Since I've got no real experience with this kind of gameplay (save for one truly ill-fated round of Halo 3), getting thrown into a mêlée of red-eyed zombie villagers was initially terrifying. My shots misfired; my punches only rarely connected with zombie limbs, and I ran out of ammo quickly. However, after getting killed once and having to restart the entire sequence, I began to get the hang of it.
After a while I got a bit tired of having to fend off the relentless onslaught of zombies, and grew kind of annoyed that I didn't have more freedom within the confines of the game. The game tracks on an incredibly rigid storyline, which is interesting on the one hand but limiting on the other. The game gives you choices as you go along - you can punch; you can help your partner; you can reload your pistol or save the ammunition for later; but ultimately you're satisfying a series of predetermined objectives that prevent the game from feeling as interactive and immersive as it otherwise could. While I did appreciate the movie-like quality imparted by the narrative - the game itself was awash with a load of historical facts and references clearly alluding to previous Resident Evil installments - I found myself getting irritated by the barrage of cut-scenes that reliably interrupted my explorations every few minutes. As a horror game novice, I suppose this made my life a bit easier, because I wasn't endlessly wandering around abandoned warehouses in search of an elusive objective, but I feel like this particular characteristic of Resident Evil 5 would start to become deeply obtrusive as my familiarity with the game advanced.
That said, I definitely enjoyed my first experience with horror games, and look forward to playing more over the next several weeks.
When this game came out, there was a lot of talk about how racist it apparently was. I haven't played it, but I've heard a lot from people who have played it that it just seemed vaguely offensive. Did this occur to you while you were playing, or were you totally immersed, or what? Do you think a horror game with a 'message,' either positive or negative (racist), would be less effective as a horror game? Or would the message not influence how immersed you feel?
ReplyDeleteOh I definitely got a vaguely uncomfortable feel while playing it...while I wouldn't say it's overtly racist, it's also pretty hard to ignore the fact that your avatar is a big, beefy, chiseled white guy whose sole purpose is to gun down possessed African villagers in a slum that's right out of Hotel Rwanda.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually glad you mentioned this, because I had completely forgotten about about it even though it's definitely something I took note of at the time. I think it's hard to make a macro statement about whether or not a horror game with a negative message would ultimately suffer - because, after all, horror games are usually extremely violent and dispassionate, and possess some certain necessary elements that I think a lot of people would consider to be morally-questionable - but at the same time, I did step back from the game and think to myself, "uhhh, this is a little unsettling." In that sense, it detracted from the game's immersive quality. Ultimately though, I'd say that Resident Evil 5 comes down to its mechanics (like most other games in its genre, I'd imagine). My feelings of discomfort abated as soon as I became fully engaged in gunning down my attackers. They became little more than targets on the screen to kill; their appearance only registered on a subconscious level.
So I don't have a definitive answer; it definitely bothered me, but yet I was still able to zone out and play the game. Now if that's reflective of my ability to immerse myself as a player or of Resident Evil's capabilities as a game, I couldn't say....
That's interesting. I usually don't feel scared when I'm 'zoned out' and playing a game-- I usually feel the most scared when I am so taken up by the game's environment and story that I unquestioningly accept everything happening in the game and focus my full attention on it. Games that I zone out to-- flash games, for instance, or RPGs where you do a lot of tedious and repetitive killing, like KOTOR or MMOs or the old Pokemon games of my childhood-- they never struck me as scary,even when they tried to be. So if paying a lot of attention to a convincing shooter makes me scared of it, I bet that a message inserted into a game like that-- a message that would make me think about things not in the game-- would make me less scared, since it would make me question the game environment, and so on.
ReplyDeleteOne of the questions I had at the beginning of this project was whether or not horror games engage with players intellectually, or whether our reactions to horror games are all visceral, non-intellectual responses. The Path was very intellectional-- or at least it focused on making you think about things-- but that is the only horror game I know of that deliberately tries to do that, and whenever it goes into 'horror mode,' it also goes into first-person mode. It would be interesting to see a horror shooter or another kind of first-person horror game try to engage with the player on a non-visceral, kind of message-y or brain-y level. Does anyone know of a game like this? I would like to see what kind of scares that game employs.
Back to Laura's comment (but not specifically directed towards her) about the game being racist...hold up a sec. It's OK for me to kill Spanish villagers in RE4 but it's not acceptable that I'm killing African people (when the game is set in Africa) in RE5? Maybe racial sensitivity is preprogrammed into us (explaining the vaguely off-putting sensation) but the fact that this game got a lot of heat about the race of its zombies is total shull bit. Would it be preferable to have white zombies in Africa? Maybe South Africa was really the most suitable place for a zombie infestation. That's straight ign'ant
ReplyDeleteStill, though, the fact remains that you control a white character and a very light skinned black character and you are mowing down hordes of dark skinned zombies. The "they sure don't roll out the carpet for us Americans" quote is pretty telling, I think. The problem isn't that the zombies are black. The problem is that zombies or no, you play the only white guy in sight and you are shooting black people. I know that I found it a bit offensive and unsettling.
ReplyDelete