![\"Come](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/screen8.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nLong before its scheduled March 2009 release, Resident Evil 5<\/em> (RE5<\/em>), the next installment in the immensely popular and influential<\/a> survival-horror videogame series, started coughing up blood…and controversy: In the narrative, a white protagonist, Chris Redfield, sets down in what appears to be an African or Caribbean country decimated by a mutant “supervirus.” Suddenly, freshly dead villagers start to revive as bloodthirsty zombies, and Redfield must slaughter them in hordes to stay alive, a la<\/em> this scene, below, from the game trailer<\/a>.<\/p>\n Perhaps Newsweek<\/em>‘s gaming critic, N’Gai Croal, giving pointed regard to the clip’s images, with their precedents in racist visual history, said it most succinctly in an excellent MTV Online<\/em> interview: “Clearly no one Black worked on this game.”<\/a><\/p>\n (Capcom, which makes the game, addressed Croal via producer Jun Takeuchi, stating that “there are Black members in the development team<\/a>. 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.” Are Takeuchi, and the people who hail his statement aware that, as opposed to making his company look better, this makes his company look worse? In other words, that with<\/em> Black staff, they’re getting the kinds of results which suggest they have none?)<\/p>\n Even more, however, on gaming blogs, fans of the series argued, typically with contempt, that viewers were overreacting<\/a>. For example, AriesXX, here, responding to one of Bonnie Ruberg’s RE5<\/em>-critical Village Voice<\/em> pieces<\/a>:<\/p>\n Africa and Haiti are the two most blighted, diseased places on the planet. This makes it totally plausible that any new ‘super virus’ might originate, or at least thrive in these areas. I don’t care what race they are, the diseased among us need to be cured, quarantined, or destroyed. If a game comes out that supports that message, fantastic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What do you think? Well, now, you can make up your own mind with the new gameplay trailer<\/a> from G4. (Thanks, Kotaku<\/em><\/a>.) As indicated by the pic beneath the above headline, Redfield now has a non-white colleague: Says Wikipedia<\/a>, she’s “Sheva Alomar,” an agent in West Africa’s branch of the BSAA (Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance). (My favorite touch: Her combat-spec<\/a>, coffee-colored, “biracial” skin tone.)<\/p>\n I think it’s racist as a tube of of Darkie toothpaste, right. (Note how the dentifrice transmorgrified, from Darkie to the meaningless Darlie, once the race charge was made.)<\/p>\n Croal says,<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you engage that kind of imagery you have to be careful with it. It would be like saying you were going to do some sort of zombie movie that appeared to be set in Europe in the 1940\u2019s with skinny, emaciated, Hasidic-looking people. If you put up that imagery people would be saying, \u2018Are you crazy?\u2019 Well, that\u2019s what this stuff looks like. This imagery has a history. It has a history and you can\u2019t pretend otherwise. That imagery still has a history that has to be engaged, that has to be understood. \u2026 If you\u2019re going to engage imagery that has that potential, the onus is on the creator to be aware of that because there will be repercussions in the marketplace.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n More and more, game manufacturers are enabling gamers to modify varied aspects of the playable character’s, or avatar’s, appearance and other characteristics. For example, the follow-up to the hilarious, 2006 Grand Theft Auto<\/em> rip-off Saints Row<\/em>, Saints Row 2<\/em><\/a>, even gives one the power to modify an avatar’s personality<\/em>.<\/p>\n![\"\u201cWipe](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/621x600timeinres_evilopen.jpg\" "\\"\u201cWipe")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\u201cMakes](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/darkietoothpaste.jpg\" "\\"\u201cMakes")
<\/a>Is Resident Evil 5<\/em> racist?<\/p>\n
![\"Whose](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/9780151011384_150.jpg\" "\\"Whose")
<\/a>It’d be interesting if the makers of Resident Evil 5<\/em> went this route in terms of their product. Giving gamers a playable Black lead character might blunt some of the charge that Capcom is subtly programming America’s tousle-headed youth for a circa 2015 Nigerian oil grab and the inevitable insurgency. (Or, like the shape-shifting Darkie, some might read such an accommodation as merely a naked ploy.)<\/p>\n