What Is Africa to Me?: Race and Ethnicity in Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil 5

Andre Brock

Thu., June 11, 11:00–12:30, Class of ’24 (4th floor, East Central)

This presentation will discuss the construction and deployment of racial and ethnic identity in videogames from three perspectives: design/genre, marketing, and gamer feedback on gaming websites.

Advances in graphical technologies have led to increasingly realistic depictions of human characters in videogames. Accordingly, the expectations of gamers, critics, and developers have risen with regard to environmental, narrative, and cultural aspects of human character development. Most recently, two videogames — Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft) and Resident Evil 5 (Capcom) — deploy players within extremely detailed re-imaginings of Africa to interact with a variety of racial and fantastic non-player characters and enemies. The developers’ attempts to create culturally appropriate settings received a variety of responses that wandered far afield from the usual tech- or game-oriented criticisms of interface, genre, game mechanics, and multimedia elements. Instead, these games (particularly Resident Evil) garnered enormous amounts of polarized culturally-oriented criticism with respect to the relationships of the White and Black characters within the game worlds.

Cultural ideologies are nearly invisible to discussions of information and communication technologies that arise in the public sphere. Instead, a baseline of white Western privilege as a “technological zenith” undergirds the use, dissemination, and understanding of technological artifacts and literacies (Dinerstein, 2006; Brock, 2007). Carey (1989) has argued that communication technologies transmit cultural beliefs while Pacey (1985) argued that technology must be considered a tripartite arrangement of artifact, practice, and beliefs about that technology. Videogaming has long excavated tropes of white superiority that employ European mythologies, science fiction and fantasy, and other literary genres to provide narrative frameworks over a multitude of game environments for the gamer’s actions.

For this paper I propose to conduct a critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) of three elements that comprise each game: the ludic, mechanical, and graphical aspects of the game; the associated videos and interviews generated to market the games; and a sampling of the discussions generated between gamers participating in comment threads following blog posts about the racial significance of each game. This analysis seeks to answer the following questions:

• What do gamers’ perceptions of racialized characters in Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil 5 tell us about the role of cultural competence principles in videogame design, marketing, and use?
• How do the mechanics and genre choices of the respective videogames shape interactions between players and racialized antagonists/NPCs?
• How have the respective marketing campaigns — viral videos, developer interviews, and game trailers — shaped perceptions of racial identitites in the games?

I will employ a framework using critical whiteness theory, critical information studies, interface analysis, and critical discourse analysis across all three media forms (blogs, videos, and games) to understand how each form plays a part in shaping racial identity. Initial findings by various game review sites and game critics indicate that color-blind ideology, based upon uncritical views of technology and playing games, play a part in the negative responses of gamers to criticisms of the games’ racial depictions.