The Gamer's Quarter

[Mr Mustache]

[Scratchmonkey]

I guess the question I have is whether you could make a game about Original Voodoo Zombies a la Serpent's Rainbow and some old Val Lewton films without producing something that would make Said want to punch a puppy.

I mean, there has to be a way to produce something that's more like Heart of Darkness than Mondo Cane.

[Isfet]

i don't even know if i'd use Heart of Darkness as an example. how about producing something like Things Fall Apart or Midnight's Children or Omeros? not that they all deal with the same issues, but along that line of thinking, i mean. which i guess ties into what could be done to make a game with these themes that wouldn't exotify or demonize the "other."

i guess to be responsible about it would take way more effort than is probably possible at this point. so the best thing might be to just not even bother venturing into the territory right now. there's really no legitimate reason to explore it, or more specifically, for these developers to explore it.

[Harveyjames]

It's a shame that the only cultural perspectives games are written from are that of freakish Japanese and Western man-children.

[Lestrade]

[Joe]

crackdown is very much a joke. anyone who thinks otherwise didn't finish it
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[dhex]

can you even have an action game without an other?

on a disappointing note, a search for edward said and video games turned up nothing useful.
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[Mr Mustache]

[Isfet]

[ryan]

Totally. After Titan Quest, there's no way I'd ever hire a satyr, regardless of its qualifications.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[Harveyjames]

[dhex]

what cultural perspective is nintendogs written from? (outside of "gaping maw of hell" i mean)
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[Harveyjames]

¥¥¥

and the aforementioned one

[dhex]

[Dracko]

You missed the part where it's okay to shoot people, so long as it's within your own race.

Because being PC is an utmost priority and isn't patronising to all involved.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Shapermc]

[simplicio]

[Harveyjames]

The town is being invaded by coloured blocks!

[Dracko]

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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Lestrade]

Did anyone else find the extended trailer both far more disturbing and far more impressive?

[helicopterp]

I have to say that I agree with Dracko and Dhex here. I think that's remarkable in its own right.


If the game were about a white American invading a poor, predominantly black village/city/region anywhere and decimating the local population because of a political disagreement or just because he felt like those savages needed to taste a little of his cold, lead civilization so that they could make sense out of their deplorable lives, I think we'd have a case. But he's not going to shoot them for those reasons; he's going to shoot them because they happen to have been infected and are now lethal machines that pose a threat to themselves, anything around them, and also, apparently, white America. I realize the statement, "pose a threat to themselves, anything around them, and also, apparently, white America" smacks of the philosophy behind American military involvement in foreign countries for at least the last half-century, but I think those similarities fall by the wayside when you have to consider that the game is still making you deal with zombies/infecteds/whateverthey'resupposedtobe.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't dismiss the charges of racism here on the mere grounds of "oh, see, they're not real impoverished Haitians, they're ZOMBIES, and that makes it all okay because it's so detached from the real world!" That would be both lazy and ignorant of me. As any who have read Said can attest, a culture consistently constructed on the fantasies of others can be just as insidious as a Black Hawk Down scenario (although I maintain that the actual plot of the game ought to be taken into account and does, in this case, considerably weaken those allegations).

However, Resident Evil 5 does not stand alone as a game; it is a sequel. Nor was its predecessor, the "problematic" Resident Evil 4, the birth of the series, no matter how revolutionary its changes in gameplay were for the series. There are at least three games in the Resident Evil series proper, and two(?) in its Code: Veronica spin-offs that all appeared before these last two. Somebody please let me know if I'm mistaken, but weren't all of them set in American locales? Weren't the zombies white? The series did a very thorough job in those game ensuring that the only demonized "other" is the zombie (the brief commentary on whose aesthetics was extremely interesting. thanks Harveyjames). I don't think, then, that setting the series somewhere else after five (again, ?) much more homogenous romps is really a bad thing at all.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[dhex]

as a side note, said isn't particularly godlike or infallible and had his own blind spots when it came to how cultures configure and re-configure internal and external influences.

i.e. america as the other in pretty much every tin-horn dictator's public life, whether or not there's any actual basis for interference. (less stabby an example would be how musical styles infiltrate and filtrate from regions; far from the nonsensical cry of cultural imperialism we have so many fucking styles that not even the mouthbreathing jackanapes at pitchfork can keep track of them.)

edit: ultimately, there's something weird about saying "white zombies, ok to kill, black zombies don't kill them cause that's racist, better check to make sure they're not gay zombies, oh those white zombies were actually basque so it's not ok to kill them anymore" etc.
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[The Soviet Onion]

What makes this really hilarious is that all of you fruits would cross the street to avoid a black guy in real life.

