Beyond the Mansion
The first Resident Evil game stars a small squad of elite police who find themselves trapped in a‚ mansion crawling with zombies and monsters. As players explore the mansion, they come to discover passageways that lead to a secret laboratory belonging to Umbrella, a multi-national pharmaceutical corporation. Umbrella’s scientists discovered a virus that brings about hideous transformations in humans and animals. The mansion stands at the center of an outbreak of this virus. It’s important to understand where this scenario comes from.
In 1989, Capcom released Suito Homu (Sweet Home) for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game followed the plot of a movie by the same name, which concerned a group of documentary film-makers beset by an onryo, a vengeful female ghost, in a bizarre chateau. Suito Homu, released only in Japan, inspired many of the game mechanics used by Resident Evil, as well as its mansion. The chateau of Suito Homu belonged to an artist who had painted frescoes containing puzzles on its walls. The baroque puzzles found in Resident Evil games descend from this aspect of Suito Homu. At one point, players of Sweet Home even receive a note urging them to “escape this house of residing evil”-the source of the evocative English phrase that titles the series, called Baiohazado (Biohazard) in Japan.
When Mikami developed Resident Evil, he gave Sweet Home’s atmosphere of kwaidan, traditional Japanese ghost story, a modern grounding. Underneath the supernatural mask, he placed a flesh-and-blood story of trade in biological weapons. The genius of Resident Evil doesn’t lie in its creepy mansion, but in the expansion of its setting to the laboratory below.
Giving Resident Evil ‘s zombies and giant spiders and lizard creatures a natural, albeit fictional, origin entailed leaving the mansion. Every time Mikami explains a supernatural event, he moves the action farther afield: the monsters come from a secret lab, which was set up by Umbrella. So where are Umbrella’s offices? In nearby Raccoon City, the location of Resident Evil 2. What then? “After it was taken to the city,” says Vincent, “you came to the conclusion that Umbrella operated worldwide.”
The series has continued this movement over the years, following the questions raised by each new game to answers in new locations, from a small piece of wilderness in the American mid-West to a city to an equatorial island to Antarctica to Spain and, now, to sub-Saharan Africa. What began as a Japan-only game steeped in Japanese themes became a global hit series the setting of which spans the world. The series follows the trail of a horror that is precisely the opposite of a “residing evil”-an evil that belongs to a particular place. Instead, it stars a cosmopolitan evil, an evil at home everywhere.
The ever-increasing realism and globalism of the Resident Evil games are what make them so potent, attractive, and open to criticism. This is why Resident Evil 5 is in for a cosmo ass-kicking.
Using Africans
Resident Evil 5’s story concerns violence and disease and takes place in Africa. The idea is that the origins of the viruses and parasites that have wrought so much devastation throughout the series lie in Kijuju. Some parasitic agent there has transformed people, mostly black men, into slavering, bloodthirsty Majini.
To depict black Africans as inhuman, diseased, threatening creatures is to walk on stage and juggle nitroglycerin. To do so in a game is to invite audience members up on stage with you to participate in your nitro-juggling act. There are two ways to respond to this volatile performance: cosmopolitan or parochial.
A moral cosmopolitan judges all people as he judges himself. He makes no exceptions for ignorance, no distinctions of culture or place. When Resident Evil 5 portrays Africans, the cosmopolitan response is to welcome the game’s developers and players into the global fold by showing how these portrayals mirror racist narratives about Africa and Africans.
The parochial view takes the game out of context, pretending that Resident Evil 5 exists somewhere outside of time and space, in a bubble of irrelevance. A parochial person argues that everything a game touches somehow escapes reality, a childish argument. Behind the cries of “It’s just a game!”, lies a puerile fear: “Please don’t take it away!”
Resident Evil 5 intensifies the issue by seeking to make its environment as real as possible, a continuation of Mikami’s approach of explaining the supernatural. RE5’s producer, Jun Takeuchi, has belabored this point, stressing that Capcom sent a team to Africa to ensure that the game gets things right. You can see the difference between East, West, and Southern African people. The enemies even speak Swahili-indeed, ‘Majini’ is a Swahili word, derived from the Arabic ‘djinni’, the source of English ‘genie’. Further, the game draws explicitly from the film Black Hawk Down, itself based on Mark Bowden’s non-fiction book of the same name, which covers an American military operation in Somalia. These efforts only heighten the necessity of observing how we play the game in context.
When Vincent and I slashed up that Majini, the animation looked ridiculous. The vigor of Chris and Sheva as they swung their knives! The contortions of the our enemy! The gouts of blood! It all went so far over the top that we started laughing. But, thinking back on it, the incident brings to mind a scene from Bowden’s book in which two American soldiers trying to escape from a firefight in a truck run over a Somali man on crutches, then laugh about it. This is what you get when you tie your game to real places and current events. This, too, is gaming cosmopolitanism.