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Near the end of 2007, a trailer for a new Capcom video game was released. This trailer sent shockwaves around the world. But unfortunately the trailer for this already hotly anticipated game, Resident Evil 5, was not only noticed because it was the first true sequel in many years for a highly popular video game franchise, but also because of the potentially racist content displayed.

Resident Evil 5 is set in Africa, where the protagonist, Chris Redfield, has traveled to investigate the effect of a virus which has spread quickly through the villages there. He is confronted with many of the victims of the virus who he must fight in order to survive. The part of this story that people have taken offense to is that the victims of the virus, the people you must kill in order to survive, are Black.

The most important thing that must be pointed out at this point is that this is a game that, at the time of writing, has not even been released yet. The only pieces of information that the general public have are a couple of short press releases and a three minute long trailer. All of my arguments, as well as all of the arguments of the people claiming that the game is racist, have been based on this sparse information.

The first and most obvious complaint that people have made is that all of the "bad guys" are black. People seem to feel that there should be a multi-racial zombie population. What these people seem to neglect to mention is that the game is set in a rural village in Africa. If you travel to rural Africa, you almost certainly will not find any White or Asian people there. America and Europe may have a great mixture of colors and cultures, but rural Africa does not. For this reason, the victims of the virus are all going to be Black, because they were the only people in the area in the first place. In Resident Evil 4, you play a character who has gone to Spain to rescue the President's daughter from a group of people who have contracted the same virus. In this game, everyone that you encounter with the virus is Spanish. Does that mean that Resident Evil 4 was racist? No, it means that it was set in Spain. If you play a game that is set in a country, you generally expect the antagonists to be natives of said country.

The second point that people make is that the main protagonist is White. Why can he not be Black too? Of course he could be, but Chris Redfield, the character in question, is a recurring character in the Resident Evil series. He has traveled the world fighting the virus victims and fans of the series had been clamoring for his return. Capcom could of course have created a new main character, who was Black or at least native to the country, but at the end of the day the games industry is a business just like any other industry in which you are selling a product, and having a character that people have played before and have some emotional investment in will be far more popular than a character that nobody recognizes.

Of course Capcom could have chosen to set their game somewhere different, but the atmosphere that they were aiming for would not have worked as well anywhere other than the desert setting they have chosen. Whilst games in which you have to kill to survive will always be controversial, I think that claiming this game is racist is unfair to both the creators of the game and the audience to which it is marketed.

Learn more about this author, Roisi Proven.
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