[helicopterp]

Hi. Soviet Onion. I'm not sure who the fuck you think I am or what the fuck you think I do. Ignorant comments like that make you a cancer here. Do us all a favor and either change your pathetic tune or clear out.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[dhex]

[ryan]

aaahhhh, race relations.

hugs!

I think I've killed enough white zombies for white zombies to know that I don't want them anywhere around me. I'm not against all walking undead, mind you, not yet.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[dhex]

my wife got this link on a postcolonial list she's on:

http://microscopiq.com/2007/07/blackface-goes-hd/

ehhhh.

i have a very hard time buying any sort of real one-to-one connection people make between games and life, especially when you start abstracting themes out to "well, it takes place in africa" and presume some kind of racism by osmosis will be engaged. i don't really think i'm going out on a limb by saying this game will have zero impact on how people view africa, unless what this blog - and others - are suggesting is that somehow people get certain kinds of cues from games that are irresistible.

i don't buy that. in order for me to buy that you'd have to consider the formidable and long-standing themes already found in games and how little they've impacted life. beyond just the obvious lack of juvenile violence compared to the popularity of gaming, how about the deep anti-industrial, ecological themes found in so many games? the deep strains of anti-capitalism (surprise the evil dude is the head of an evil corporation - evil corp - whose only business propositions are burning and pillaging the earth to sell stuff to...someone...who has a lot to trade after the planet is destroyed because...zzzzzzz) should have precipated what...a million revolutions by now? or at the very least, people should be better at running, jumping, punching, kicking, stabbing, shooting, driving, flying and riding ostriches. (does joust reinforce the idea of animals as subservient to humans?)

this might be the worst bit of the "games as art" current - not players thinking about the games they play, but the influx of slackwits from various cultural studies fields who can't get a foot into the current industry because your dissertation now needs 4,000 sources from the most obscure left-wing sources regardless of topic. media criticism is well and good, but the end result is a lot of stuff like this sloppy blog post i just linked to. i'm all for linking a series of unrelated ideas together and all that but the more i read this kinda stuff the more pissy i get, which is good for no one.

case in point:

[Scratchmonkey]

I'm stuck seeing it both ways. I do feel like at least one of the trailers had something beyond "these zombies are black" going on, mainly because of the shot of the sunglassed man with a bullhorn and a military outfit, although it was so short and out of context that I don't feel comfortable deriving anything other than thinking that I'm not sure how it fits into the whole of the game (or game trailer).

In any case, just because Haiti is a racially charged country, especially in regard to the US and just because it's basically impossible to make a racially-neutral game involving it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. I'd be surprised if Capcom didn't puke all over themselves in the process; on the other hand, I'd rather it get made than not.

Also, Soviet, is this YHBT or what? Cos generally performative posting is a no-no over here. If that's what you want, selectbutton is a little more groovy.

ETA: Zombies were totally originally a "black" thing, or at least a West Africa voudoun-by-way-of-Haiti thing. The old Val Lewton films, "I Walked With a Zombie", etc., are great cultural artifacts for how the 'zombi' was prior to Night of the Living Dead, which, like how Tolkien redefined basically all fantasy that came after him, informed the modern cultural view of zombies (although there is an issue of race brought up in that movie as well).

[Scratchmonkey]

Double post!

And, I think the more interesting game to be made from the "old" zombie mythology would be something along the lines of a mystery or a slow-burn game where the investigator is trying to figure out what's going on. Actually, the thing that would probably piss me off the most about RE5 is if the story involves military-experimentation creating the zombis rather than voudoun because jeez, talk about shop-worn cliches.

[dhex]

hold on wait the game is in haiti? what the living fuck is that blog on about then?
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[Scratchmonkey]

http://rotten.com/library/cryptozoology/zombies/

ETA: They're equating "blackness" with "Africa"? Woo different kind of cultural imperialism.

[helicopterp]

That was a really ridiculous piece.


I especially wanted to hurl when the writer came back after the update to say

[Shapermc]

Ok, so this conversation is getting a little racially charged.

Cool down guys.

It's a slightly important and prominent topic to be discussed and it's worth discussing, but try to stay sane here.

Also, I'm going to have a hard time holding a grudge against this game unless it's super-cliche-ville. I've been known to hold grudges too. If people want to complain about this kind of thing RE5 is not the first, and probably won't be the most offensive.

