In The Line Of Fire: Part Two

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June 11, 2009

NGai Croal's blog
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In The Line Of Fire: Part Two

Last time, I ended my column about the response to my response to the E3 2007 Resident Evil 5 trailer by stating that I had (mostly) decided to refrain from further comment until I’d gotten the opportunity to play the final game and speak with its producer, Jun Takeuchi. And at the February 2009 DICE Summit in Las Vegas, I finally got a chance to sit down and speak directly with the man behind the game behind the trailer, of which I’d said: ‘There was a lot of imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery’.

Even though I had made few public comments during the intervening ten months between my remarks and interviewing Takeuchi, I followed much of the ensuing discussion along with Capcom’s steady rollout of promotional materials for the game. The Captivate ’08 trailer – from Chris Redfield’s voiceover (“I knew it from the moment I arrived. There’s no reason here, no humanity. Everywhere I look I find vacant stares. All I see is death”) over footage of frenzied crowds and mobs, to Sheva’s greeting on behalf of an entire continent (“Welcome to Africa”) – seemed particularly tone-deaf and still lacking in context. And while the Tokyo Game Show trailer finally added that much-needed context – the Umbrella Corporation, bioweapons, terrorists – it was from that 2008 conference that gameplay footage surfaced on YouTube of Chris and Sheva taking on black men dressed in grass skirts, sporting tribal-inspired masks and shields and wielding spears.

All of this was on my mind when I sat down to speak with Takeuchi on a Friday afternoon in his Las Vegas hotel suite. As is my wont, I didn’t go directly into the most sensitive topics. Instead, I led off with some questions about the game’s controls (he prefers the traditional RE4 setup), Dead Space (“a really great piece of work”) and Left 4 Dead (“it’s more based on going after the enemies yourself, whereas in Resident Evil 5, the idea is to stay alive”). After about 20 minutes or so of this, I asked him about what kind of research he and his team had done to prepare for RE5, and he said that the designers and artists had gone to Africa for two to three weeks, took thousands of photographs and brought them back to Japan. But when I followed up by asking which specific countries they visited, Takeuchi replied: “Unfortunately I can’t quite remember the names of the countries that they went to, but as far as I remember it was in North Africa.”

I asked him whether anyone at Capcom’s North American or European offices had expressed concern about the iconography of Chris Redfield going up against a slew of black zombies, to which he answered: “They had read the story of the game and they knew everything that was going on in the game. So, no, we didn’t really get any feedback like that, and I would say that’s the reason why.” But after I explained my own concerns about the trailer – more specifically, the manner in which it blurred the line between locals and zombies throughout, given the long history of dehumanising imagery of black people in Africa and the Caribbean – he prefaced his stock response that he had intended no message or political slant to the game by saying: “I feel like what I’m hearing from you now is a little bit different from how it was communicated to me in the first place.”

Takeuchi added that because the team’s North African research trip had educated them as to the diversity of the region, the reason the racial composition of the zombies in the various trailers evolved over time had nothing to do with any criticism and more to do with the production process. “When we were creating the E3 2007 trailer, we actually hadn’t finished the modelling for the other characters, so we had to reuse the same couple of patterns over and over again,” Takeuchi told me. “So that’s how that trailer ended up looking how it does. But listening to what you say now, and thinking about the trailer that we released at E3, I feel like I finally understand where you’re coming from.”

And as Takeuchi went on to explain that the enemies with the grass skirts and spears were seeking to defend the ruins from intruders and that he’d been inspired by the Indiana Jones movies, I felt like I once again understood where he’d been coming from. That a two-to-three-week trip to unspecified African countries and looking at a number of movies set in Africa alongside pop-cultural inspirations like the Indiana Jones series simply hadn’t been enough to sufficiently educate him or the team about the legacy of the imagery that they were tapping in to and, as a result, they’d lost control of their message. That’s my take on it, of course; I doubt that the man who sat across from me and thoughtfully answered all of my questions would agree. But if his muse should inspire him to set another game in an African country – or any real-world location, for that matter – my only wish is that he do so in as fully informed a manner as possible.

