“Tread carefully” – Resident Evil 5

**Resident Evil 5** (Capcom, Xbox 360, 2009)

I didn’t know a lot about Resident Evil 5 going in. I’ve never even played Resident Evil 4, the more celebrated game it builds on in several key ways. I only had to look at the cover art for the game — the title over the outline of the continent of Africa in threatening dark red — to be reminded of one relevant conversation, and Google’s auto-fill helpfully confirmed the topic: “resident evil 5 racist”. The top result on that search is an editorial on American gaming website IGN, and it is a revealing document of the state of much games discourse at the time.

“Set in Africa, because (as revealed in Resident Evil: Code Veronica) that is where the Progenitor virus originated, your primary targets are native Africans. With the release of the first full RE5 trailer in 2007, numerous journalists and social commentators raised concern that RE5 depicted Africa as a nation of savages and that the game itself would reinforce unhealthy stereotypes.”

IGN’s framing here itself presents Africa as a single homogenous country, a racist approach pretty much maintained throughout, and is indicative of the level of discussion. There are more virulent contemporary articles reacting with fury to the idea that a game might be racist, but IGN’s attempt to both-sides the issue and rise logically and impassively above the fray is more revealing still. Not just in acting as a reminder that 2009 is now a very foreign place, where some people could believe that “in today’s culture, where an African-American has been elected President of the United States, most racism occurs below the surface.”

It continues. “It might be fair to accuse Capcom of being insensitive to how others might perceive the game, perhaps even of suffering a cultural ignorance, but the accusations of outright racism are a bit far-fetched.” “You could have the same storyline, the same cut-scenes, the same game–just with white antagonists–and no one would care. Doesn’t that very fact show that the “racist” elements of RE5 are a result of the perceptions of the viewer?”

It’s a familiar split. Racism potentially attributed to the part of Capcom, the creators, is treated as a state of being, an almost impossibly high bar to clear. They don’t have a racist bone in their bodies! Players’ observations of racism, on the other hand, are a matter of perception and can be discounted. Nothing to see here. Something like race being socially constructed means that it doesn’t exist in objective reality, so no one need ever worry about it. What a relief!

The second search result on the subject is Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, who is not a video games writer. It’s a very casual post largely quoting Dan Whitehead’s early impressions of the game for Eurogamer, but Coates nonetheless in a few words cuts through serious swathes of bad games discourse. “If we’re going to allow video games to enter into the world of adults […] then we have to be serious. Either this shit is real, or it ain’t. You can’t ask people to at once respect the creativity of gaming, and then tell them they can’t critique it.” The refusal of so many players and commentators to think about game narrative in anything but its own internal terms is going to be a backdrop to much of my fraught journey through the 2010s.

Resident Evil 5 is a clearly carefully put together game. It’s more of an action game and less of a horror one than Resident Evils of old, with the investigation aspects and wordy descriptions of settings there as a nod to history and little more. The level of ammo, though, is as well calibrated as ever, just to a slightly different level: to stay on the verge of running out as you take down all the enemies. That’s partly because you have to think about whether to share some with Sheva, main character Chris’ local partner in action. Sheva serves triple purpose as a route into games’ co-op shooter boom, someone nice to look at, and a constant reminder that you aren’t slaughtering everyone from its fictional African country.

The game also smartly updates the old Resident Evil factor of control limitations adding to the sense of dread and vulnerability. You are unable to move and shoot at the same time, or indeed to run and move the camera around to see where you are going. In Gears of War, holding down A and dashing felt like another way of adding to your sense of power and force. In Resident Evil 5, it feels like an uncomfortable last resort, to be completed as soon as possible. The result is to split everything into a series of holdouts and escapes, even as you spend less time than ever running past zombies without shooting them.

When playing I never spent any time getting as lost as I did in the confusing warrens of Resident Evil 2, not least because you can call up a very effective map at any time. All of the pathways and set pieces are just as constructed to build and release tension though, and to keep you thinking constantly of resources and their limitations as you chop up barrels and parcel out ammo and healing items between Chris and Sheva. It’s paced for a fast action thriller, but there is no way of missing how precisely it is paced.

Look at all of that, and makes even more sense to attribute the same agency to the construction of its narrative beats. The choice of setting and the choice to treat the residents of that setting as threatening whether or not they’re zombies can’t be separated from each other or from the attendant racism. When you see someone calling for help before reaching them and seeing a massive zombified thing burst out of their head and swing around at you, there is a reason that person is a blonde white woman. It’s a choice to try to maximise the shock at innocence turning bad, a choice rooted in racist and sexist tropes. They existed before the game, they exist afterwards; when patterns keep showing up it’s not because they’re coincidences, any more than any of Resident Evil’s other bits of expertly-turned filmic shorthand are coincidences. For anyone trying to write seriously about the game to pretend otherwise was to do the game and the medium a disservice.