[Editor's Note: In the first part of our two part interview with Ragnhild Mogren, teacher at Stockholm University, we specifically discuss the Resident Evil 5 trailer, why historical baggage can never be divorced from certain imagery and ask what it means to live in the "global village".]

What do we see when we play videogames? What implications do games have on our society, and do games get a free pass because they’re “just games”?

Riding on the wave that is the Resident Evil 5 debacle about racism and culture understandings about mediums that we consume every day, we spoke to Ragnhild Mogren, teacher at the educational programme Multimedia Education - Technology at Stockholm university, about these issues to figure out why not just gamers, but our entire society, should care about what games are portraying and contributing to our culture.

What does a person with no understanding of the Resident Evil franchise, as a game series, think about this piece of film? When asked about what feelings and emotions that comes up just from the trailer alone, Mogren’s response is quite clear.

- If I should interpret this trailer from a hermeneutic perspective, that my previous understanding and knowledge plays a huge part in what I actually see here, then this piece of film is very racist.

Her arguments echo the words of N’Gai Croal and his MTV Multiplayer blog interview, that there are images in this trailer that are perfectly sound to be concerned about.

- This trailer says to me that the black people here are portrayed as Neanderthals, quite frankly. This white figure, on the other hand, is very good looking in terms of the norms and rules of what a good looking man is supposed to look like in our society, even if it’s completely unrealistic. The trailer shows political power in that it presents a sense of historical colonial suppression.

Mogren is of the impression that we should be more concerned with ethnicity and gender issues today because of the fact of globalization. And because of this, the colonial power aspect gets even more transparent in the Resident Evil 5 trailer. A sense of being “local and global at the same time” is what defines us an internet generation, a generation in a globalized world, and, according to Mogren, it also has great impact on us as individuals. With great globalization comes great responsibility, so what happens when this trailer is shown to black kids in Africa? These are questions she argues we should ask ourselves in such a globalized world as this.

- Is this going to be shown to kids, black kids, in South Africa? What is your thought process behind that?

But what could have been done differently? What could have changed the trailer to rid itself from the racial sublimity that plagues it? If a group of kids were playing ball, and the ball rolled over to Chris Redfield who kicked it back to them, to acknowledge to us as viewers that this is, in fact, people who live here, would that make any difference? Mogren remains skeptical.

- Imagine a duel between this white male and a black person who is equally equipped, has similar attributes and conditions, maybe even is told through a first person perspective [like Chris Redfield’s narrating voice] and maybe it takes place somewhere else than a poor and depraved village, then maybe we could have a different situation.

When looking at comparison shots of the Resident Evil 5 zombie models and the Resident Evil 4 models, which spawned the argument that the zombies had become less “zombie-like”, the difference between the uninfected people and the infected, zombie-types, are becoming less apparent in the fifth iteration, it seems.

- If this is a trend that is president throughout the games previous iterations, leading up to this one, can that be a sign of our society’s evolution?

What Mogren is suggesting is that the blurred out line between zombie and non-zombie in the Resident Evil 5 trailer could be a sign of our society’s constant evolving attitude toward ethnicities; that the black zombies are actually not that zombie-like because of the fact that we already view blacks, according to this trailer, as Neanderthals or zombies in and of themselves.

- Perhaps less people are discriminated today than ten years ago, but it is being acknowledged more today and we are more aware that these issues exist. That’s why it becomes such a big issue today when you bring it up because it’s so sensitive, regarding both ethnicities and gender issues.

What about the game itself? We know that this is just a trailer that has been, purposely, chosen to represent Capcom’s game. But what should the actual game do in order to avoid getting these intense reactions from people?

- It needs to be a change of perspective and a change of environment. But I will, as long as a white person is shooting a black person, get bad vibes from it. That is very interesting and of course has to do with the history of black people. I will always think “that person is black”, instead of just “that’s a person”. That being said, it doesn’t mean we can’t have games where black people are being shot.

Mogren suggests a change of perspective for an ethnically even game setting. To play as a black character not unlike Redfield with the same conditions and to, ultimately, make an emotional attachment to the player playing the game that is so sorely lacking in the trailer.

She also suggests that the environment itself needs to change dramatically in order to even out the playing field. The village here is portraying the black man as inferior, but also the perspective from where the angles are shot in the film are portraying the white man (Chris Redfield) as on top, and down there in the shadows we have the black people, far away and emotionally unattached to us white people. Even the weapons they use are primitive compared to Redfield’s equipment.

Lest we forget that this is a conscious descriptive representation of an African village from the developers of the game and the editors of the trailer. To agree that the environment needs to change to even out the playing field is to agree to a false representation of the artistic vision that is the depraved African village portrayed in the trailer. All video editing and camera angles aside; you can’t show an economically challenged African village without the economically challenged village in Africa.

Link To Part 2!

written by Jesper Sellerberg \\ tags: Africa, Chris Redfield, Evil, fact, Features, game, Gender, Interview, part, person, perspective, Racism, Ragnhild Mogren, Resident, society, South Africa, Stockholm, teacher, Today, Trailer, university

Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 11:10 pm