“No One is Ever Ready for Something Like This.” – On the Dialectic of the Holocaust in First-Person Shooters as Exemplified by Wolfenstein: The New Order
-
Eugen Pfister
and
Felix Zimmermann
Abstract
For almost three decades, the depiction of the Holocaust was considered taboo in digital games. While World War II became a popular historicizing setting for digital games, the crimes of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in particular remained conspicuously absent. In this article we show that discussions about the fundamental suitability of specific media or media forms for dealing responsibly with the memory of the Nazi regime’s crimes have already taken place several times and that similar arguments can now be applied to the digital game. With this in mind, we pursue the question of whether only so-called serious games are suitable for this purpose, or whether, on the contrary, mainstream blockbuster games – here specifically the first-person shooter Wolfenstein: The New Order – can find ways to maintain the memory of the Holocaust without trivializing it. We approach this question by analyzing chapter 8 of Wolfenstein: The New Order, in which protagonist William “B.J.” Blazkowicz allows himself to be deported to a Nazi concentration camp. We discuss this camp scene dialectically, on the one hand, as an encouragement to rethink the first-person shooter and, on the other hand, as a reproduction of a superficial iconography of the Holocaust.
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Videogames and History
- “How Do We Play this Thing?”: The State of Historical Research on Videogames
- Building a Video Game Collection: Lessons Learned from The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games
- Playful Curation: A Case Study of Doki-Doki Station Museum’s Role in Preserving Digital Game History in Indonesia
- Toward a Foucauldian Genealogy of Video Game (Pre)history
- “No One is Ever Ready for Something Like This.” – On the Dialectic of the Holocaust in First-Person Shooters as Exemplified by Wolfenstein: The New Order
- Reprogramming the History of Video Games: A Historian’s Approach to Video Games and Their History
- Additional Article
- Hear, Here: Oral History, Gentrification, and Memory Politics
- Public History in...
- Troubling Pasts: Teaching Public History in Northern Ireland
- Review Article
- Crowdsourced COVID-19 Collections: A Brief Overview
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Videogames and History
- “How Do We Play this Thing?”: The State of Historical Research on Videogames
- Building a Video Game Collection: Lessons Learned from The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games
- Playful Curation: A Case Study of Doki-Doki Station Museum’s Role in Preserving Digital Game History in Indonesia
- Toward a Foucauldian Genealogy of Video Game (Pre)history
- “No One is Ever Ready for Something Like This.” – On the Dialectic of the Holocaust in First-Person Shooters as Exemplified by Wolfenstein: The New Order
- Reprogramming the History of Video Games: A Historian’s Approach to Video Games and Their History
- Additional Article
- Hear, Here: Oral History, Gentrification, and Memory Politics
- Public History in...
- Troubling Pasts: Teaching Public History in Northern Ireland
- Review Article
- Crowdsourced COVID-19 Collections: A Brief Overview