Also, I honestly feel that society is getting a bit too P.C. for it's own good these days.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Scratchmonkey]

Heh, if you want things to "cool down", bringing up the whole "P.C. language" thing is probably not the way to do it. I mean, talk about broad stroke generalizations.

[Shapermc]

[Scratchmonkey]

Well, yeah, my point is mainly that 'P.C.' is so over-used that it's become a culture wars MacGuffin. For everybody using it to describe white-washing and hands-in-ears thinking, there's five people using it to justify old-fashioned bigotry and it becomes difficult to talk about it without degenerating into poop-throwing.

[Isfet]

some of the footage i'd seen in trailers just seemed to rub me the wrong way and appeared to be going into some murky territory. of course, i haven't been able to find where those trailers were linked from to support my statement, so i may as well be making shit up now.

anyway, i think i'd agree with dhex in that a using a setting like this is not exactly safe. i don't know if i have enough faith in the developers to handle it all the right way, but i suppose we'll see.

[Lestrade]

I agree that we'll really have to see how the game pans out to appreciate whether or not this is a racially insensitive game or, as I suspect, just a case of Capcom wanting to repeat the success of RE4, which featured an American in a foreign country.

There could, of course, be all sorts of things read into this sort of scenario, but I'm not sure Shinji Mikami and co. are actually making a huge political statement, nor are they necessarily portraying non-Americans as filthy sub-humans who need to be eradicated. I think the notion of non-American "zombies" (nonbies?) obviously was a twist to bring new life into a stagnant series, and having Haitian or African adversaries is an issue of locale, not politics.

It looks like the idea is, can we make "zombies" scary when you're in bright sunlight? (This looks to be the brightest RE yet.) If that's the concept, then what's the best setting? A desert-like area is pretty good, but the Middle East was probably too obvious or politically cumbersome to use, so how about something like the trailer?

I don't think there's an ill will here towards black people, but hopefully Capcom has enough sense and good taste to give the game context, so it's not just "pretty white American shoots up a bunch of black folks." That military-lookin' dude with the bullhorn looks like a nod towards something deeper.

Anyway, perhaps Capcom will have to respond to this criticism by showing more of the game, to explain that they're not just creating what people believe to be a racist shooting gallery?

Either way, I'm going to find it very difficult to play this without a Wiimote. :-(

[Harveyjames]

[parkbench]

I agree with Soviet Onion.

[ryan]

And I agree with HarveyJames!

Well, not so much agree with as in I'm in a similar situation as. Some of us maybe live in places that don't allow for the above snarky comment to be relevant? Standard deviation, I suppose.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[Harveyjames]

It's a pretty grand assumption. You don't know us, our lifestyle, or our relationships to black people, so fuck off, you pointless cunt.

[Shapermc]

Ok, so I showed this trailer to my wife and she agreed with most everyone else. Also, the longer trailer rubs me a bit more than any of the other trailers. Her comment was something like "white supremacists will love this game." Which I guess could be true whether it ends up racist or not.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[extrabastardformula]

[Dracko]

Do the opinions of a racist idiot minority (majority?) pervert the intent and context of an IP to the extent where it itself becomes racist, or was it just like that from the beginning and we didn't notice until extremists popped up?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Shapermc]

[dhex]

[Shapermc]

[silentmatt]

Honestly, I can't really understand the basis for this argument.

The claim is that, since all the zombies in RE5 are black, it is racist? What if the protagonist was black? Would it still be considered as such? Should the earlier RE be seen as racist because you only kill white people?

Maybe it is just because I come from a multinational place, where I was surrounded by people from all nationalities from a very early age, but I don't understand how people are interpreting this as the least PC thing ever. Even during the extended trailer, the main character only started shooting at the black people once they turned into zombies. Call me insensitive, but I don't care what race you are. You turn into a zombie? You are a target.

Plus, in the extended trailer, the whole "I've been working here for a long time" spiel makes me think that the main character is there on a medical mission of sorts, helping the village overcome some malady (which, of course, leads to zombification). I don't see his presence as being solely to "slaughter black people" but rather as someone who was there to aid them but then gets caught in the middle of a war-zone.

Really, I feel like the setting looks amazing. We are finally moving RE away from "constantly overcast abandoned village" -> "evil filled castle" formulae into a setting with sunlight (!!!) that hasn't been done to death in videogames. Based on the trailer, I'm pretty excited to see how it will pan out.
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"Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient."

[extrabastardformula]