Content Warning: I discuss Resident Evil 2’s handling (from the perspective of this FAQ) of child sexual abuse and incest in Resident Evil 2 from 14:50 to 15:40 and again from 18:40 to 19:20.

Article Discussed:
A Detailed Analysis of the Resident Evil Videogame Series by Capcom Entertainment
Dan Birlew & Thomas Wilde
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/198459-resident-evil-3-nemesis/faqs/2204

Music:
“Yarn Ball” from Love ZZZV.
Support Zan-zan-zawa-veia at https://www.patreon.com/zzzv. Find out more about Zan’s music at https://zan-zan-zawa-veia.bandcamp.com, http://aanaaanaaanaaana.net/, or @zanzanzawa.

Other Links:
Killer7 Plot Analysis by James Howell https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/gamecube/562551-killer7/faqs/38193
Driving Off the Map: A Formal Analysis of Metal Gear Solid 2 by James Clinton Howell http://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/
Silent Hill Plot Analysis by SilentPyramid https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/198641-silent-hill/faqs/36931
Beyond The Filter 02 – On The Flexibility of Flash and The Web of the Past with Nathalie Lawhead https://archive.org/details/beyondthefilter02flash
The full list of 44 pieces being discussed https://twitter.com/Benladen/status/854180037251129345
Support for this episode made possible by the lovely contributors to my patreon, https://patreon.com/benladen

Rough Script:

For episode six of Reading Games: A Personal Critical Canon, we will be discussing A Detailed Analysis of the Resident Evil Videogame Series by Capcom Entertainment, written by Dan Birlew and Thomas Wilde and published on GameFAQs. Links to the article and other relevant materials are available in the episode description below. There are some content warnings as well. Check the very beginning of the episode description to see what is being discussed, and what time stamps it occurs during.

[Music]

I’ll be honest: when I was putting together the list of 44 pieces of games criticism that meant a lot to me, I added this one mostly to make a point. And being even more honest, I didn’t expect that I would ever need to articulate that point. It seemed self-evident. But then this podcast started, and I’ve been hitting a bit of a wall. Because the problem was never that the point was self-evident. It’s that the point I was making – that a “plot analysis” on GameFAQs deserves to share the same space as the other essays I have discussed and will continue to – requires a whole bunch of context to actually make.

That, coupled with the fact that this hundred-thousand word behemoth is more plot summary than analytical exercise, means that this episode is going to have a slightly different format. I did go ahead and reread the thing, pulling quotes that I thought might be useful to the points I wanted to make. But running through each game and constructing a complete argument out of this piece as a whole is simply not going to work. Because there isn’t a thesis here; it’s a collation of information spread across about ten games. It’s a primer for those, like me, who aren’t familiar with the series, or a refresher for those who are. The goal isn’t to convince anyone of anything, other than that this is a reliable source of information regarding a famous series of videogames where you can find what you want to know.

I don’t want to overstate this particular entry into the plot analysis genre. At the time, I could’ve equally gone with SilentPyramid’s analysis of the Silent Hill series, or James Howell on Killer7. Like I said, I was making a point. Because all three of these examples share a lot in common. They’re accessible works trying to bring clarity to games that fall outside of games’ storytelling norms. They’re amateur works, self-published on a platform that accepted, but was not meant, for them. They’re examples of the curation of information in a pre-fanwiki culture, where instead of infinitely nested links, stories were told in longform prose.

Had I chose one of those others, though, the things we are going to end up talking about would have been different. Because, as much as these might end up sounding like monologues, they aren’t. I’ll be honest one more time: I’m letting the texts lead these discussions, even when I might be better served to insist on something else. So let’s get into it.

Would you like to hear a joke that I’ll end up taking way too seriously? If not, I’m sorry, but this podcast has already been that, on some level. So here it goes. The dictionary definition for lore says:

“1. all the facts and traditions about a particular subject that have been accumulated over time through education or experience.
“2. The backstory created around a fictional universe.
“3. (obsolete) workmanship”

The joke’s that that’s how all bad high school essays start, right? Well, it turns out that we can’t really talk about Resident Evil without talking about lore, and that definition happens to offer a good entry point. Because all three aspects interplay with each other, and understanding lore is crucial in understanding why this SparkNotes-like recap is important to include on a list of great games criticism.