On August 3rd squarepusher said:

N'Gai, when you end this column by suggesting that Capcom or its team should inform themselves about the culture and history of Africa, I have to ask you: are you informed yourself about South-Africa’s bioweapons research? (and this question is not meant to be taken as a dig against you; just out of genuine curiosity)

Are you informed about the fact that Wouter Basson, head of Project Coast, was openly invited into Fort Detrick (USA) and Porton Down (UK) and had the tacid approval of the latter? Doubtlessly, if you were aware of this, it would suddenly make sense why Capcom decided on selecting Africa as the main setting for its videogame.

Here are the reasons:
1 - South-Africa had a history in biowarfare
2. There were specific bioweapon programs that seemed to mirror what Umbrella and its ilk are doing in the games, and in keeping with the videogame series’ eugenic bent, these bioweapon programs were largely aimed at reducing the black (and undesirable) portions of society. I'm talking here of Project Coast.
3. Worse, UK and US bioweapon labs collaborated with Wouter Basson's South African biowarfare research, which among other things included vaccines that sterilized women and anthrax as a weapon against segregated races.

It is not a stretch to call Wouter Basson the 'Mengele' of South Africa.

You should really watch the CBC documentary 'Anthrax Wars'. It's all covered in there.

http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/passionateeyeshowcase/2009/anthraxwar/

http://www.anthraxwar.com/

It’s regrettable this is part of the country’s past – what is even more regrettable is that a fictionalized retelling of this dark past is enough to get videogame pundits’ panties in a bunch because of what they perceive to be ‘racism’.

Seriously, re-reading that column you did, I have to conclude that Jun Takeuchi either did not know much beyond making the game and was not involved in the story creation process, or he was being coy about listing his sources. Seriously, this game - Resident Evil 5 - contains countless real-world references yet I'm supposed to believe they only visited a couple of countries in Africa and watched some Indy movies? That doesn't really fly. They obviously chose to create a fictionalized version of apartheid South-Africa's past - like they chose to fictionalize the whole 'eugenics' thing.

Again, I see ignorance here on both sides - both on your part and on the part of the videogame producer here (perhaps he did not really know much about the story so he couldn't really comment on it; but he should have known)

To conclude: what the Resident Evil series are all about - bioweapon research, deadly viruses, pharmaceutical companies interlocking with bioweapon companies - is NOT FICTION. Sure, there's not an Uroboros virus that can transform you into a hideous monstrosity, but all the same this is not that far removed from reality to dismiss it all as 'fiction' or 'genre cliches'.

On July 7th icewine said:

Wow, I didn't expect my comment would get feedback, 'cause I just want to post some my thoughts about the article.

squarepusher, I appreciate you explained to me about the background knowledge that RE5 might being related. And I want to say, I always think RE series has a lot of backstory to expand, such as bio-weapons, espionage, humanity, evolution, germ warfare.....etc. The problem is, they didn't bring the "backstory" to the front. What they focus in the game is action control, stunning CG and monsters fighting. The script is really weak. Most of gamers have to go through all notes in the game plus some speculation to know what happens there. The backstory of RE series relies heavy on those notes. My point is they should write a good script to bring the related background knowledge into the game, into the characters, not just let the story stay in the "back". And really, I never heard of brilliant conversation from RE characters, the most thing they said is some sort of "Watch out! Behind you!" If you notice, you'll find their formula is to bring a CG, let the hero and the villain taunt each other, then fight. The taunts are usually the oral message to introduce the boss monster.

To tell the truth, I don't think they really care to explain or combine much background knowledge in the game. The research takes time, as I said in my previous post. They might publish another book like "Resident Evil Archive" to explain lots of things you want to know, but aside from that, shouldn't they come up with good script with more depth and gradation for the game?

People may care less about the script part, in terms of a game. Indeed, A good game doesn't have to have a (good) story. However Resident Evil is already involved in. The game might just work out in the B-movie way, but it will lack some emotional fulfillment and aftertaste, which is good art or entertainment presentation can give us.

On July 6th ColbyCheese said:

"When you want to make something you're not familiar with, it's hard to be very successful, because it lacks history, culture, life and environment realization, unless you spend much time to do relevant research."

I think that sums up the entire ordeal nicely. It's painfully obvious that they didn't do enough research with this title. No amount of philosophical or intellectual hand waving and excuse making will change the fact that more than a few people thought their handling of the material was poor, to say the least, and that only hurt their sales.

