More Imagery With a History

Last year when the first footage of Resident Evil 5's African locale (and equally African zombie hordes) caused an uproar in the video game enthusiast press about supposed racist overtones, I started to wonder if I was losing my mind. The whole issue struck me as a tempest in a teapot. While most members of the enthusiast press heaped scorn on the contention of many non-journalist commentors that it was disingenuous to complain about the African hordes in RE5 but not the Spanish hordes in RE4, I always thought there was something to that argument. The most repeated charge in the gaming press was that the game did not make it clear enough that the villagers were already infected when Chris Redfield arrived on the scene in the game's opening moments; that the villagers looked like they were not far from zombies even before the infection. Upon actually playing the game, I thought that the opening cinematics made it abundantly clear that Chris had arrived too late, and if they didn't, the fact that it doesn't take long for the whole population to attack Chris and Sheva en masse erases any doubt. But even if this hadn't been cleared up, how were the mechanical, soulless farming activities of the Spanish villagers in RE4 any less offensive? N'gai Croal's contention that the imagery in RE5 "has a history" rang hollow to me. Both RE4 and RE5 feature a white, male hero venturing into an exaggeratedly savage unknown land to gun down throngs of uncivilized natives. Yes, imagery of black "savages" menacing a white minority has a history in America. But so does imagery of technologically superior interlopers wiping out hordes of natives. To say that only the former is cause for alarm in a video game is to minimize the suffering of thousands throughout history, and the refusal of most members of the gaming press to acknowledge this deeply disappointed me.

I'm also disappointed (but not at all surprised) that the same people who found RE5 so irresponsible are largely laughing off Nintendo's upcoming iteration of the 8-bit classic Punch-Out, which allows players to pound the crap out of a parade of cartoonish ethnic stereotypes. To repurpose Croal's slogan, this imagery has a history within the Punch-Out franchise: one which gamers and games journalists alike have long found particularly amusing. Maybe such absurd stereotyping can't be excused, but it can be understood. Punch-Out was born in the mid '80s, and by and large, people were simply not as enlightened then as they are now. Look at any Saturday morning cartoon, any comic book, any toy line, any pro-wrestling show, from the same era, and you'll see much the same treatment of the subject of race and nationality. All Asians are martial artists. All Russians are fanatical communists. All Native Americans are shamen. As a kid who grew up playing Punch-Out, I can attest that at least some people without racist tendencies did not bat an eye at characters like Piston Honda and Great Tiger, just as we didn't bat an eye at the superhero Apache Chief, the wrestler The Iron Shiek or the G.I. Joe character Quick Kick. All these portrayals are astoundingly insensitive in retrospect, but one can't reinterpret the past through the lens of the present. Still, the present is when Punch-Out for the Wii is being released, and little has changed. In fact, most of the ethnic stereotypes from the original game look to be present in the series' newest iteration, from the French pushover Glass Joe to the overweight islander King Hippo. They've even added a gay stereotype, the effeminate Disco Kid. And this brings me to the point I want to make. Now that the player's avatar, Little Mac, has been redesigned to look vaguely Hispanic (or maybe Italian), can't we say that, when he wails away on Disco Kid, we're once more watching a video game exploit imagery with a history--this time for laughs rather than horror?

Now Punch-Out is a cartoon, and, by definition, cartoons exaggerate mannerisms, vocal inflections, etc. in order to create a world full of larger-than-life characters. True, but that doesn't preclude them from being offensive. Take a stroll through the "propaganda extravaganza" section at Superdickery.com if you don't believe me. Perhaps it's better to say that the stereotyping in Punch-Out is anything but mean-spirited. It works as comedy precisely because we know better. In the original NES version of Punch-Out, when Piston Honda spouted random Japanese words as his between-rounds dialogue, few members of the game's intended audience would have thought of it as crass and unfunny. Many of them probably wouldn't even have recognized it as a joke. If it happens in the upcoming release, it will be seen as ironic, an invitation to laugh at how far we've come. But this doesn't get Disco Kid off the hook. To our collective shame, our society is yet to progress beyond gay bashing, both physical and psychological. There are still religious nuts who think that homosexuality is a disease to be cured, idiot 14 year-olds on Xbox Live using gay slurs as pejoratives for their opponents in Halo deathmatches, and deeply insecure (possibly closeted) men who physically attack other men because of their sexual preferences. Maybe Piston Honda (or, as he'll be called in the new game, Piston Hondo) is a relic of a bygone era when Americans worried about the Japanese economic menace. As awful as it was then, now we can look back on our past ignorance and have a self-effacing laugh. But some of the game's stereotypes seem still to be a little too close for comfort.

I haven't played Punch-Out yet. As a huge fan of the original, I definitely intend to. Until I have, I don't plan to make any final judgments about its content. And in this post, I mean only to raise questions that I think people need to consider. Why was the imagery in Resident Evil 5 cause for concern, but not the imagery in Punch-Out? Should we feel guilty for laughing at humor that employs insensitive imagery and language, even in a tongue-in-cheek way? Are gamers lagging behind the rest of society on these issues? None of these questions can be answered in a blog post; maybe they can't be answered at all. One thing is certain, though: we have to stop burying our heads in the sand, and confront these possible hypocrisies, not just as gamers, but as responsible individuals.