Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Re: Christ, do you want your fucking Eagle Scout patch now, or

[quote name="Lizard_King"][quote name="Fortinbras"]This is a fucking retarded argument and I'm through with it. [/quote] I don't expect you to believe me, but I wasn't asking a leading question or attacking you. [quote] Then I guess I'm in good fucking company, seeing as he didn't quite understand what the hell he was saying either. [quote]<i>It’s not as simple as saying, “Oh, they shot Spanish zombies in ‘Resident Evil 4,’ and now ‘black zombies and that’s why people are getting upset.” The imagery is not the same. It doesn’t carry the same history, it doesn’t carry the same weight. I don’t know how to explain it more clearly than that.</i> [/quote] So other than vague generalizations alluding to poorly defined terms, he can't really figure out how to explain it more clearly than that! There are images, and history involved! Which images? What history?! Who fucking knows! That's for your mind to conjure up and do his job for him![/quote] I'll do it for you, since I followed the discussion about RE5 pretty closely. I won't claim 1:1 between what I am paraphrasing without looking everything up, but I think I have the gist of it. Things Croal was not saying: -The makers of Resident Evil 5 are racists who made a racist game, based on previews -People who are going to enjoy RE5 are going to be implicated Things he was saying: There is a long history of racist imagery surrounding Africans, specifically black Africans, that you would have to work particularly hard to be unaware of in, say, the United States. It is, however, quite possible for people from other cultures who do not have a history of racism, genocide and enslavement of black Africans to recreate such imagery in a manner that could be problematic in terms of what it appears to make legitimate conduct within a video game. Like, for instance, the Japanese. Given those two things, he had a few questions based on the original previews of RE5, which had such gems as the two black men dragging away the blond woman to have unspeakable acts performed on her. -Are the makers aware of this history? -Has it been taken into account when designing their scenarios? -If not, is there a possibility that the game might deliver entirely the wrong message outside of what was intended, and did that concern the devs? Capcom opted to go with complete radio silence for the most part, but clearly got the message and altered at least that one scene by release time to have a much whiter person dragging away the blond. Their unwillingness to engage the subject directly was unfortunate, but since Croal's goal and that of most of the people questioning RE5 in this context was neither to intimidate or create a pr scandal for them, everybody pretty much dropped it once the conversation had run its course. It was clear that any such imagery present in the game was the product of ignorance at worst, and in the context of the final, released game it would be difficult to view it as a seriously racist work absent the intention and the, um, gravitas such a thing might require. What was more interesting was the refusal of many gamers to even acknowledge there was any possibility of a problem. Look, they'd say, nobody complained about anti-Spanish racism in RE4. Hey, they're zombies, not actual people it's not the same. Or my personal favorite, "It's people like Croal that are racist because all they see is race stuff everywhere". Some of those responses are rooted in ignorance, a lot in the reflexive defensiveness that members of a majority group tend to feel when these issues come up in any format. And some percentage of it was actually honest disagreement with his points, which actually led to some interesting conversations about the nature of race imagery in the present day. I think the main thing is that people perceived simply wanting to talk about it as an attack or a Fox outrage or an Al Sharpton hoax, but they are not the same thing. [quote] So what, a one-on-one interview is a second hand source now? Are you fucking shitting me? Whatever. He's no Al Sharpton, he just bitches about stupid shit not rooted in reality.[/quote] It is, actually, rooted in reality. You may disagree with him, but he wasn't pulling this out of his ass. The reasons I assumed that you were dealing primarily with secondhand interpretations of what he wrote were first that you'd done that just now, and that many people really seemed to gloss over what he was actually saying in favor of whatever their first impression of his argument was through someone else. The latter was reinforced by what you've said here. [quote]I'm sorry if you make your purchasing decisions based on what he says, but if so, what are you doing playing Resident Evil 5 you big stinky hypocrite? [/quote] I did have a lot of questions about what had been initially presented in the original previews, but mostly it was an academic issue more than a practical one. I was fairly certain Capcom and Takeuchi were simply clueless, and I was interested in what they would say. But it was very unlikely to stop me from seeing the game for myself, and because much like Croal I wasn't on a witchhunt so much as asking a few questions, it really creates very little conflict for me. Xbox live has, of course, found a way to manifest the very worst things possible in terms of hateful language, but that is hardly the game's fault. [quote] He's a mediocre journalist whose claim to fame <i>is in fact</i> being "that guy who took a big stinky shit on Resident Evil 5 for no fucking reason". If he liked games as much as he seems to like to hear himself talk, he would have never written that article. [/quote] I don't think that's the case at all. He had an extensive track record unrelated to that, and I actually knew of him primarily because of his column in Edge. That's not directly relevant except to say that I don't think his career is going downhill apart from alienating people who overreact on the internet. I don't understand what about what he was saying was so profoundly terrible that you would demand he unwrite it in order to be considered someone who "likes games". It's perfectly normal for games to be asked more sophisticated questions as the industry moves forward. It's the future, in fact, but it has zero negative impact on people who aren't interested in having those conversations. All it means is that you won't have unintentional tributes to Birth of a Nation in upcoming games, or at least not as many of them. It is not the same as, for instance, the Mass Effect blue ass controversy, for a lot of reasons that you probably don't need me to explain to you. [quote] I don't doubt he'll never enter the consciousness of video game journalism again, mainly because he got shitcanned from Newsweek. Still, I guess if one morally crusading dipshit from Caltrops managed to catch me in his INKREADABLE LOGIK TRAP and show me my prejudices against self-righteous shitheads who write for widely-circulated magazines are WRONG, then he's done his job. [/quote] Actually, I'm almost positive that if more people are slightly more aware about the issues surrounding racial imagery, that probably counts as mission accomplished. Even if it's a negative awareness, that's a lot easier to grow out of than ignorance. [/quote]