September 22, 2007 -
GamePolitics readers will no doubt recall last month's Resident Evil 5 race controversy which erupted across the online world as African-American bloggers took issue with the upcoming game's setting in Africa as well as the idea of a white protagonist mowing down waves of black villagers turned zombies.Although the furor over RE5 eventually died down, liberal website AlterNet has fanned the flames with an article posted earlier today.
'Resident Evil: Extinction' Flick Based on Racist Video Game Series takes the popular zombie shooter to task, and not just over RE5's gunning down of African villagers:
As they pack into theaters to watch the blockbuster Resident Evil: Extinction this weekend, moviegoers may first want to play one of the many blockbuster video games on which the film is based. Those that do will likely enter a world... increasingly populated with very dangerous depictions of non-whites.
...last year's smash-hit Resident Evil 4... places players in the position of fighting parasitically-controlled Spaniards (called "Los Ganados" or "the cattle") with stereotypical Mexican accents...
And, in what looks like it could be a training video for a white supremacist race war... players of the soon-to-be-released Resident Evil 5 video game are placed in what could be an African country or Haiti as they blow up armies of black zombies.
Although his time frame is way off, author Roberto Lovato also revives the 2003 Haitian controversy which eventually prompted GTA Vice City to be edited by Rockstar:
Players of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, this year's most popular video game... become characters in the virtual world who mouth such statements as "I hate these Haitians!,"and "Stinking nest of Haitians, we gonna kill 'em all!"
...Like many of the most popular games, including Kung Fu, Warcraft 3 and Shadow Warrior... most video games deny humanity to the non-white, especially Latinos. A comprehensive content analysis study of video games conducted by Children Now, found that while 56% of all human characters in the games were white, only 22% of all human characters were African American and only 2% were Latino...
Mallika Dutt, Director of Breakthrough, an organization which is developing ICED! a serious game which examines the plight of immigrants, told Lovato:
We've been tracking this (video game racism) for some time and we saw how effective games are for getting someone into the skin of someone experiencing something. Unfortunately, we also found that many of the most popular games give players the opportunity to experience what it's like to be a bigot...
The issues around video games are just one example of how very important it is to understand gaming and other new media. There are so many games that promote hate and prejudice. So, we decided to do something different.
Comments
I was just thinking about this; half the characters in video games are of asian descent. Capcom, after all, is run by a bunch of Japenese folks.
So, I wonder how people from Japanese video games are determined to be of a certain race?
I mean, are Asians automatically 'white' to these people when they aren't mispronouncing their Ls and Rs?
Well, the Resident Evil series is a special case in this situation. Even in Japan, the characters were Americans with English-speaking voice actors.
RE5 was confirmed to be located in haiti (yes thats probably spelled wrong) where i believe those of a dark skin are common, its called being true to the setting. If it were in america, it'd probably have more white people, but its not.
Context is important, otherwise you're just another racist trying to show that white people are racist devils (even when the white people are asians from across the ocean).
So much talk for so little proof of research.
Hey people, there is a reason why they teach you the scientific method in grade school...
Because he's ripping off Robert Parungao's (misguided) college essay that studied race in those three games. GamePolitics covered that essay back on 7/24/06.
Lavato is doing bad research on bad research..
I'm fighting for zombie rights for years now.
oy. IF YOU DARE.
Quiet! You're destroying his perfect argument!
For instance, he's an avid gamer himself, and he's opposed to video game regulation. More here : http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/warcraft3reignofchaos/news.html?sid=...
Then no one will complain about the game because all white folks are still cruel and uncaring about the majority of African-Americans; even though we are taught since kindergarten that we should respect other minorities.
But that's just me. (seriously shut yer mouths if you don't have something intelligent to say)
I for one will not stand for this undead racism.
We see it how we want to, others see it how they want to. We see things like WC3 as an extreme fantasy used as a social statement. To others, the humans in the game aren't a race, but a species purely of caucasians. It's a point of view. All we can do is put forth ours. I just wish people didn't feel the need to bash each other.
-Mike Schwinger
it would of course make perfect sense to this guy to kill tons of white zombies in African villages. and his linking between spainish setting and Mexico as proof of bigotry is crazy
there is a big difference between people from Spain and Mexico. he is the one showing racial prejudice saying all spainish speakers are the same.
and what was that second part about the Children now study?
i just finished looking over it and boy is it horrible
they constantly rant about how games don't have enough female characters in their leading roles. any dumb joe on the street can tell you that games are dominantly played by males so why would a company out to make money do things that would alienate their clients?
and th best part, they blast on the gameboy for being to violent because '80% of it require violence to complete" and that violence being of coures jumping on enemies heads with mario.
He was looking for racism, so he found it.
http://www.nukeisrael.com/zognightmare.htm
Idiots need to face the fact - zombies will look like the ethnicity of their origin, unless they made the zombification agent turn them all white, at which point we'd have the same people making different complaints about racial homoginization, or something else just as stupid.
Why don't they complaint against CAPCOM, the JAPANESE company, that make RESIDENT EVIL?
I am guesting that in RE5, you are going after some white person making a zombie army.
Games are not promoting hate. In fact I think games are bringing every one together. With world wide online play, games are uniting the human race.