A poor choice all around. Hopefully, they'll put a little more forethought into their next title. At this point though, I probably won't bother with it anyway.

Wow, I just looked at the date and I can't believe you guys are still talking about this.

On July 7th squarepusher said:

ColbyCheese: That's because 'more than a few people' have not been 'desensitized enough' to kill black people - because they are most likely white Anglo-Saxon people with collective guilt feelings. Really, that's all there is to it - despite what people like to tell themselves. There's really nothing else outside of this self-induced guilt tripping feeling that makes this any different from shooting Spaniards in RE4.

The problem here isn't that you're killing black people - it's that you're killing more lifelike adversaries that are basically human and no longer zombies. It just took black people to put it all in painfully clear perspective for average Joe sixpack.

And this hit me too while playing the game and killing the first 'zombie': people basically play this game because they enjoy slaughtering or shooting zombies in the head. Everyone goes for the headshots in these games. Now they put a black guy in front of you to shoot at and suddenly you feel conflicted. (including me the first time, but after the first few kills it went away; the desensitization process kicked in) I am willing to bet there would be no problem if an ethnicity of a different color or creed were presented to you to kill.

It takes a honest person to realize that something must be wrong here or that the user is finally beginning to come around to a central disconnect. And BTW, I'm not saying 'stop making these games anymore', don't let me shoot people in the head blabla, but at least recognize when you're being asked to mow down people en masse who look alarmingly human, how this is going to look to an audience not that terribly familiar with videogames. Of course it's going to look like a murder simulator, and it goes some way towards validating Jack Thompson's far-fetched accusations.

You're basically being desensitized to kill all sorts of 'mobs' throughout the years - it started in an abstract manner with slow-moving, not entirely lively zombies, now they have been taking the 'zombie' out of the 'zombie' and this new creature is more intelligent and preserves more of his mental faculties. Now we're shooting Spaniards and Africans in RE4 & 5 and then these same gamers who are decapitating reasonably lifelike-looking people (x500) sit back and wonder with a certain myopic zeal why the mainstream media accuses videogame developers of desensitizing kids/young people to killing. I'm not going to be a hypocrite about it: I had conflicting feelings about this while playing the game, and the 'shooting African people' was only the catalysing event for this epiphany.

On July 6th squarepusher said:

icewine:

The real problem isn't that these characters are black and to a middle class Anglo-Saxon public it seems wholly abhorrent to kill Africans given their collective self-guilt; the real problem in my own estimation is that the graphics are just getting too realistic nowadays to be casually blowing people's heads off; whatever the setting. Sure, there are these tentacles popping out of the Ganados' mouths every now and then, but there's no mistaking it otherwise for a living, breathing human. And as these graphics get more and more realistic, and the 'zombie' aspect of the enemies is getting less and less pronounced (think back for a minute - how much do the zombies of Resident Evil 4 and 5 resemble those of the first three? Almost none. They're almost human), this is starting to feel more and more like a military training tool - the only thing that still causes a slight disconnect is the fact that Resident Evil has always suffered from its tank-like controls.

But introduce something like Project Natal and suddenly you're 'inside' the game, so to speak, and that's when we'll be having a moral dilemma of a whole different sort.

Before somebody gets their panties in a bunch, I'm not condoning censorship; I felt bad for the first baddie I had to kill in the game, and after that the moral conflict went away. You could say I was 'desensitized' to it and you wouldn't be far from the truth - it's just that other ethnicities and races are considered fair game. It's a perspective issue.

Secondly, Resident Evil 5's story is far from lame. If you're referring to Albert Wesker's Uroboros Plan to exterminate the vast majority of the population with only a select few having the right genetic makeup to evolve into a superhuman - there was actually a real scientific movement spanning from the early 1900s to as late as the 1970s which was concerned with exactly that. It was called eugenics, and people who considered themselves eugenicists also likened themselves to Social Darwinists. Everyone remembers of course Adolf Hitler's Endlosung, and he was a prominent eugenicist, but truth be known he got every one of his sick ideas from American and British eugenicists - George Bernard Shaw came up with the suggestion to exterminate people humanely in gas chambers, Madison Grant inspired Hitler with his race mythology and hyping up of the Nordic race, Henry Ford encouraged anti-semitism and even published dozens of copies of 'The Protocol Of The Elders Of Zion' in Germany and the United States.

