When seeing the Resident Evil 5 trailer in the lecture on Wednesday my first impressions were pretty neutral. I felt that maybe this could be controversial; having a white soldier killing black people could possibly evoke memories of colonisation or experiments done by pharmaceutical companies. The notion of the 'other' mentioned by Kevin was picked up later when reviewing the trailer in my own time. What I began to question was why would the producers (Capcom) represent in this case Africans as 'bad' before infection?
My conclusions were that this was done unintentionally.
I think that by using Africa as the setting for the game they are offering the followers of the series a new and different environment to experience. The 'othering' of the African characters was an unfortunate and unintended result from an attempt to create a vibe.
I think what game designers and producers can learn from this is that not all people are understanding and could possibly misinterpret these representations. Maybe a little more research is needed to be done by game designers to ensure what they are representing is what they intend to represent.
Candace.W
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I can see the point that people were making about racism, but I agree that it was unintentional. I think people have a habit of reading too much into things, and create the negative sides purely from this fanatical unpacking of something. Yes, racism is a problem in our world, but this doesnt mean that every time people from two different races appear in a ficitional environment and one is killing the other that its racism.
ReplyDeleteI disagree. Just because something wasn't intended to be racist doesn't mean it isn't. And whether it is fictional or not doesn't detract from the fact that there's racism going on.
ReplyDeleteThe reason a game can portray a herioc white soldier wiping out a bunch of infected africans and be seen as NOT racist is exactly why racism still is a problem - People don't understand when they're making blatent generalisations about another race
I do think there were racist undertones to the trialer, but I think the fact that the game developers (Capcom) said that they had a 'black guy' on the team whom they were "constantly checking with" makes me think they were just a bunch of idiots rather than a bunch of racists.
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