How Wolfenstein (I&II) subverts the monomyth - confronting the fear of living (Patreon)

I’m just going to rattle off some facts here and you can stop watching if you want to, as soon you disagree with any of them: immigration is a good thing; being a racist is worse and more offensive than being accused of being a racist; 6 million jews were killed in the holocaust; oh, and lastly, nazis are bad. Now if any of my upcoming opinions deeply offend or upset you, I’d like to give you some ammunition so that in the comments you can tell me all my opinions are invalid. Here we go: I hate Stanley Kubrick, I think he makes stupid movies for stupid people. Let’s do this.

Warnings: Discussion of the holocaust, of Nazis, of fascism, of genocide, spoilers for Wolfenstein: The New Order, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

Section 1: Introduction

Wolfenstein has always been about killin Natzees. You kill Natzees and you shoot Natzees and you stab Natzees and you blow up Natzees and you punch Natzees. So let’s go play a Wolfenstein game - Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014).

You start off flying low over the ocean to the compound of the Nazi general Deathshead. You crash down into the beach and run through the trenches shootin Natzees. You get into the compound and kill some Natzees and then you sneak around the castle and kill more Natzees.

But then, Deathshead himself appears, and captures you and your team he’s going to dissect one of you so now suddenly, you have to choose between two of your friends, Fergus and Wyatt. How can you make this choice? How can you decide whose life is worth more or less?

No no no this isn’t what Wolfenstein is about, Wolfenstein is about killin Natzees and shootin Natzees and punchin Natzees. So cut forward in time you’re in the 60s chainsawin Natzees and sneakin on Natzees and killin Natzees aw yeah. So you bust your friends out of Eisenwald Prison and you find the resistance and you go on a mission to London and the guy… you’re with… blows himself up to avenge… London… wellthatwasweirdbut now you’re breaking into this Nazi compound hell yih and you’re blowin up Natzees and shootin Natzees and killin Natzees and punchin Natzees. Turns out this guy Set Roth has been sabotaging Nazi infrastructure from behind the scenes! Great! Let’s go find this guy in… a concentration… camp… Oh god…

Butnoitsokay because Set is going to take us to this secret vault of cool tech that’s gonna help us beat the Natzees! Wahoo! You blow up this stupid Natzee bridge and go shoot some more Natzees and kill more Natzees and punch some more git DANG NATZEES. 

So you’re gonna go to a Nazi base on the moon and shoot Natzees! You’re gonna kill all the Nazis on the moon and escape and fly back and crash down into Nazi London and then get home as fast as possible cos the resistance base is under attack from those dang Natzees! Oh no! They’re killing everyone and burning down the base and they’ve taken your friends prisoner and they shoot Klaus and he’s… dying… no. This isn’t right. He’s telling Max Hass, who’s like a son to him that he’s all alone now. No. No this is sad. This isn’t right. This isn’t what Wolfenstein is about.

Or is it?

MachineGames signed the paperwork to develop a new Wolfenstein game in 2010, after having pitched to Bethesda previously and having been turned down, but then Wolfenstein being acquired by ZeniMax Media along with Id Software in 2009. What MachineGames wanted to do in their new game was take the character BJ Blazkowicz and expand his actual personality so that he has thoughts, and feelings, and a complete internal psychology.

In an interview in 2014, Jens Matthies, the game’s creative director, said:

''We always loved the idea of a prototypical action hero exterior juxtaposed with a rich and vulnerable interior psychology, what we humans express publicly is often guided by how we want others to perceive us, but when we are alone with the thoughts in our heads, we are free to be completely naked and exposed. We wanted to give the player access to the head space of B.J. Blazkowicz. As such, whenever you hear his thoughts they are utterly intimate.''

(I really encourage reading that full interview by the way: it’s about diverse voices in games and Matthies absolutely kills it.)

Blazkowicz had always previously simply been a first-person character who existed as a vehicle for the player to kill Nazis, but MachineGames made him into a whole person. In another interview, Matthies said:

"The goal is not to have a protagonist that's so neutral that you can project yourself into them; the goal is to have a protagonist that is so relatable that you become them"

If you want to learn more about this, and about Wolfenstein as a whole series, I’d suggest you watch Noah Caldwell’s A Thorough Look at Wolfenstein.

All this is to say that MachineGames created something incredible in Wolfenstein: The New Order, and that’s what I want to look at here. In the next two sections in particular, I’d like to examine how Wolfenstein New Order and New Colossus makes the player painfully aware of the very real mortality of the characters, and then how it subverts Joseph Campbell’s famous Monomyth.

In 2017, when MachineGames released Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, it was instantly apparent that there were many repeated elements from the first game, despite the sequel also telling its own separate story. I believe this perfectly parallels MachineGames’ development of the character of BJ Blazkowicz and of the Wolfenstein IP generally, and that’s why I’d also like to do a slightly aggressive reading of the games, and discuss a potential meta-narrative subtext.