Nearly every line Albert Wesker utters, from his 'overpopulation' quote to the 'humanity requires judgement', is taken wholesale from a prominent eugenicist/extreme environmentalist/Social Darwinist. 'So now I have to seperate this chaff from the wheat' - Margaret Sanger had similar things to say about vast sums of the American population, especially blacks. Francis Galton - the man who kickstarted eugenics - even suggested in a letter that he would encourage the Chinese to take over Africa because the obedient hard working Chinese were obviously preferable to the 'savage Negro population'. (in Galton's own words - Africa For The Chinese) Then we have Umbrella boss Spencer - this old guy with his utopian/dystopian dream of having a genetically engineered superclass of humans which he would rule over as a God - which to me sounds like a reference to another prominent eugenicist/Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer (in name) and Francis Galton (in appearance and his background - the man who termed 'eugenics'). (and there's no mistaking his looks - he looks uncannily similar to Francis Galton)

So, when Chris says to Wesker 'do you get all your ideas from comic book villains?', I was half expecting Wesker to respond 'No Chris, I get it from David Suzuki/Maurice Strong'. And that's the worrysome part - when Wesker talks of overpopulation, it's meant to emphasise he has gone off the deep end - yet this mantra is repeated over and over again on all the major cable networks courtesy of the Optimum Population Trust.

So I think there's a bit more to the game's backstory (and series for that matter) than you give it credit for - it's more relevant than you might think.

On July 3rd icewine said:

I've read both "In The Line Of Fire" articles and have some thought.

First, I believe when those people making RE5, they didn't think about the game would raise such a serious discussion. They just want to make a game which picks up RE4 legacy and setting Africa as the world. Probably racism is not a big problem in Asia, so no one expected the game would trigger racism responses. I'm Asian. At least in my country, racism is not a big problem (I doubt it's a problem here), but in Western countries it can be such a storm topic. Since Resident Evil series is telling Americans story, and Japanese game producers didn't understand history and culture of white and black conflict, plus they wrote a bad script for the game, RE5 becomes a racist game.

When I saw the trailer first time, I didn't think about racism, until I read some articles about this on internet. I went back to watch the trailer, and I start having racism feeling there, especially when I saw in mercenary mode, Chris and Jill hold guns to kill tribe people. I think it's a very bad imagery. It is not only about white people against black people, it's about a group of people who use high technology against people who don't have superiority like them. But, if I didn't see any racism discussion, I probably would never thought anything about racism. If you keep inquiring into a topic, even if it is not a problem before, it will become a problem eventually.

Second, there's one thing I want to point out. It may not applicable to every Asian who live in Asia, but it's an existed phenomenon. Most impression we have for Western countries (particularly American) is based on Hollywood movies. Those movies have powerful influence. Although movies are not equal to real life, they're still like guides to tell us about Western people, culture, their life and everything. I'm not surprised to know Jun Takeuchi said he's inspired by Indiana Jones movies. From the very first RE game, it is inspired by horror movies. What these people do is producing a movie game. As technology improving, they did it, just they also touch an sensitive field they didn't realize.

When Eastern people try to tell a Western people story, they may not as good as Western people do, and vice versa. Japaneses tell an American story in their game, they don't quite succeed, but they make a good game. Americans tell Eastern people story in their movies, they don't quite succeed either, but they make lots of money. When you want to make something you're not familiar with, it's hard to be very successful, because it lacks history, culture, life and environment realization, unless you spend much time to do relevant research. It's a common problem. For me, I would hope they write a better script to explain where black mobs come from, the conspiracy behind it, the better description of characters. If people know clearly those black mobs are actually victims, white guys feel guilty to kill them, and feel angry about using them as test samples, that would be better than knowing it's a game with a lame story full of fighting black people.

On June 16th squarepusher said:

I addressed this in my own article (it deals specifically with zombie movies and videogames over the ages).