The operative definition, I think, is usually number two. Lore is a backstory for fiction. It’s the item descriptions or genealogies or ancient wars or behind-the-scenes movers and shakers that probably don’t show up in the story itself. Or if they do, it’s only in reference, offhandedly. Based on my reading of Birlew and Wilde’s plot analysis, in the Resident Evil series you might include the Progenitor virus, Edward Ashford and Ozwell Spenser and James Marcus in that definition. You might also include the way that the T-Virus, the thing that makes people (and plants and animals) into zombies, came into being. And the G-Virus, which is like the T-Virus but makes people mutate rapidly. Plus the Nemesis and Las Plagas parasites, as well as the TG-Virus from Resident Evil: Dead Aim. Most importantly, it covers just about everything about the Umbrella corporation, a megacorporation who create and market “bio-organic weapons” and who serve as the overarching series antagonist.

All of these things are incredibly unimportant to understanding the story of any particular game, as far as I can tell. The games themselves tell stories of people caught in strange, puzzle-filled places – mostly mansions, trains, labs, and tunnels – with zombies trying to kill them. Usually they are trying to escape or investigate, and the story itself often revolves around two individuals helping each other to do so. All this lore does is fill in the gaps, creating a sense of cohesion. Which brings us back to the first definition.

If lore is a backstory for a fictional universe, it’s generally intended to simulate “the facts and traditions … that have been accumulated over time through education or experience.” It’s there to lend verisimilitude at the aesthetic level, continuity at the franchise level, and exploitable material at the level of production. Because having the sense that these things are living, full of genuine facts and developed traditions, makes them more appealing. Again referencing the FAQ, we might think of this in terms of escalation. In the first game, our characters are part of S.T.A.R.s, the Special Tactics and Rescue Service of the Raccoon City Police Department. As the games go on, we learn of the UBCS, or the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service, Umbrella’s own pseudo-STARS parallel who work to hide the company’s wrongdoings. In Resident Evil: Dead Aim, one of the main characters works specifically for, quote, “an anti-Umbrella unit within the United States Strategic Command.” This escalation gives the sense that we are learning and experiencing these bits of information, and that they have facts and traditions behind them. They also amount to nothing in terms of the actual story.

If this all sounds dismissive, I assure you it isn’t. Lore isn’t, of necessity, a bad thing. Stories should feel like they have the weight of history behind them, because they do. And that doesn’t need to be incorporated directly into how the characters react to the threat of a zombie every time. There is a place for this kind of information. But there’s also a tendency to rely on it, and effects beyond its aesthetic value. Which is why I included the third, obsolete definition: “workmanship.”

Lore is craft. It’s a backstory for a fictional world that provides it a sense of fact and tradition, and it’s one that you look at the same you would a well-carved table or a piece of inventive code. It treads a fine line between the weight of history and the pleasant diversion of a job well done. Lore is reading things like a plot analysis FAQ. Or, at least, it used to be.

I mentioned earlier that these FAQs are something of an artifact of a pre-fanwiki culture, and I do believe there has been a shift. Birlew began this in 1998; he ended up abandoning it because he got a job as a strategy guide author based on some other work. Wilde picked it up in 2000, and updated it through the beginning of 2006. This eight year span mirrors almost perfectly the time from the first utterance of “Web 2.0” to the point at which it became the dominant ideology of web development.

For those who don’t know, a very short summary of Web 2.0 is that it was a focused effort on the part of corporations to make the internet more user friendly. Things like blogging, podcasting, RSS feeds, and social networks were its hallmarks. The previous internet wasn’t free, but it was characterized by sites handwritten in HTML, forums, and pseudonymous chat rooms. 2.0 was a centralization effort, making things easier to access for ordinary people and easier to control for major corporations. You can find a good discussion of the artistic implications of that shift on the Beyond the Filter podcast episode with Nathalie Lawhead, which is linked in the description.

