Two stories this weekend struck the same nerve: first, that Resident Evil 5 trailer, where the white hero guns down a mob of black people, has gotten new play and been accused again of racism; second, the ongoing protests and boycott threats against China continue to plague its role as the host of this year’s Olympics. Both stories are about games, and both stories have attracted a backlash.
Resident Evil 5 fans are ticked about the criticism and hatred that the franchise has drawn; aren’t people – likely liberals and blacks – overreacting to that trailer? Why is gunning down a crowd of black zombies different from slaughtering any other zombies? Why do black critics like N’Gai Croal insist on (as one commenter put it) playing the race card? In other words, why do we have to think about any of this stuff at all? We should just play the damn game.
Same for the Olympics, although the controversy is far more complicated and frankly, far more important. Are the Olympic Games a place where healthy competition can take place between all nations, to vent the steam that would otherwise lead to, well, all the stuff that China is either doing or condoning? Doesn’t it defeat the whole point to politicize the games?
I understand these viewpoints, and hey, I get it. The purpose of a game is to create a safe, orderly and artificial space for competition. It’s not supposed to “matter” – at least unless you’re gambling.
But when is a game ever just a game? We love to watch sports and trounce our friends in Halo because while the game doesn’t matter, the players do. Everyone comes into the match with a story, a history, and something to prove. The Yankees and the Red Sox aren’t just two teams that play some games every year. It may not be fair that the Olympics are colored by politics – but nobody (in the US) had a problem with it when our hockey team crushed the Soviets’ in 1980. You don’t see people bitching (today) about Jesse Owens “playing the race card” at the Hitler Olympics.
In the same way, fears that Resident Evil 5 is either racist, or unfairly accused of racism, all have a place in how we deal with the game. Because whatever’s happening with Resident Evil 5 will just get more common. If every video game were Pong, we wouldn’t have to deal with the representation of human beings in games. But games are only becoming more cinematic. They’re depicting more realistic people who have clearer ethnic identities and worldviews and more dialogue in which to hit more buttons with the ever-growing audience of players. Pretending this stuff shouldn’t matter is naive.
Sports fans already knew this; gamers are still learning. If you judge by the comment threads, even the most ignorant football fan has a more nuanced grasp of race than the average Resident Evil 5 fanboy. They’ve accepted race is a factor. And they realize, if only through their passion for a hometown team, that a game is never just a game.
Heh, this reminds me of a scene in House, where Cameron is all pissed because a champion cyclist has been doping, and Chase asks her why she cares so much — it’s just a game, the rules are arbitrary, so he cheated and won, so what?
And she says that it’s precisely BECAUSE it’s competition by arbitrary rules that cheating (circumventing those agreed-upon rules) is wrong.
But while that’s on-target, I think it also misses part of the point, which is that games and sports are often a form of symbolic combat, and therefore how they deploy symbolism is in some ways more essential than the symbolic effects of non-game/real-life actions. If a bunch of white people fight a bunch of black people in Africa over a piece of land, that has disturbing symbolic implications because of history, but it also has non-symbolic implications that are ugly, but also speak less: for example, human greed. It’s bad that there’s racism there, but it’s not all racism motivating it — part of it is simple, equal opportunity greed.
If, in a game, however, within an arbitrary set of rules created by the designers, the hero must be white and one set of zombies he guns down will always be black: without equal power to think, without the advantage of equal weaponry, without, in short, an equal playing field, existing only to be slaughtered for the player’s pleasure, their very lives toys for the player, the symbolism there is troubling, precisely because the rules set up are completely arbitrary. They could have been anything. The zombies could have been altered by their infection, a la the zombies in I Am Legend, to be not only nonhuman, but nonracial. The choice to make them black says something, and what it says can be read as something that’s pretty ugly.
I totally agree with your stance on the Resident Evil game.
I don’t think it’s supposed to be taken in a racist context at all.
The game is set in Haiti, where voodoo originated.
End of story.
“Why do black critics like N’Gai Croal…”
I think that says volumes right there. When he’s defending us from crazy lawyers, he’s just N’Gai Croal. Now that he’s expressed an (apparently) unpopular opinion about the possibility of racism in videogames…NOW all of a sudden he’s a “black” critic.
The title of your essay is absolutely correct: It’s hardly ever “JUST” a game. I see it played out everyday from World of Warcraft to playing “Go Fish!” with my children.
That’s just another item on the list of charming human characteristics I guess.
Thank you for your contribution to the discussion.
Ryan, to be clear, I don’t know if I’ll consider the game racist or not. I’ve backed off making a judgment, ’cause we’ve just seen a trailer. (Also, it is confirmed they’re setting the game in Africa, not Haiti – and it’s long been known that Blackhawk Down, set in Somalia, was an influence.)
My main point is that I just don’t buy the “it doesn’t matter that they’re black” argument. In a good game, every choice you make about the backgrounds of the characters should matter.