http://trueslant.com/tassi/2009/07/20/a-further-elaboration-on-racism-in-video-games/

Thanks for reading, even if you don’t agree with me.

So unlike the other commenters, I actually do play a lot of video games. And I actually think that, you know what? When you play a Wehrmacht soldier in whatever WWII game, that is crossing a line. It’s not obscenely bad. But if you present the Allies vs. the Axis as a neutral choice, red vs. blue, you are going somewhere bad. The reason that it’s less offensive is that Nazis are not, at this particular moment in time, killing any Jews, while if you think racism has completely disappeared from America I really don’t know what to say to you.

I won’t comment on Call of Juarez, because I don’t feel like I know anything about the content, and I don’t object to Confederate main characters intrinsically. My relatives fought on the wrong side of the war, anyway. I wouldn’t be happy, though, if the Confederacy was presented as just awesomesauce when you have to be a profoundly disturbed human being to deny that it was… how shall I put this? Wrong. The Confederacy was wrong. Many people in the South knew it, and a few of them had the chance to act on it. That’s just life. No country or army is a monolith, and if these characters are individuals with their own motivations, that’s totally fine by me.

But it’s a little different when there’s such a thing as a game that features a white protagonist killing hordes of dark-skinned people who walk and talk and drive cars and are just like humans except that they’re zombies and inherently evil and therefore they must die. Everyone seems to think, around the white and Asian-dominated sections of the Internetz, that this is equivalent to having a white protagonist killing white zombies. It isn’t. It can’t be, because black people have never said, “White people! Those barbaric, disgusting savages filled with lust for our pure black flesh! Man, isn’t it great that we’re around to keep them in check, or they might overrun the world!” Because that, inverted, is colonialism and slavery and to a certain extent the racism that still exists all over the world today. Of course Capcom didn’t get it. Racism is worst in homogenous countries like Japan that have never grappled with it. Look at Russia, for God’s sake.

Look, I’m not blaming you for not seeing this. It is really, really hard to get these things. Institutional racism is not any one video game company’s fault. In a perfect world where there was never any such thing as the colonization of Africa or racial chattel slavery, where Birth of a Nation was never released, you could have little white bunches of pixels running around and killing little black bunches of pixels all the live long day. Because that’s all a video game is, right? Just entertainment? If only. An image is a powerful thing, and we don’t live in such a perfect world. Racism, these days, isn’t calling someone nigger or lynching them on a tree – although that still happens, here in there, in America at least. Racism is thought that changes your actions just a little bit, just enough to hurt someone. We can’t let these things stand.

The racism in “Resident Evil” is in the subtext. The game/movie plays on stereotypical views of Africa as a dark continent with evil, cannabalistic unknowable residents who eat normal (also read: civilized) people. Would a game set in say England (e.g. one based on “28 Days Later”) have been as offensive?
I don’t think so because the subtext would be missing.

Same problem with a game set in New Orleans, after Katrina. As the commenter above noted about another game: “It was every racists’ caricature of urban America.” What’s even more offensive, though, is that gamers would turn the misery of Katrina into entertainment.

Paul, you may not find it “outside the realm of taste to have a video game where a Confederate soldier must kill Union officers to save his brother.”
You say out that the player isn’t “not killing (Union soldiers) in order to beat a slave at the end of the level, you’re fighting to save your brother. Race has nothing to do with it.”

No you’re wrong.

In that came, you and your brother are Confederates. The Confederates battled to uphold a way of life that was built on the dehumanization of an entire race. (Yes, I know all about States’ rights. I was raised in the South. I stand by my assertion.) Race has everything to do with it.