One hallmark of Web 2.0 that I left out was wikis. Wikipedia, notably, was founded in 2001 but didn’t break into the top 10 US websites until 2007. Only a year before it reached a peak of having 1,800 articles added daily. Wikia, the social network platform for wikis, debuted in 2004 but had its breakthrough in 2007 with more than 3,000 wikis in fifty languages.

The implications of this shift were huge. Most folks have had the experience of exploring a wiki far past the point of interest; you look something up out of curiosity, and realize hours later that you are in a hole that you have no idea how you ended up in. To refer back to the first episode of this podcast, they can be engines of dissociation. They’re games. Structurally, they rely on the presentation of objective information in a dry, basic format that is shot through with links. Aesthetically, they present plot summaries that have tantalizing links to endless other plot summaries that have endless links to etc.

There are two major differences between the article at hand and wikis, structurally speaking. The first is that wikis are, at least theoretically, collaboratively authored. The second is that in the GameFAQs style, there are no links. Plot analyses don’t send you down into other rabbit holes, unless you take steps to find them. You can’t bounce from half-read article to barely-started article. You either read through this kind of plot analysis or you abandon it. The material realities for why this FAQ ended in 2006 are manifold; Birlew got a job, and Wilde is still working as a games writer and critic; these recaps require intense work for no money, which is egregious when CNET buys GameFAQs in 2003 and even worse when CBS takes ownership by buying CNET in 2008; and, more than anything, the neoliberal shift in capitalism is about to unravel in massive market crashes, so there is a final moment to escape this unpaid labor into the precarious economy before gig work takes over everything. So, among the other things that this FAQ is, it is a time capsule of a dead web.

All of that relates to lore. Not because lore begins in 2006 or 1998 – the first and third of those definitions I read earlier are sourced back to the late 16th-century publication of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, an Arthurian epic poem that earned its author a pension from Queen Elizabeth I – but because it crystallizes as a way of reading games in the Web 2.0 landscape. User-generated content and hyperlink-heavy forms of analysis combine with the slow death of medium-sized games. What we’re left with is a games landscape that prioritizes either independent games by a small handful of creators, most of which end up prioritizing one or two mechanical innovations which are filled in with make-do storytelling around the edges, and massive tentpole releases that stuff themselves full of everything in order to justify their price points to a ravenous consumer base that has actively excluded a non-hardcore audience. From that point until now, all small games have to choose between being Myst or Doom, and all big games have to be both Myst and Doom at once.

At its best, lore – this workmanlike backstory that simulates facts and traditions – doesn’t just give a story a sense of weight. It pushes you to consider important realities. Take, for example, an offhand point by Wilde in his section on Resident Evil: Code Veronica:

“By the time RE begins in 1998, Umbrella’s the kind of inescapable megacorporation that drives most cyberpunk plots.”

He says this in introducing a condensed version of the Ashford family, a massive lore mess in the games starting with Code Veronica. On the one hand, it’s a fairly straightforward comparison; the Ashfords are basically the Tessier-Ashpools from Neuromancer, down to Alexia Ashford and 3Jane both being clones who were kept frozen for decades. More abstractly, though, cyberpunk’s megacorporations were initially modeled after Zaibatsu, a sort of nested corporate structure prominent in the Japanese Empire that allowed for strict vertical control of market segments. In Neuromancer especially, they were meant to act as replacements for the state, which had largely disappeared in a libertarian wet dream. Resident Evil, on the other hand, has no such fantasy; you play as cops, one of the armed wings of the state, in nearly every entry. That’s the escalation from before; in the time from Resident Evil 1 to Resident Evil Dead Aim, you go from playing special cops to capital-SF Special Forces.

This is the kind of lore that helps reveal underlying ideological shifts. Neuromancer comes out in 1984, in the dead center of the decade of Thatcher and Reagan, when neoliberalism was grabbing and growing its foothold in the imperial center. A decade and a half later, statements like “there is no such thing as society” have done their work and been discarded. Big government, meaning social programs, has been defeated, and getting rid of the armed wings of the state would be ludicrous.

