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GamePolitics readers will no doubt recall last month’s Resident Evil 5 race controversy which erupted across the online world as African-American bloggers took issue with the upcoming game’s setting in Africa as well as the idea of a white protagonist mowing down waves of black villagers turned zombies.
Although the furor over RE5 eventually died down, liberal website AlterNet has fanned the flames with an article posted earlier today.
As they pack into theaters to watch the blockbuster Resident Evil: Extinction this weekend, moviegoers may first want to play one of the many blockbuster video games on which the film is based. Those that do will likely enter a world… increasingly populated with very dangerous depictions of non-whites.
…last year’s smash-hit Resident Evil 4… places players in the position of fighting parasitically-controlled Spaniards (called “Los Ganados†or “the cattleâ€) with stereotypical Mexican accents…
And, in what looks like it could be a training video for a white supremacist race war… players of the soon-to-be-released Resident Evil 5 video game are placed in what could be an African country or Haiti as they blow up armies of black zombies.
Although his time frame is way off, author Roberto Lovato also revives the 2003 Haitian controversy which eventually prompted GTA Vice City to be edited by Rockstar:
Quote:
Players of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, this year’s most popular video game… become characters in the virtual world who mouth such statements as “I hate these Haitians!,â€and “Stinking nest of Haitians, we gonna kill ‘em all!â€
…Like many of the most popular games, including Kung Fu, Warcraft 3 and Shadow Warrior… most video games deny humanity to the non-white, especially Latinos. A comprehensive content analysis study of video games conducted by Children Now, found that while 56% of all human characters in the games were white, only 22% of all human characters were African American and only 2% were Latino…
Mallika Dutt, Director of Breakthrough, an organization which is developing ICED! a serious game which examines the plight of immigrants, told Lovato:
Quote:
We’ve been tracking this (video game racism) for some time and we saw how effective games are for getting someone into the skin of someone experiencing something. Unfortunately, we also found that many of the most popular games give players the opportunity to experience what it’s like to be a bigot…
The issues around video games are just one example of how very important it is to understand gaming and other new media. There are so many games that promote hate and prejudice. So, we decided to do something different.
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