Most gamers will recall the race controversy sparked by the Resident Evil 5 trailer released at E3 2007. Set in Africa,  the trailer showed a white protagonist mowing down hordes of black zombie villagers.

As the long-awaited game draws closer to its March, 2009 U.S. launch, CVG serves up an interview with Capcom's Masachika Kawata, an RE5 producer who says his team had no racial agenda in the game design:

We chose Africa [as RE5's setting] because we're extending the storyline logically. Following the tradition of the Resident Evil franchise, you'll remember from Code Veronica - the Progenitor virus comes from Africa so we wanted to go back to the root of where the virus originated.

 

For the people who think it's racist... well, we can't please everyone. We're in the entertainment business - we're not here to state our political opinion or anything like that. It's unfortunate that some people felt that way.

We've gone where the story has taken us...

Via: Edge Online

A watchdog group has criticized the controversial Michigan State University chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom for promoting Border Patrol, a racist Flash game released in 2006.

The charge came after MSU YAF linked to Border Patrol via a recent blog post.

YAF Watch, a site dedicated to tracking activities of the MSU YAF, writes:

The game, Border Patrol, encourages the player to shoot Mexican immigrants dashing over the border. When the player shoots one of the immigrants, a blood splatter appears. The various targets for the player include a pregnant woman, a baby and man carrying a backpack...

 

This is not the first time YAF has been involved in degrading immigrants. They first made headlines with a proposed "Catch An Illegal Immigrant" game in 2006. The game would have featured a person portraying an illegal immigrant, and encourage game players hunting the person down. The game was condemned by MSU officials, including President Lou Anna K Simmons. It eventually was canceled.

According to Wikipedia, the MSU YAF was cited as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2006. In 2007 the group hosted Chris Simcox, head of the Minuteman Civil Defense League, a group which aggressively targets illegal immigration.

Border Patrol, anonymously released to the Internet, has been widely condemned. As GP correspondent Colin McInnes wrote in our original 2006 coverage:

Most of the debate about illegal immigration centers on America's border with Mexico, so it's especially troubling that in Border Patrol the player's tasks include shooting "Mexican nationalists," "drug dealers," and "breeders" - pregnant Mexican women - who try to rush the border towards a welfare office.

A Northwestern University study indicates that MMO players are subject to the same racial biases seen in the real world.

According to iTnews, researchers used the virtual world of There.com as the setting for social interaction experiments in which light and dark-skinned avatars approached random players and asked for a favor. From the report:

White avatars in the DITF experiment received about a 20 percent increase in compliance with the moderate request; however, the increase for the dark-toned avatars was 8 percent... The finding is consistent with previous DITF studies -- in real and virtual worlds -- that demonstrate that physical characteristics, such as race, gender and physical attractiveness, affect judgment of others.

Researcher Paul Eastwick commented:

This study suggests that interactions among strangers within the virtual world are very similar to interactions between strangers in the real world. You would think when you're wandering around this fantasyland … that you might behave differently. But people exhibited the same type of behaviour -- and the same type of racial bias -- that they show in the real world all the time.

Via: Kotaku

Not content to rest on the laurels of their hilarious GTA IV Activity Book for Kids, the crew at the -minusworld has come up with a Resident Evil Activity Book for Kids.

By way of explanation, there's this:

Oh Resident Evil 5, you elusive wench! Why must you make us wait so long to play you? What the hell are we supposed to do until March? And think about the kids! They can’t even play the game, period. Luckily, though, Capcom has heard your cries and is clappin’ back with the Resident Evil Activity Book For Kids. You won’t find any blood, gore, or racism here but you will find good old wholesome fun! So much fun that your head might explode, exposing wavy tentacles of joy that flail around the village. Get to it!

While the issue of race in the trailer for the upcoming Resident Evil 5 has received no small share of attention in recent months, it continues to spark outrage among some members of the black community.

On Your Black Writers today, Tolu Olorunda takes exception to the RE5 trailer:

What I witnessed [in the RE5 trailer] was nerve-wrecking, painful, mind-numbing and heart-racing... 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...

Olorunda also raises the issue of under-representation of African-Americans in the video game industry:

The Video Game industry is one which has profited immensely from the casualty of black on black hostility. Notable products of its faculty include, “50 Cent: Bulletproof,” “Def Jam: Icon” and “Grand Theft Auto.” This $10 billion market owes the majority of its inspiration to the tragic decisions of young black and brown teenagers...

 

A 2005 survey suggests that Blacks constitute 2% of the demographic makeup of Game Developers, with Latinos making 2.5%. How ironic is it, that this reality does very little to punctuate the disproportionate consumption of video game products by Black and Brown teenagers...