By Sirius McDonell

Writer/Reporter 

The ever-rising popularity of “Resident Evil”, a video game series that started 30 years ago, is a definitive marker in how well anti-government-style action games hold up over time. However, when video game companies are going down the list of decades-old games to remake for the youth of today, where is the line drawn when it comes to what content is still acceptable from an updated, modern lens? What could you, hypothetically, remove from an already poorly received game, to make it appealing to a modern market, where the controversial portrayal of a marginalized group of people could lose you billions of dollars? 

In Capcom’s “Resident Evil 5”, the game centers around you, the player, controlling the protagonist Chris Redfield, a white man and government agent sent to stop a black-market dealer in Africa. He is accompanied by Sheva Alomar, a Black woman, who plays the role of a navigator and combat partner. She is functionally reduced to being a guide for Chris, or a defender that fights to assist Chris in the game whenever they run into hostile individuals. She only becomes defenseless when it is needed to make Chris more appealing or hero-like. The game displays various instances of casual racism (the usage of an African woman singing in tongues at the very beginning of the game is done to build up an air of mystery, the visuals of African men, women, and children, living in poor conditions and squalor minimize the progress made in modern-day Africa, and the animalistic displays of violence and fighting that casually happen on the streets in the background of the game as you walk around encourage the stereotypical perception of barbaric brutality) with no effort made the citizens of this game’s environment look or appear human in the slightest. This isn’t helped by the portrayals of Black men throughout the game where they appear to be feral, poorly dressed, and disagreeable or in habit a cult-like mentality when infected by a fictional virus.  

The casual racism becomes explicit when you take into account that the primary antagonist of the game, Albert Wesker, is a White man who sought out this virus (called Uroboros) which would be used to extinguish the lives of billions, kickstarting a mass genocide in order to leave behind those that would be suitable for his “master-race” that included only the best of humans. Africa was the breeding ground to see how well people, when infected with the virus, would service him as if he were their god. The idea of a game’s appeal being built on the backs of the negative portrayal of an already stigmatized group of people who fought so hard and still fight hard for liberation from post-colonial racism and its after-effects is absurd. This game received backlash upon release in 2009 and has yet to be released or developed alongside the other Resident Evil mainline game remakes in recent years.  

So, is it the setting that makes this game racist, or is it the portrayal of Black individuals, and the type of environment they’re put in, that makes the game racist? The truth is that a game being set in Africa is not the problem. The problem is when a game portrays a place, like Africa, as being full of brutality, violence, or technologically less advanced than the West. By doing this, it reduces Africa to being nothing more than a cheap stereotype that comes at the expense of the people who live in and come from there. A better game would keep Africa as its setting but not reduce the environment to lacking hygiene or care. A better game would not portray Black individuals as dirty, barbaric, or monstrous.  

When video games choose to poorly represent countries and their people as being something that they aren’t, it can lead to stereotypes being more prevalent, since that may be the only introduction and exposure to a different group of people that some audiences will have. And yes, while these same video games have gotten more inclusive in the present day and are generally marketed towards a broader crowd, they can still end up falling short in how they write and portray their characters who are people of color behind a thinly veiled illusion of inclusion. This ongoing issue makes it significantly difficult for POC to speak up about how they feel discriminated against when playing through a popular game, like “Resident Evil 5”. It cannot and should not be normalized for POC participating in media of any kind to expect to have such blatant microaggressions so casually thrown their way. This kind of harmful mentality goes past video games and bleeds into how we perceive ourselves in real life.  

Fiction is directly influenced by reality, so we must draw the line on misrepresentation and bigotry before we all internalize a false and harmful perception of POC in real life, even more so than what the general perception already is. As Virgina Woolf once said, “You must remember that fiction is the mirror of life.” To disregard the bigotry and racism that we see in fictional material is to disregard the very real stereotypes that we see echoed in real-life sentiments. It can only begin to end when the perpetuation of stereotypes that we’ve tolerated for so long is no longer able to be distributed amongst the general population that consumes the source material.