The point, though, is that the cyberpunk connection isn’t wrong. But it’s most instructive in its differences. Where the Tessier-Ashpools were the creators of AI, Umbrella is primarily an arms and pharmaceuticals company, appropriate to the escalations of the Cold War in the intervening years and the way that corporate consolidation around drugs became a political economic trend. Some examples, from Wilde’s recaps. From the Code Veronica recap:

“The most interesting revelation is the fact that there’s a great deal of competition in the field of T-Virus research. Umbrella isn’t the only company in the world that deals in monsters.”

From the Resident Evil: Dead Aim recap:

“Umbrella markets its bioweapons. Before Dead Aim, this was an assumption; now we know for sure.”

And especially, from the Resident Evil: Outbreak – File #2 recap:

“Through a shell corporation, Drugs Incorporated, Umbrella provided the hospital with untested drugs as a way of avoiding costly and potentially unsuccessful clinical trials. Some if not all of these drugs were based on the T-Virus, to judge by the patient records; at least one patient was given a fast-acting cancer “cure” that killed him shortly thereafter.”

These bits of information – all of which, again, have basically no bearing on the actual story of any game – reveal a few things. Umbrella isn’t a monopoly, and it actually participates in world markets. Given that all they really seem to do is turn people into zombies using drugs – and not in the reactionary-liberal sense of antidepressants making you numb or whatever – this seems like a deliberate choice. It forces the player, or reader, to imagine who would be in that market; who would want to buy ways to annihilate populations, turning them into unruly non-subjects. The third quote goes farther, indicating that they aren’t just making money, they’re actively subverting regulations. Which, again, points back to their being a fairly robust state apparatus missing from most (early) cyberpunk fiction.

Returning to the state for a moment, I’ll have to do some recapping of the recap rather than direct quoting. Resident Evil 2 seems to best set up the dichotomy of Umbrella; on the one hand, much of the game takes place in a police station. I imagine some of the topics – particularly the sexual abuse that is woven through the villain’s story – is handled poorly. But the way the game is set up points to a few things. First, the station is basically a puzzle box. This is primarily a gameplay concern, but it metaphorizes the way state bureaucracy obfuscates state violence. This second part is, I think, the most charitable reading of that abuse; the state’s monopoly on violence, enacted through its armed protectors of property, provides structures for abuse. This isn’t to say that things like CSA didn’t or couldn’t exist outside of capitalism; only that the form it takes in the game – a serial abuser emboldened by his position as a police chief – is actively abetted by the structures of the state.

The other main location (other than a train, that beautiful symbol of public infrastructure that saves the day) is a laboratory connected to Umbrella. It’s where Resident Evil being full of buildings that self-destruct becomes a proper trope. And that is interesting. Because a laboratory with a self-destruct mechanism can only mean one thing: it is in the private sector. Under what other circumstances would secrecy and opacity be such overwhelming imperatives that the engineers would rather it be rigged to explode than that their intellectual property be revealed to the outside world?

All of that is, in my estimation, an example of how lore can shine. It creates conversation, putting a work of art into the context of art across time, and gives us tools by which we can talk about the world as it is. It invites parallels to be made that lead to critical thought about the material causes of its creation, which draw us back into the world that it was ostensibly meant to provide escape from. It links neurons, offering new ways of thinking. Sometimes, those links then cause us to make derivative works or have conversations. In doing so, it links people. Often into communities of taste, but at its best into potential organizations of solidarity and action.

Speaking of communities of taste, one more quick diversion before we try to bring this thing to a close. One of the aspects of this Plot Analysis FAQ that most intrigues me, and has for a long time, are the asides. The ways that the author contextualizes information according to taste, or argues for the inclusion of certain aspects over others. One very basic example, from the recap of Resident Evil 3.

“RE3 has more replay value than any other RE game to date, with three endings and plenty of secrets to unlock, as well as the incredibly fun (read: addictive and frustrating) Mercenaries minigame”

By the apparent goals of this document, that bit of information is wildly unnecessary. This isn’t a product review. It has nothing to do with the plot, which is of utmost importance if you take into account the entirety of Wilde’s analysis of Resident Evil: Gun Survivor 2, which goes:

“Also known as Resident Evil: Fire Zone, this Namco/Capcom collaboration is a retelling of sorts of Code Veronica. It stars Claire, Steve, and a liberal helping of every monster in the RE series. It’s also a dream that Claire’s having as she’s lying unconscious in the crashed plane in Antarctica. As such, it has no bearing on the plot.” End quote. And end recap.

