then went back to my house, popped the game in, and played for six hours.

At Taintbrush, we make a point to not always report on current events. We figure there are lots of websites out there that make their money by riffing off whatever hits Gawker, the Superficial, ESPN, et al, on a daily basis, and we’re not being unique or interesting at all if we just get in line to snark on things everyone is snarking. No, if we’re not going to be unique or interesting, we’re going to do it by writing about stuff we want to write about not stuff we think we should write out.

The issue in question relates to the game I just talked about playing, Resident Evil 5 – specifically, the minor media and audience furor that has stirred over the game’s racist and imperialist overtones. Brief background on the game: You are Chris Redfield, a jacked All-American boy who eats iron and shits four-year-olds for breakfast. You are dispatched by the government, or some non-governmental organization, or something (I don’t remember, we were drunk) to Africa, where a plague (?) or madness (???) has settled over the local tribes, turning them into savages. As it is your duty to put these savages down, you start killing them on the way to progressing through the game’s cookie cutter plot. For the entire game, you are constantly killing rabid, violent, and unintelligent African people.

A lot of the levels require you to traverse a vast network of African villages. In these villages, there are plenty of cultural artifacts, from tribal masks, pottery, war masks, and typical stuff you would find in an African village (This is sarcasm). As you are trying to collect as much stuff as you can so you can sell it, this involves smashing the shit out of everything you see and robbing it all. Are you following? You are killing black people and stealing all of their valuables.

The question: Is the game racist, or is it just a typical premise used in hundreds of other action-shooters? Kill people, take their stuff, keep going – it’s a formula that’s been used in Zelda, Mario, and so many fucking games I am not even going to waste your time or mine by typing it out. Still, when the only portrayal of the indigenous peoples of Resident Evil 5 is as those people, then it’s a question to be raised. Do games not aspire to be Real Art these days? Do gamers not strive to be taken seriously by art critics? Then we can look at this shit and not feel pompous becuase we’re not just taking it at face value.

A small number of reviews have done this, to mixed success. From GameSpy:

It’s also impossible to ignore the controversy surrounding RE5 prior to release. The game’s disturbing imagery and its portrayal of Africans has offended some and stirred up plenty of debate. Not every gamer will be bothered by what RE5 presents in its first few levels, but there are elements that could upset others. In a few sections of the game, Chris and Sheva face off with waves of infected people dressed in tribal garb, and it’s quite unsettling if you’re familiar with old Hollywood stereotypes of indigenous African tribes as lawless savages, zombies or not.

Here’s IGN’s somewhat blase analysis:

There’s been a fair amount of media discussion around the question of whether Resident Evil 5 has racist overtones due to its African setting and the fact that the main character (at least on the first playthrough) is a white man shooting black people in their native land. I personally didn’t find Resident Evil 5 to have an overtly racist feel, but I did find one aspect of it a bit disturbing. It was a bit strange to realize I was wandering around Africa stealing the region’s gold, precious gems and expensive native treasures, which I then cashed in to pay for weapon upgrades. Add in the fact that I ended up killing the parasitically infected villagers and townspeople of the area with said weapons, and the discomfort comes full circle.

But I long ago lost count of the number if videogames I’ve played whose in-game economies, storylines and character motivations made absolutely no sense. And I suppose the people of Kijuju won’t be needing their treasures anymore anyway, seeing as they’ve all been infected with a parasite and then killed by me. Consider it money well spent on ridiculously powerful weapons.

The problem with this review: The writer begins to question the game’s morality, and then he acts like it’s not even a relevant question! “It’s never been a problem before, so why not now?” is a pretty glib way to avoid addressing a real issue, which is that people are offended by the questionable racial overtones of the game, which in turn should be leading them to question the moral overtones of any game where the objective is to kill hundreds of people. Because Resident Evil 5 is not the first game where you have to kill black people, nor will it be the last (I’m not being tasteless! It’s true!), but it is one of the first mainstream games to factor such polarizing racial sides in its stubborn morality: You are white, they are black, you are good, they are savages, and you must kill them.

Whenever a work of art comes out that promotes immoral themes, critics are reluctant to address how these themes might be absorbed or consciously accepted by a stupid audience. That’s what the crux of it is: Every critic and intelligent guy thinks they’re too smart to be affected by the messages in a movie or a song or a video game, so it’s not worth talking about, because if people can’t see that it’s just fun or that they’re being manipulated, then that’s their problem.

This is a really elitist way of looking at it, which is funny coming from a guy who wrote 1000 words shit-talking the Beatles a few weeks ago. It is irresponsible and ignorant to avoid discussion of how the lowest common denominator (to be a prick) interacts with the work of art. When Zack Snyder has Silk Spectre and Nite-Owl watch Rorschach kill a guy in the prison bathroom without even flinching, their condoning of death and violence, combined with their cool status in the eyes of the audience, helps lead the audience to believe that death and violence are okay. People say, “But it’s only a movie! It’s just made-up! No one really thinks that!” Well, no; if you process without questioning, if you accept without wondering why, then you are allowing a foreign projection of values onto your own, which I think desensitizes you and makes you a little worse off. Why shouldn’t you flinch when someone gets killed in a movie? Why shouldn’t you be offended when a character calls someone a racial slur? And now, why shouldn’t you be offended when you, a white American, are told to kill hundreds upon hundreds of native Africans?

Do I have a stance on the issue? Yeah. I don’t think the game is intentionally racist – all of the lines in the demo about Africa being a “savage land” with “no intelligence” seems to have been removed (and we played through a shitload of this game), the game makes it clear that the Africans have been corrupted because of an outside plague, and hey, there’s even a token black girl to help you with the killing so you don’t feel so conflicted! At the same time, the encouraged destruction of the villages is pretty insensitive, but now that I think about it, the game doesn’t really tell you to destroy stuff. You destroy it because you know there might be gold, and bizarrely enough, handgun ammo inside. You’re destroying stuff because you’re familiar with that old adage of gaming – break stuff, and lo, steal what is inside. Is Capcom being irresponsible by framing that mechanic in the context of destroying another culture?

Maybe. I don’t want to pretend my own view is the best, but I think it is definitely a valid question and one that more reviews should be unafraid to address if they want to be serious at all. In the past few years, we’ve seen a proliferation of videogames that have aspirations to be called Art, and if the medium is moving towards artistic recognition, then we need to ponder these things. So, is Resident Evil 5 racist? Yes and no. What a conclusion! What do you think?