Resident Evil 5 Analysis

In the article of Andre Brock, dated 2011, When keeping it real goes wrong: Resident Evil 5, Racial Representations, and Games, the following is a summary of the article in which it focuses on the representation of the game Resident Evil 5 describing the features or stereotypical strategies used to establish Sheva Alomar’s character.
Resident Evil 5 was found that it had depiction of raced and gendered characters trades upon stereotypes which are essential to the public’s understanding of the game. The games’ representation of race was through software, play e.g. mechanics, narrative and genre, discourse, the game reviews and gamer’s reactions. In the game, two primary objectives are met, “keep your partner alive” and “finish the game”. Sheva Alomar was programmed to follow Chris. She defends for Chris when he is in danger and
threatened, also uses ammunition without effective result.
She picks up objects e.g. ammunition, grenades, healing herbs, money tokens unprompted but does not use them, a mule. Sheva’s agency is minimised and treated like a beast of burden for the white. A character that is limited in such, she is not reflected anywhere in the game narrative as a dominant character, thus cannot advance the game.
She requires Chris’s assistance to fight off enemies and for cure. In the game, Sheva’s skin is lighter than the other Africans i.e. the NPC’s. She rendered to represent two racial groups in one figure, maybe an Ethiopian or Somalian. She can translate and understand Swahili but doesn’t speak it during the game. Completing the game, additional unlockable costumes for Sheva can be unlocked, the “clubbin’ outfit and the “tribal” outfit. Although the developers exaggerate the dimensions
of a female figure in video games i.e. having a large breasts, tiny waists, high pitched voices and inadequately clothed. Sheva is also depicted in the focus on her arse, and waist and appealing unlockable outfits. Sheva’s outfits are not made for fighting, except from the original one, thus implementing that she cannot differentiate on what to wear. The “clubbin” outfit, she being portrayed as a sexual character, the “tribal” costume, portrayed a more exotic and sexualised Sheva in one outfit. Sheva’s phenotype, visual characteristics represented her as a tragic mulatto, mulattoes are represented as objects of white sexual desire, similar to white women with the presumed sexual licentiousness granted by their blackness and unable to legally resist white male advances. In point of the statement above, Sheva’s represented a sexual desired object, not a person. Although RE5 does not have the mechanic for sexual contact, her outfits leave her nearly naked, which it is assumed females wear outfits without reason. These costumes work to articulate imaginaries of sexual objectification and exoticism. A figure functioning to support the white figure, serving the notion of the embodiment of the ‘Other’ controlled by the White.