I’d also like to talk about the reception of The New Colossus, why being offended by a game that makes Nazis the bad guys is not a good look, and how the political climate in America shifted between 2014 and 2017 so that the second game was received with such a different and bizarrely hateful attitude.

After that (in the second video) I will be looking at gut-punch storytelling in games: what it is; why it is so prevalent in games; how games use it well or poorly; how some games manage to do without it; and lastly, making a case for why Wolfenstein is the absolute best at it.

I don’t usually like to lay out my essays in the introduction like this, but I am producing two videos in this one essay, and I’m going to be covering a lot, so honestly I’ve written this introduction more for myself to stop my head from falling off than for you. Isn’t that selfish of me? What a shame. Unsubscribed and blocked.

Section 2: Lebensgefahr

In a video examining the philosophy of Antifa, Philosophy Tube host Olly Thorn pointed out that Anti-Fascism is a philosophy or a political position, and not a full-time job. I was actually described as an “Antifa Kiddie” by Sargon of Akkad once, so I can confirm this. In fact, fighting against fascism full-time in a fascist-ruled world, would be an exhausting, gruelling, nightmare, and MachineGames’ Wolfenstein games are very much aware of that. In fact, these games make use of innovative mechanics, clever storytelling, and actually the basic human condition, to make you very much aware of that.

The primary way that Wolfenstein makes this apparent is its attitude towards death. Death is really ever-present in Wolfenstein. It’s like that friend you had over for dinner and even though you’ve said five times now that you need to get an early night he just won’t leave.

The New Order starts with a suicide mission flying low over the ocean. The danger and threat of the situation is immediately apparent. People are dying left right and centre and then you get to the compound and you have to make a literal life or death decision. Here the game splits into two timelines. In one, you will experience certain scenes and dialogue with Fergus, in the other, Wyatt.

However, it isn’t the presence of the person you saved that is really tangible here - it’s the absence of the dead. If you’ve played through both timelines every scene with whoever you chose to spare is just, kind of, spooky. There’s a sort of ghost in the scene, the person you didn’t save. Their absence is itself a presence. 

When I first played The New Order I chose to save Fergus, and then I got to a scene near the middle of the game in which Fergus accuses Blazkowicz of making the wrong decision. He says he wishes it had been him. He wishes I had saved Wyatt instead. I found this really powerful, because I already felt bad about choosing to let Wyatt die, so I literally stopped the game and started over.

This time I chose to save Wyatt, and when I reached the same point in the story, I feared for the worst, and my fear was realised: Wyatt blamed Blazkowicz for choosing him as well. Wyatt thinks he made the wrong decision too. Wyatt, just like Fergus did, feels such powerful survivor’s guilt that he yells at Blazkowicz, shoves him away and slams the door in his face.

And then, as the game changed from cutscene to first-person perspective and I saw through Blazkowicz’ eyes, I read the sign on Wyatt’s door. It said, “Betreten ist verboten. Lebensgefahr.” which means “Entry forbidden. Danger of Death”. The Lebensgefahr here was not a threat to your life, as BJ Blazkowicz, but the sense of mortality that hangs over Wyatt and over the whole game.

I’ve talked about the dog scene from The New Colossus in an essay before, but what’s important to note is that like the dog scene, the Fergus or Wyatt choice does not affect the plot of the game, but rather the experience of the game for the player. 

In The New Order, the ocean could be read as a metaphor for a blissful death. After escaping Deathshead’s compound Blazkowicz drifts out to sea, and the title sequence plays. In a way, he has died. The war is lost. Even when Wyatt first sees him again after 14 years he says “Gosh almighty I thought I was a goner and here you are back from the dead to save us all”

Blazkowicz’s attitude to death from the start is the classic macho fearless stoicism. He doesn’t care about his own life - he’s committed to dying already - he just wants to take as many Nazis with him as possible. 

This attitude is pretty common among the resistance fighters and must intensify Wyatt’s survivor’s guilt. They are all committed to dying.

In fact, when they attack London, Bobby Bram blows himself up, telling Blazkowicz “You make this count, all right?”

Relating this back to earlier - this is because their fight against fascism is exhausting and gruelling and awful, and all they can eventually do is tap out and hope that someone else completes the journey for them.

When Blazkowicz is about to go up to face Deathshead at the end of the game, Anya tells him that she believes there is still a good place in the world where people can be happy, and he replies that he agrees, “but not for you or me”. This means that he views their struggle as necessarily ending in death, and that only one day after many more have died, could there be a safe happy place for people to live.

After this, Blazkowicz goes up to face Deathshead who reveals that he still has the brain of Fergus, or Wyatt, that he has preserved all this time. He inserts it into a killing machine and Blazkowicz is forced to kill his friend in order to save himself and defeat Deathshead.