Perhaps a more indicative example, though, is how Birlew basically begins and ends the recap of Resident Evil 2. From the beginning:

“For the purpose of brevity, this synopsis will follow the plot as it occurs in the Claire A & Leon B combination, which is by far the more structurally sound of the two scenario combinations.”

And then near the end:

“Perhaps the reasons why the previous plot summary focused on Claire A/ Leon B are now clear. The focus scenario is much richer in plot and explanations. There is not as great a leap of faith required to believe that Ada still lives.”

That second bit comes at the end of a summary of the differences between the Claire A, Leon B and the Leon A, Claire B plots. One of which goes, quote:

“Sherry is never impregnated with a G-Type embryo, so Claire doesn’t have to create a G-Virus antidote. Thus, no mention of an antidote is heard.”

In other words, Birlew preferred the version of the plot which featured incest to the point of viral impregnation. This is not meant to impugn his character; only to say that the relative importance of Ada’s plausible survival overrides other possible concerns. It’s a fascinating little artifact, and one that would be sanded out of the fanwiki model.

It’s time, I think, to try to wrap this whole mess up. So let’s start by quickly going over what we’ve covered. We start with lore. That’s important because a plot analysis FAQ wouldn’t make much sense without it. Then, we have to take into consideration how this article is an artifact of its time, given the differences between when this was written and the current landscape of Web 2.0. Part of which is that wiki culture has supplanted these kinds of recaps. At the same time as that is happening, games are losing their economic middle, sometimes referred to as B Games. It didn’t happen here, but you might link that to neoliberal policy that organizes society in order to redistribute wealth to the most wealthy, meaning everything becomes Myst, Doom, or Myst-Doom.

With all of this context in mind, we tap into the games themselves. A comment from Birlew about Resident Evil 2 takes us down a comparative reading of that game’s lore with Neuromancer, which brings us back to ideological shifts in neoliberalism from the mid-80s to the late-90s and early-aughts. That comparison reveals a couple things: a shift from informatics to pharmaceuticals and weapons development, and a different sense of how megacorporations interact with the state. This then takes us down into some of the content of one of the games, at least as represented by the authors of this document. Especially the ways that the more gameplay-oriented decisions can support thematic resonances, and how the choices that get made in the construction of this document matter.

I think it’s important to say, here, that I imagine it’s entirely possible that my reading of Resident Evil 2, and the games in general, might very well not stand up if I played them myself. Which brings us back to where I started; the original idea with including this FAQ on the list I made was to prove a point. One I thought self-evident, but realized was anything but. That point was that games criticism is a broad thing. Anyone interested in it shouldn’t confine themselves to academic disputes, displays of social capital, or the many other possible pitfalls. There’s a strange history in this field, and I wanted to acknowledge it. On the other end, I wanted to point to the fact that games criticism isn’t beholden to the products it begins with. This podcast episode has nothing to do with the Resident Evil games. It has everything to do with a particular plot analysis written by particular people over a period of time. It’s not derivative of a derivative, except in the most technical sense. Birlew & Wilde’s work stands alone, as far as I’m concerned, even and especially because of the problems I have with it. Just like you don’t need to see Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus to appreciate the importance of Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” games criticism can draw from the world to create new ways of organizing our thoughts.

[Music]

This has been a discussion of “A Detailed Analysis of the Resident Evil Videogame Series by Capcom Entertainment,” written by Dan Birlew and Thomas Wilde. Next up on Reading Games: A Personal Critical Canon is “A Review of Peter Jackson’s King Kong” by Zolani Stewart, an essay about genealogies and first person bodies. I would also like to thank Zan-zan-zawa-veia for our intro and outro music, which comes from the song “Yarn Ball.” You can find out more and support Zan at patreon.com/zzzv or on twitter @zaanaanaa. I’ve been your host Bee, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Next Time:
A Review of Peter Jackson’s King Kong
Zolani Stewart
https://medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal/a-review-of-peter-jackson-s-king-kong-the-videogame-ff2f71d940ce