So I happened to stumble across a game trailer which caught my eye. The name of the game is Resident Evil 5. It is part of the Resident Evil series for game console, where you play a character in a 3rd person shooter view. The series has to to deal with zombies and you, they player, killing these zombies. Now what was interesting about this trailer was that the story line takes place in Africa; where apparently the zombie virus "originated".
The main hero is a white heterosexual male, running around killing Africans infected with the virus. They also portray African cities as wastelands and try to make it scary or dangerous. Apparently it is okay to kill these "zombies" because they are not people, they are monsters. I never really took into consideration how the media and gaming industries portray violence against others as a norm until I took this class. While watching the trailer, I felt that the game was racist, and that they were emphasizing the gender portrayals (the man being muscular and the female being skinny and wearing "the outfit"); so I looked for any discussion on the game in a game forum.
Forum Link
In that forum, I was pretty shocked at what some people said. One person said that it was not racist because it did not blatantly say you were killing all Africans. It kinda shocks me how some Americans do not notice stereotypes and bad portrayals of ethnicities in these kinda games. To them, its not racist unless it is brought up to them that it is. It also makes me wonder if the game developers were just substituting the AIDS virus with this zombie virus.
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1 comment:
Really smart observations. I'm inclined to think that those who define racist contents and contexts only when it is using vernacular that is "politically incorrect", are missing the iceberg and intentionally denying that the iceberg of racism is what we've collided into and which is responsible for the sinking ship.
M.Tamez
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