Anyway, here is the bit specific to this issue:
[quote]
Is it racist that Resident Evil 5 portrays a white military man having to blast his way through infected savage African tribesmen? Or is it 'racist' that those same people eager to accuse the developers of racism did not seem to mind when they were shooting Spanish in Resident Evil 4? Does that not in itself imply that some ethnicities are fair game, but others are not? And who decides which genocide is more atrocious than the other? Stalin once said: 'A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.' Are the audience shocked because this is the first time they have to kill 'blacks', only because they have already been desensitized to kill people of any other ethnicity, race or colour?
[/quote]

Long story short - I think it is shortsighted to make this 'just' about the African setting or their colour/race. To do so is to make this into a wedge issue. Rather, you should leave all the political correctness at the front door and truly ask yourself the question: why am I outraged that I'm shooting at black African people who carry a 'disease', while I'm quite happily enjoying myself shooting the living daylights out of Spaniards/Americans/whatever. That in itself goes to show the 'player' has been desensitized, but only to a point - he still feels a little uneasy about anything that might portray him as being 'racist' or 'politically uncorrect' - but there is no denying he enjoys the killing that is going on in these games.

And regardless, nearly every person displays some form of racism once in their lives - it's part of the thought processes occurring in our reptilian brain that always seem to get the better out of our more rational faculties. And just pretend for a minute that we lived in an 'alternate universe' where there had been a history of predominant blacks ruling over whites (so we have a 'Black man's burden' instead of a 'white man's burden') - would the pendulum not swing in the other direction here, and would we perhaps be outraged by whites getting killed en masse in a videogame? Besides, it wasn't like there were only 'black' slaves in the United States and Europe, you know - white slaves were pretty common too, and human trafficking/child trafficking still exists to this day, so from the days of Rome it never really disappeared.

I dunno, I just have to conclude that N'Gai Croal needs to look at this issue from a more broad perspective and not let his opinion be guided by his 'emotional' connection to the 'tribe' if you may - realize that racism will stop when we stop talking about it altogether. Endlessly talking about 'is this racist' or 'is that racist' only engenders racism. In fact, the race card is frequently employed on the mainstream media and instead of 'uniting' all people as a Martin Luther King would have envisaged, all it does to throw 'race' into the debate and keep people fighting with each other over silly, petty stuff. And like Morgan Freeman pointed out, a 'black history month' or 'black history day' ain't gonna cut it - and no self-respecting black should have a need of it anyway - just like gays should repudiate a Gay Pride parade because it puts them into easily defined stereotypes - it certainly doesn't help their cause of social acceptance despite what the media portrays it to be.

On June 12th ColbyCheese said:

“Unfortunately I can’t quite remember the names of the countries that they went to, but as far as I remember it was in North Africa.”

Sure, I guess some people would say that it's easy to forget what frigging foreign country you spent thousands of dollars to send a large portion of your staff to. I know I personally can think back on all the times I've found myself in some unnamed European or Asian country. You know just some "shit-hole" of a country. After all, everyone in a 1000 mile radius looks the same anyway. Amirite???
*end-sarcasm

It's one thing to give this guy a pass, and making up excuses for him completely disregarding an entire region (continent even?) of our planet. Fine. That's your (and his) right as an individual. It's a completely different thing for you to THEN turn around and tell ME that I'M the racist a-hole just because I had the audacity to be offended by yet another corporate interest tap-dancing on the culture, persecution, and subsequent struggle of my ancestors.

"Shut up darkies. Why for you didn't complain about teh mexican zombiez. lol U R racist."

On June 15th AndyLC said:

>>Unfortunately I can’t quite remember the names of the countries that they went to, but as far as I remember it was in North Africa.

he said "they"
Does that mean he didn't go himself? If so, that does seem more understandable as the Producer, he's not making the game from scratch, he's just overseeing the project. He's not even the director.
Say with Metal Gear 4, they don't name the zones they're in, it's just Middle East, South America, Eastern Europe.

N'Gai should've probably interviewed the staff that spent all their time researching the locales and locals then. The artists especially.

>>yet another corporate interest tap-dancing on the culture, persecution, and subsequent struggle of my ancestors.

That's the story of Resident Evil 5. These people are the victims of Umbrella, infecting them with experimental viruses when telling them it was to help them.The game DOES draw on classically racist themes, in more ways than just Chris punching black dudes.

