You may have noticed that I haven’t posted much news in the past few days. You may also have noticed that a fair few gaming news sites have gone a bit off the deep end recently.
There’s lots of examples if you follow gaming news especially with the saga surrounding Sweet Baby Inc’s “harassment” by gamers.
But one of things I wanted to highlight was IGN’s absolutely shocking take that Resident Evil 5 is racist and must not be remade and must be rewritten. Why is it racist you ask. I’ll let IGN’s own Matt Purslow explain.
Set in a fictional West African country, Resident Evil 5’s primary antagonists are Black people. Intentionally or not, Resident Evil 5 positions Africa as the ‘Dark Continent’, an uncivilised world harbouring a diseased population that needs gunning down via Western intervention in the name of global security.
In the 2020s, in a post-Black Lives Matter world, there is only one acceptable response to a white man shooting waves of Africans for an entire video game: no.
Matt Purslow. IGN
The fact IGN awarded RE5 a 9/10 is conveniently omitted from this opinion piece as is the fact that IGN gave Resident Evil 4, a game with a white man shooting waves of Spanish for an entire video game a 10/10.
It’s the worst take possible and one IGN is sticking to but silencing people that want to call them out by disabling comments on their website and Twitter. A YouTube version of the article is currently sitting on 2,000 likes and 15,000 dislikes.
The second big oof of the week comes courtesy of EA game studio Cliffhangar Games who are currently working on the Black Panther game.
Dani Lalonders of Cliffhanger Games has gone on record stating the studio is 100% “people of colour” and she will not hire white people because they “create unsafe environments, are hard to work with and create micro aggression.”
Unfortunately I’m not making that up. I wish I was but it’s very very real and very racist and discriminatory.
Now obviously the games press is defending her and Sweet Baby Inc and it seems like GamerGate 2.0 is in full swing and the games “journalists” and game developers are closing ranks to tell gamers that we’re the problem and we will do and think as we’re told.
So I simply won’t be visiting these sites and as I won’t use “traditional” social media (Twitter, TikTok, Facebook) I won’t be keeping up with the news.
I also won’t be buying any new games for a while, especially EA games as I won’t support racism in any form.
So for a while the community will be some micro and full scale reviews I’m working and a few more opinion pieces (not racist ones like IGN publish) and the odd rant.
It sucks that this is necessary but the trend that started in Hollywood then spread to TV that the fans are the bad guys has unfortunately made it to the gaming industry.
Hey, I appreciate the work you do here with this community so I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt on some of the issues with your post, but I also want to correct the record on those issues.
IGN did not suddenly invent the idea that RE5 had racist undertones. That accusation existed from as early as the game’s release in 2009. And it doesn’t exist in a vacuum but ties into a recurring observation that western media (EDIT Maddie fairly pointed out that Capcom is not Western; this label would perhaps be better revised to “media of developed nations”) has very often treated non-western cultures as savage hellscapes, and its inhabitants as demonic predators (see early American Westerns). The fact that IGN gave the game a 9 on release and now acknowledges its issues is not a sign of hypocritical woke fever but that a niche dialogue has been elevated to higher prominence in the past 15 years.
Interestingly, the article at the link above actually directly addresses the distinction between RE4’s setting and RE5’s that you reference.
As for Cliffhanger games…you kind of did make that up. Lalonders’s actual quote:
Is this racist? Maybe. Certainly it’s discriminatory, but it sounds way more like a reaction to poor past experiences than it does like anything malicious.
More importantly, you claim that Lalonders “of Cliffhanger Games has gone on record that the studio [implying Cliffhanger] will not hire white people.” Except the quote from Lalonders is from 2021, when they were working on a different game at Veritable Joy Studios.
She goes off on whole bit about why she won’t hire whites and then says “I’m not saying that.” Well she did and we all heard it.
You can’t say “I don’t hire whites to create a safe environment for people of colour and free of micro aggression” and then say “I’m not saying whites create unsafe environments.”
That’s EXACTLY what she is saying because she just did.
Not only is it incredibly racist, in most countries it’s also illegal to hire based on colour.
As for IGN the only comparison to RE4 he made was the gameplay where RE4 is more open and RE5 funnels you where it wants you to go a lot more.
What I forgot to mention was the writer of the article that was wrote by IGN that he cites for raising the racism concern in 2009 actually went on to retract her claims after playing the full and seeing it in context. Even the voice actors have come out in defence of RE5 in the YouTube comments and an overall theme of those comments is people of colour defending the game.
I also have to point out that RE5 is not western media. It’s Japanese and one of the games protagonists is also black.
There goes the benefit of the doubt I guess.
I wish you a swift escape from your sisyphean grievances. Best of luck.