Runnin’ Stoopid
Thursday, 2nd August 2007There’s so much wrong with this entire thing that I’m not entirely certain where to begin. But, to ensure that we’re all on the same page [by now, you should be on either the indexpage, or the one devoted to this article], here’s the news…inasmuch as the Village Voice is news.
As of now, the story’s here. As of later, potentially, it’s also here, granting that things on the ‘net don’t always stay where they’re initially put [I think there are still a few dead intralinks on this site which never got updated for the new blogueware].
So. There it is. And it’s really all summed up in a single paragraph: But the point isn’t to smack one more label on mainstream video games (violent, sexist, racist). The point is that—for this white girl, at least—the Resident Evil 5 trailer is strangely disturbing.
Isn’t Critical Review neat? Not that the Voice would have lawyers anyway; lawyers are, like, part of the Establishment, after all.
So. Where in fact to begin. We could start in the seventies, I suppose. Remember SpaceInvaders? That ultraviolent pixelcidal alien exploitation game? Me neither. Though I suppose that would count as a racist murdersim, the boringish 8bit war occurring betwixt the human race and…whatever those prehistoric mudkip sprites were. I dunno.
But that’s probably reading too much into a harmless thing. So we won’t do that here. Maybe the Voice can get to it on their own time
This really isn’t a NotS about the Voice. It’s not even a NotS about the XBox. Call me optimistic, but I figure there’s no need to belabour the point of obvious idiocy.
Instead, this is a NotS about a black dude shooting white cops in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Just kidding. The real problem with San Andreas was polygonal wireframes accidentally left in the forgotten sourcecode beneath the game which could only be accessed by violating the EULA and cracking the—oh wait…no…that wasn’t a problem; sorry: for a second there, I forgot that Hillary Ashcroft Clinton is not to be trusted.
Still looking for a place to start on this idiocy….
So, I wrote this book once. What the hell: it’s not like anything thus far in the article is related to anything else. But this might actually matter. I wrote this book about zombies. And, being not personally bigoted against any congenital condition [I don't count idiocy in the biologically capable as a congenital thing; it's a learned laziness], I had white zombies, black zombies…I had a zombified Cryolophosaurus ellioti in there; I’m bloody well diverse.
But, this isn’t about allosaurs. Or sinraptors. Possible tetanurans. Theropods, anyway. We think. Y’know: palaeontology is an exact science; but so is medicine; still: everybody lies. Dig?
Where in hell was I…apart from halfway into a headache. Oh yeah: black zombies.
In Paroxysm, one of the characters decided to call the black zombies ziggers. The Grey Man. I liked that. I always like it when characters in my novels think up neat shit. Then I tend to kill them anyway, since I work in mysterious ways. Also because there are no happy endings in reality; there are just circumstances in which people evade death long enough to carry their own oxygen around with them while whimpering about the good old days. This isn’t about that either.
Really, this isn’t even about zombies. It hasn’t been since…pretty much ever. Instead of writing for the Voice, I went to the streets. Specifically of Racoon City. I’ve been playing these admittedly silly games for ten years now. Even in the first, inasmuch as it contained zombies, the main villain, apart from SpoilerWeskerSpoiler, was the Tyrant. For those of you catching up having only seen a couple of loosely related films, the Nemesis was a sort of modified Tyrant designed to hunt the games’ protagonists exclusively. But that’s its own thing.
One thing is true, and it’s something I’d noticed in the games and considered while writing the novel: all the zombies in the games were white. Or, really, grey. The Grey Man. Keeping down the whites, blacks, and whatever else. But, as mentioned in the Voice [kinda], that sorta follows: Racoon City was a smallish American city, probably somewhere in Ohio; there has never been a percentage higher than about thirteen for black Americans—even back when every white guy in the country reportedly owned a dozen each. But this isn’t about that either.
I’ve been to Racoon City. Not just in the games, but IRL. Functionally. It’s just DuhMoines. Or Marietta. Or any other town separated by a wall of misunderstanding from Harlem and containing less than a million people. The sad fact is that the only place in this country where you’re guaranteed to see black guys and oriental chicks and Martians and whatever else in the same place at the same time is in advertising. And I’m not sure which is worse about that: that it never happens in reality, or that Madison Avenue wants us to makebelieve that it does.
And here we find ourselves in a dangerous place, because people are morons. So I’ll make this as simple as my wordprocessor will allow. I don’t care. I don’t like blacks; I don’t dislike blacks; I don’t care. I don’t think about them, to be honest. I think about people; I don’t think about genetic suntans. For all I care, you could be plaid; and, while I’m not personally a huge fan of the Scottish, it won’t bug me. Just, don’t be an idiot; we’ll get on just fine.