I appreciate N'Gai can speak his mind, but I don't actually have any indication that he's played the game.
If producer Jun Takeuchi asked N'gai a question on the game he's given so much attention to, would he be able to answer too?

I worry that, instead of expanding views, this is going to just narrow them. There's other titles that I believe are far more racist than this Capcom title, but it passes under the radar of everyone in America.

On June 12th dreamhunk said:

I wouldn't be suprised if this Re 5 game gets band in places like south afirica.

On June 12th SolidStrife said:

What, like a rock band? Or maybe even a rubber band?

On June 12th bluecat said:

"That a two-to-three-week trip to unspecified African countries and looking at a number of movies set in Africa alongside pop-cultural inspirations like the Indiana Jones series simply hadn’t been enough to sufficiently educate him or the team about the legacy of the imagery that they were tapping in to and, as a result, they’d lost control of their message."

It's not fair to dismiss the research that went into the game based on the comments of the director. A game director has very little to do with the actual hands on art production. If you want to talk about research, you should talk to the artists who were actually on location making sketches and taking photos. I bet you they could tell you what real world inspirations went into the game (and im sure they actually remember what countries they visited).

Also, about the spear chucking natives in RE:V, there's a very interesting part of the game where you find a journal of a young man from that area. In the journal you learn that the people of the village have gone insane after being given supposed vaccines. He remarks how it's odd that people are putting on their traditional ancestral clothes which they normally only wear for holidays. There are things like this throughout the game that flesh out the setting and the characters and environment they are in.

I know the imagery in RE:V is very dicey no matter how you look at it, but I think it was made with far more sensitivity than most games.

Seriously, if you could somehow get a chance, it would be awesome if you could talk to some of the actual artists that actually dictated how the African setting would be depicted.

On June 12th Darryl_Olsen said:

After reading Part Two I get the feeling that N'Gai's enthusiasm for this issue fizzled before the piece was finished.

On June 12th asym said:

I asked him whether anyone at Capcom’s * like what I’m hearing from you now is a little bit different from how it was communicated to me in the first place.”

Is there a formatting error here, or was some text accidentally deleted where I've inserted the asterisk? I find the sentence difficult to interpret as it is, and it seems to end with a hanging pair of quotation marks...

It's illuminating to hear Capcom's side of the story. It does seem that Takeuchi was hardly at pains to present an culturally authentic depiction of any particular part of Africa. The fact that he was unable to recall the names of the specific countries he visited is especially telling - one gets the sense that his team were more concerned with replicating a photorealistic but superficial image of 'Africa', rather than any meaningful representation of an underlying culture.

That said, how often do game developers, Japanese or otherwise, present a foreign real-world setting that benefits from research beyond the hazy lenses of Hollywood cinema and a tourist-trap photoshoot? Sonic Adventure's South American setting was seemingly constructed through the exact same method as RE5's Africa (right down to the explicit Indy references) and that appears to have offended nobody. The only unique issue here is that RE5's particular stereotypes coincide with imagery that is considered inherently offensive in North America and Europe (but not in Japan). For us to tell Japanese developers to avoid doing this - to require them to follow our arbitrary rules, which are typically unknown to them, and certainly meaningless - strikes me as a bit of cultural imperialism in itself, and may eventually result in mainstream games that are even blander and more homogeneous.

On June 12th MrCarltio said:

Correction to my original post(s) Leon* and blue eyed*.

On June 12th MrCarltio said:

UH just out of curiousity why isn't anyone complaining about let's say Street Fighter and racist tendencies, or how come no one complained about GTA series and racism.

I mean hell SF series is full of racism and stereotypes then. For crying out loud in SF you have Balrog an African American boxer from the streets fighting for money. You have Guile a Caucasian American militant with blonde hair blue eyes. You got Ryu a Japanese martial artist whose stone cold doesn't like to have fun and does anything to get ther job done. Mafia seems to be labeling all mobsters as either Italian or Russian. Heck GTA was just as bad with stereotypes but no one complained. Even Far Cry 2 can be seen as racist.

As for RE4 not having history there, in Spain there was also a civil war in which the country was split between supporting a facist gov or a democratic or communist gov(not sure). Might to need to fact check but, Hitler backed the facist party. Chris Redfield blondie blue haired(Aryan Race stereotype). There I found something in RE4.