Deciding I wanted some counter-programming to Monday (and the week that would inevitably follow), I started playing the video game Wolfenstein: The New Order. I’ve been vaguely aware of the Wolfenstein games — Wolfenstein 3D, in addition to being the predecessor to the seminal FPS Doom, is the game where, after fighting a whole lot of Nazis, you face down Mecha Hitler. I’d heard that the new (ish — The New Order was released in 2014) games were pretty good and I dove right in, wanting a fairly dumb shooter where you shot Nazis.
Wolfenstein: The New Order delivers.
And how.
The New Order is a game from a different time. 2014 was a long time ago in video game years. The Last of Us, BioShock Infinite, and the Tomb Raider reboot had come out the year before to great acclaim. Call of Duty was in its heyday, Fornite was years away. Destiny was brand new and ‘live service’ was mostly relegated to MMOs and mobile games. On the criticism level, no one really knew if games were art and Anita Sarkeesian’s excellent Tropes vs. Women in Video Games was just getting started in its high-profile interrogation of the latent sexism in so many games. Video games as a medium have come a long way in the last decade The New Order is very much a game of that era. There’s no desire to interrogate or elevate the genre — and this was before the culture wars over games going ‘woke’ started to take off. There’s a part of me that’s fascinated by its unassuming approach to throwing the player into levels with straightforward objectives, a straightforward plot, and a main character named Blazko who’s personality of manly manliness makes John Wick look like a character study of an assassin. This is a game where the Nazis won World War II and it’s up to you to fight them.
The unburdened simplicity of plot and character extends to the Nazis. The New Order needs a villain for its square-jawed hero to indiscriminately fight and what better villain than, as is per Wolfenstein tradition, Nazis? The game doesn’t spend any time exploring why Blazko wants to fight the Nazis, nor does it feel any need to. Nazis are evil (duh) and the due course of action in this game is to violently stop them. It’s a very simple equation in the politics of the game: Our manly man Blazko (whose manly ruminating borders on self-parody) fights Nazis because he is a hero (and manly) and Nazis are evil. Simple.
I’ll admit, the game caught me off-guard. I don’t play a lot of military shooters; a lot of the video games I play have measure of at least a nuance or protagonists who have a personal reason for their adventure. For The New Order, Nazis are a shorthand for “these are the bad guys, you know what to do.” Which in turn made me realize that sometime in the past decade, Nazis have gotten complicated. In the popular imagination they’ve gone from being cartoonish, moustache-twirling villains to, uh, having to remind people that even if they’re in khakis and polos, Nazis are bad, actually. Wolfenstein isn’t trying to make a political statement with its evil Nazis, but that the game doesn’t feel the need to expound on why the hero of the story feels the need to fight Nazis is itself a political statement. The Stripped Classicism architecture and statues of men giving the sieg heil are unquestioning markers of an evil, fascist regime. It’s simple.
I think if I’d played Wolfenstein: The New Order a few years ago the game would have been a competent, albeit unremarkable, shooter. Playing it now, it’s an odd reminder of how different things were. On a day when an advisor to the new US President is giving what very much looked like a Nazi salute during a post-inaugural rally, it’s surreal to play a video game with no aspirations of being Serious or Important with its narrative but is so unquestioningly supportive of killing Nazis. In an era where, as far as games have come, there are still battalions online who decry new games for being overly ‘woke’ it’s almost surreal to see a game that would so squarely fit into their definition of a ‘real game’ to be so casually anti-fascist. Sure enough, there are discussions on forums asking if The New Order and its sequel are ‘woke’. Because fighting Nazis, in all their racist, fascist, sexist infamy, has somehow become controversial; because the term ‘woke’ has been highjacked by the alt-right to describe the bogeyman of progress, because somehow this is where we are in 2025.
I’m enjoying Wolfenstein: The New Order. Sure, it’s a little too macho for my tastes and it makes me appreciate how far game design has come with levels and the like, but fighting Nazis is fun, and getting to brutally fight fascism in a simple, uncomplicated way is such a pleasant escape.
Also, the studio behind The New Order made a new Indiana Jones game that’s coming out on PS5 soon, so I guess there are more Nazis to punch this year. Lovely.
Essays, Not Rants! 