You may have noticed that I haven’t posted much news in the past few days. You may also have noticed that a fair few gaming news sites have gone a bit off the deep end recently.

There’s lots of examples if you follow gaming news especially with the saga surrounding Sweet Baby Inc’s “harassment” by gamers.

But one of things I wanted to highlight was IGN’s absolutely shocking take that Resident Evil 5 is racist and must not be remade and must be rewritten. Why is it racist you ask. I’ll let IGN’s own Matt Purslow explain.

Set in a fictional West African country, Resident Evil 5’s primary antagonists are Black people. Intentionally or not, Resident Evil 5 positions Africa as the ‘Dark Continent’, an uncivilised world harbouring a diseased population that needs gunning down via Western intervention in the name of global security.

In the 2020s, in a post-Black Lives Matter world, there is only one acceptable response to a white man shooting waves of Africans for an entire video game: no.

Matt Purslow. IGN

The fact IGN awarded RE5 a 9/10 is conveniently omitted from this opinion piece as is the fact that IGN gave Resident Evil 4, a game with a white man shooting waves of Spanish for an entire video game a 10/10.

It’s the worst take possible and one IGN is sticking to but silencing people that want to call them out by disabling comments on their website and Twitter. A YouTube version of the article is currently sitting on 2,000 likes and 15,000 dislikes.

The second big oof of the week comes courtesy of EA game studio Cliffhangar Games who are currently working on the Black Panther game.

Dani Lalonders of Cliffhanger Games has gone on record stating the studio is 100% “people of colour” and she will not hire white people because they “create unsafe environments, are hard to work with and create micro aggression.”

Unfortunately I’m not making that up. I wish I was but it’s very very real and very racist and discriminatory.

Now obviously the games press is defending her and Sweet Baby Inc and it seems like GamerGate 2.0 is in full swing and the games “journalists” and game developers are closing ranks to tell gamers that we’re the problem and we will do and think as we’re told.

So I simply won’t be visiting these sites and as I won’t use “traditional” social media (Twitter, TikTok, Facebook) I won’t be keeping up with the news.

I also won’t be buying any new games for a while, especially EA games as I won’t support racism in any form.

So for a while the community will be some micro and full scale reviews I’m working and a few more opinion pieces (not racist ones like IGN publish) and the odd rant.

It sucks that this is necessary but the trend that started in Hollywood then spread to TV that the fans are the bad guys has unfortunately made it to the gaming industry.

  • ConstableJelly@beehaw.org
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    8 months ago

    There goes the benefit of the doubt I guess.

    I wish you a swift escape from your sisyphean grievances. Best of luck.