The people who are complaining are just pussy. They say they want racial equality but act very intolerantly.
Every one focus on the bad. No one ever praised HALO for treating human equally. HALO have a strong Black soldier and also featuring soldiers fighting along side you from any race of the human species.
"It looks like more and more people on the left are losing their minds over nonsense like this. Makes me glad I’m a conservative."
Let me just say that I'm a left leaning liberal, and I'm starting to get a little sick of people lumping all of my kind with idiots like Roberto Lovato. The fact of the matter is, no matter what side of the coin you're talking about, there are dumbasses. Left, right, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. It doesn't matter. Both sides have both good people AND complete morons.
I'm as to the left as they come, and I wish people would stop blaming games for everything just as much as the rest of you.
Anyway, I've said what I needed to say.
i have to say, though, that the RE series does seem to make a single race of people into zombies for one game
true racism means to refuse to include a race in a game due to hatred for them....this is a stupid double standard, if we had white people killing white people, and no one else...people would complain "hey...where are the black/latino/foreign" characters? you're racist" if we have black guys killing balck guys its a stereotype...if we have white guys killing latinos/blacks....its racist....tell me....WHAT DO YOU WANT US TO DO?!
Ah ha, I thought his reference to both Warcraft III and Shadow Warrior sounded strangely familar.
Heh, I suppose something like this was inevitable. Remember when the RE5 stink first hit this site, and tons of people were posting things like "Why didn't people complain about RE4 and call it racist?" Well, it's happened now.
"Only"? the demography of the U.S. is 12% black.
I saw that one too. I was thrilled with the reaction, but rather disappointed with where they went with it.
Of all things, they argued that the company was trying to sell the 'thrill' of killing poor people. I didn't quite get that, but maybe that's just me.
Its the thrill of killing zombies, not poor people... with an additional emotional reaction at times, I would hope.. I remember other RE games have had some pretty emotional plot elements at times.
I meant more than a few times, though not hardcore all the time gaming or owning a system.
Oh, and the demons. Maybe he's writing about how everyone in warcraft were mean to those poor innocent demons that just wanted to envelope every world in flames.
Both of them spoke with fakey accents, but speaking for myself as a Spanish American, I wasn't offended. Well, maybe slightly, but I had zombies to kill and I couldn't let it bother me. Or maybe - JUST MAYBE - he hasn't played the game EVEN A LITTLE and doesn't know what he's talking about.
Oh, and just to clear up one of his central misconceptions: Spaniards are white Europeans, and not really the target of much in the way of racial hatred Stateside. Just, y'know, putting that out there.
Man, fuck that Roberto Lovato guy. Looking over his past stories, he's clearly a one-issue writer (that issue being "everyone's out to get Latinos") who doesn't feel it's important to research an issue before writing about it (seriously, Kung Fu? A 22-year-old NES game? Really?)
Now, if he wants to complain about Total Overdose or Chili Con Carnage, I'd say he has a fair point, as you can't get much more blatantly stereotypical than that. But I have a feeling he was just asked to write a movie review, and thought, "Hmm, how can I tie this into my love of writing about perceived racism against Latinos?" And lo and behold, the shining light of half-assed pseudojournalism reminded him of something he'd once read about Resident Evil once.
How he managed to find such a weird, decades-spanning pastiche of games to hold up as "popular" while missing the most obvious ones is beyond me, but he's clearly just another writer with an agenda who doesn't know shit about games. Next.
We live in a world where Cops try to blame videogames for causing hate-filled posters to be put up, but it turns out those were pages from (the admittedly genius) Zombie Survival Guide.
But we also live in a world where, in America, most people who aren't white--and many who are--deal with degrees of racism from subtle or even unintended to blatant and even physically harmful.
As gamers, we can't trust that the media is going to bother to check the facts (when have they previously?) and we can't go around calling people names or discounting their point of view when we don't share their life experiences. What we CAN and SHOULD do, but inevitably get ignored or taken out of context doing, is pointing out the TRUTH.
The game is not intended to be racist;
Its history supports this, when not cherrypicked from;
And there are people out there who find these images offensives.
Fine; they're allowed to--that's what freedom of speech does, it lets us say what we think. But we should respectfully point out some of the flawed assumptions that are going on in connecting the GAME ITSELF to this racism when the reality is that, in the context of the game world, this is but one more stop along a zombie-filled horror ride that has made efforts to broaden its terrain and story by placing the characters into new environments.
Is it possible the game developers didn't think of this? Yes, especially since Asian nations don't carry American baggage in regards to race issues. Is it likely they intend to offend? Not very--we're not dealing with R*, and again, America's history with race issues is not shared by the rest of the world.
But it's just as foolish for us to say that the people who find this offensive are stupid, because they aren't part of the videogame culture. Just like the race issue might seem obvious to an American who sees this image and looks no further for facts or data, so do the factors that reveal this game's innocence in racist propoganda seem obvious to gamers.
Yes, the people bringing this issue up again are completely out of touch in regards to the game and the game community--but answering their immature, unfounded, knee-jerk reactions with more of the same is hardly the way to prove them wrong or make a point, no matter the subject.