14 DAY TRIAL // Resident Evil 5 is the latest iteration in Capcom's survival horror franchise. It was set out to provide a new and unique twist on the events portrayed in the series. It teamed up the main character in the first game, Chris Redfield, with a new and lovely sidekick and dispatched him to Kijuju, a fictional African country that was devastated by a virus, which turned the population into blood thirsty monsters.
Up until now, it followed the basic recipe that other titles before it had made famous, but there was a small thing that exploded into one big debate, the fact that you played as a white man who killed black people. Out of nowhere, activists and organizations started to boycott Capcom because of racism, forgetting that it made complete sense, for the action took place in Africa.
We've heard a lot of opinions from different people about the subject, but now The New York Times' resident game reviewer, Seth Schiesel, has placed the whole subject into a much more comic perspective, managing to wrap up the whole problem into a few words.
“So Resident Evil 5 exposes the perhaps uncomfortable truth that blacks and Arabs can become zombies too, just like anyone else. Blacks and Arabs do not have a secret anti-zombie gene,” said Schiesel. “And just like all the thousands of white, Asian and Hispanic zombies that have been dispatched in innumerable other games before them, the African zombies must also be destroyed, or at least neutralized.”
People, no matter their race, are still vulnerable to viruses, if Capcom introduces a zombie virus to a fictional nation, then you can be sure that every inhabitant will be infected no matter what. The virus will be surprised in the most normal conditions, with native African tribes making no exception.
Hopefully, people will just let the racism debate die and we won't see it brought back from the dead anytime soon.