So. Back to the black nadazombies in Africa. Which itself leads to another few points of contention.
First: they’re not zombies. Technically. By certain estimations. Mine not among them. I personally regard the Infected in 28 Days Later to be zombies, because they’re mindless, anthropophagous sociopaths running [yes, running] about, biting, infecting, and/or eating everyone else. Also from Paroxysm, and reiterated here because the novel was an idiotunfriendly 250,000 words and this might not be: I consider zombies to be, functionally, a group [class, race, whatever] of people whose intent is to infect you and make you one of them. Whether that’s Romero’s Ghouls, Boyle’s Infected, Stoker’s Vampires, Matheson’s Zompires, O’Bannon’s SpaceGirl, or the Voice‘s Journalists. In that sense, the general oppositional force in Res5 are probably zombiesque enough as to make no difference. Unless you really want something to whimper about, in which case it could be argued that the physiological zombies in the first three primary games were mostly white, while the blacks in Res5 and the Spaniards in Res4 were some secondary, less meaningful sort of infected peopleeaters. But I’m not going to argue that, because I don’t care.
Second: it’s Africa. You really want to deny a few basic facts? Pretend that Africa, when plagued by any given event, isn’t somehow going to involve black people. It’s Africa. It’s where black people live. I know how much that sounds like a bushism, but it’s pretty much the actual case. Homosapiens came out of Africa as black people, evolving lighter skintones in Scandinavia where white people were and are more fit to survive. And, if that sounds a little too heartless and intelligent to you, go the other way and blame Quetzalcoatl for making it so; I just work here.
Third: I’d like to be impressed by someone noting the…hang on; I’ll find and copypaste the actual, illiterate sentence….
Sounds familiar yet? Yup, we could be talking about the HIV/AIDS crisis, which has killed 15 million Africans, and infected 25 million others on the continent. Especially since one of the few sentences spoken in the Resident Evil 5 trailer is, “Casualties continue to mount over the long years I have struggled.”
Ooh. It’s 2007, and someone put that together. Good job, Moron.
Of course, John Carpenter already did that for you, some years ago. He noted, in the commentary on the disc, that 1982′s The Thing was, even at the time, analogous to the emerging AIDS pandemic. Romero mentioned the same thing—regarding I think Day of the Dead from 1985. You’re late to the party, Kid. Also, if you’re still looking for something to be terribly clever about, it’s too late to note that Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was all about frankenfoods; they mentioned that on its disc, as well.
Yes, HIV is just like a zombiebug. Because, as we all know, anyone with AIDS is suddenly inclined to run around biting people. Happens all the time. Totally. And, if you get bit by someone with AIDS, you die, then get up and kill; the people you kill get up and kill; the people they kill get up and kill; and the people they kill get up and become journalists. Grow up.
Fourth: it’s a videogame. Says so right there on the box. Or, it will, if it ever gets finished. It doesn’t matter. And I say that as someone who plays videogames more hours per day than I sleep. Know what I did yesterday? I played Rise of Nations five times. About four hours per game. Won’em all; but guess what that leaves time for, outside the game: very little. It occurred to me, around four in the morning, that I hadn’t even stood up for twelve hours. Even to go take a leak. On the bright side, it secondarily occurred to me that, at least, I hadn’t just taken a leak without standing up first. So that all worked out well enough, except that I got approximately zilch accomplished yesterday. The genocide of the French is fun, of course; but it’s a meaningless game, so it’s not actually an accomplishment.
It’s a videogame. It’s not Jack Thompson’s Murder Simulator. It’s not Hillary Ashcroft Clinton’s Sextoy. It’s not training anyone to go to Africa, wait for HIV to evolve to the extent that it causes its victims to die, rise, bite, and spread the new condition. Grand Theft Auto doesn’t make you kill cops; Resident Evil doesn’t make you a zombie; Prance Prance Revolution doesn’t make you gay. As far as I know. But I’ve never played it. Danced it. Whatever those little fruits at the mall are doing. Maybe it makes you epileptic; I dunno.
Hey: there you go. I’ve seen white people flailing about on Prance Prance Revolution. What manner of racism is that: pretending that white guys can dance. There oughtta be a law.
It’s a videogame. No one cares. Or, no one should care. Silly sapiens.
Of course, that’s just my opinion; I think I developed it while playing Destroy All Humans.