I originally posed this question on the forum at Ars Technica a few days ago:

New Resident Evil 5 trailer is spectacular – and disturbing

If you haven’t seen it yet – GO. It looks unbelievable. Insane, crushed HDR lighting actually works for this game. You almost feel like you need sunglasses to look at it. The atmosphere, the setting, it’s amazingly detailed.

But here’s the thing. I’m not posting just to say how incredible the graphics are. I’m posting because… well there’s no other way to put it: I’m a bit disturbed by the setup.

You are a lone, beefy white guy who is shooting an entire village’s worth of skinny black Africans.

Now, I’m not crying foul over this personally. I played RE4, and no one howled when you killed an entire village’s worth of Spaniards. Is this any different, really? They are all zombies after all right?

The game’s creators (no links, sorry) have referenced Black Hawk Down as a major influence on the game and it definitely shows. I remember watching that movie and being taken aback by the insane slaughter – in fact I remember remarking to my girlfriend at the time that I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea to portray the people of Mogadishu as the nearly mindless zombie freaks that they were in the movie. Upon reflection, I came to respect the approach of the film more; everything is told from the eyes of the squad that was shot down, and in their view, it probably did seem an awful lot like that. We have books written by the survivors that more or less confirm the hellscape that the movie portrays (which of course was also based on a book). We know it actually happened, and in a sense that renders it less controversial, at least as far as the film treatment went.

But with RE5, I fear that there is an inevitable backlash coming because of the theme. Capcom needs to tread very carefully with the setup, in order to not piss people off. And again I’m not advocating any sort of political correctness, but rather just an awareness of how loaded their imagery potentially is in this game.

What do you guys think? Am I being alarmist or did you get the same vibe?

While many of the responses in the thread centered around “why would we complain about this when we’ve already killed an entire village of Spaniards” – quite rightly, I’d add – it looks like the racism shitstorm has in fact been kicked off by this post at blog Black Looks. I quote:

This is problematic on so many levels, including the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that this video game is marketed to children and young adults. Start them young… fearing, hating, and destroying Black people.

The first thing I’ll note is that what you read above is the entirety of the post. There’s no follow-through, no exposition, no analysis. It’s a classic knee-jerk reaction. (And devoid of any understanding of an M-rated game… “children”? Er, no.)

I’m not worried about this particular post. But think of it as a spark landing on some dryer lint. This story is now going to morph into much longer op-eds and blog posts and forum rantings all over the internet. Move over, Manhunt. We’ve got a new videogame whipping boy in town. Moreover, RE5 is not due until 2008. The game is not even remotely close to finished, and thus the controversy can continue to fester in the absence of any real information for many months yet. It’s going to be ugly.

footnote – the post title refers to the fact that the “original” zombies are, of course, black. A fact that I’m sure will be brought up many times in the ensuing debate.