Confronting Fergus there, at the end, he says “Blazkowicz. A damn nightmare this. Trapped in this damn machine. Got no control of my actions”

This is basically, how Blazkowicz feels too, and ties back, again, to my essay on Shadow of the Colossus and the Powerlessness of Violence. BJ Blazkowicz is, by being brought to this fascist Nazi future, trapped in a violence machine, and only the way out is the endless dark depths, like the ocean, of death.

That’s why, after being wounded in battle against Deathshead, with the Nuclear cannon pointed at the compound, Blazkowicz gives his friends the all clear to fire, and kill him. And then, straight after, as the credits roll, we are looking through the water, at pictures of the dead.

Section 3: The Monomyth

In media analysis people often talk about the “hero’s journey”, an 8 part formula that supposedly underpins most stories that feature a hero going on a journey or adventure. In this formula a character is (step 1) in their familiar environment but (step 2) they want something. Therefore they (step 3) go somewhere new and (step 4) then have to adjust to their new surroundings. They (step 5) get what they want but, uh-oh (step 6) it comes at a great price. In step 7 and 8 they return home, but they have been changed by the journey.

At the end of the journey the change that the hero has gone through typically constitutes embracing their own mortality and the absurdity of life. In this way it has been called a metaphor for Friedrich Nietzsche’s Life affirmation in which someone reacts to the unpredictable nature of the universe by embracing it and conquers their fear of death. 

Joseph Campbell’s original “hero’s journey” or “monomyth” actually had 17 steps, but that’s just for nerds, so here I’d like to examine Wolfenstein New Order and New Colossus using the 8 step Hero’s Journey, making occasional references to the 17 step Monomyth when we want to get really specific. 

So here goes. Wolfenstein, The New Order: Blazkowicz is (step 1) fighting the war but he wants (step 2) to win the war, or at least defeat Deathshead. He falls into a coma and wakes up (step 3) in 1960s Nazi-ruled Europe, and goes to find his people, the resistance (step 4). Upon discovering Set, they find out about secret tech (step 5) that could let them win the war and even gain a Nazi nuclear sub, but then the base is attacked (step 6) and so Blazkowicz returns (step 7) to Deathshead’s compound but (step 8) now, as opposed to how we found him, he is a whole person, with friends, and a lover, and a fighting chance at winning the war. Now, he might have something to live for. Um… but then he dies.

Until they came back to make a sequel, the ending of The New Order was that: Blazkowicz defeats Deathshead and is a whole person with something to live for now, but then he dies. I’d like to just stick a pin in that, for a minute, if that’s okay, and return to it shortly.

It’s also worth noting here that in the Monomyth, the 5th step is “the belly of the whale” in which the protagonist is suddenly in the deepest possible part of the new unfamiliar world. In The New Order this step is when Blazkowicz has to go to Nazi Berlin, which is kind of a perfect example of the belly of the whale. There’s also a step, step 7, called “meeting the goddess”, where the protagonist receives helpful gifts from a supernatural force, often a goddess. I just think it’s funny to note that the “goddess” in Wolfenstein is Set, the grouchy old scientist.

Now, The New Colossus: At the start of the New Colossus Blazkowicz is (step 1) among his friends on the stolen U-Boat but (step 2) they want to free America. So he (step 3) travels to America, and (step 4) recruits more people to the resistance. He gains the advantage over the Nazis (step 5), but in the process, (step 6) he is literally killed and brought back to life. Like, Engels cuts his head all the way off. Finally, he returns to kill Engels (step 7) but now he’s healthy and somewhat happy and has a future to look forward to and he’s started a revolution to free America (step 8).

Now here it’s worth noting that in the Monomyth there is a step (step 10) that expects Death and Rebirth, usually metaphorically. So usually the hero loses something very important and learns to live without it. In The New Colossus however, Blazkowicz literally, literally, literally dies and comes back to life.

So now let me talk about the ending of the Monomyth. In the last two steps of the Monomyth, the protagonist learns to conquer their fear of death, and because they have done that, they are the master of two worlds, the spiritual and the physical, and they can live peacefully. 

If you’re already thinking about how this applies to Wolfenstein, good job, you can now go start your own YouTube channel I have nothing left to teach you. But you might have noticed that this doesn’t really apply to our protagonist. You see, somewhere before the start of the story, Blazkowicz has already conquered his fear of death.

Both of the Wolfenstein games therefore subvert the monomyth, by making the protagonist confront and conquer not his fear of death, but his fear of living. In The New Order he meets and falls in love with Anya, and in The New Colossus she is pregnant, and he talks very explicitly in his internal monologue about his fear of her being unprovided for after he dies, but you could say, his total acceptance of his death shows that his real fear, is living.

This is, in a clever way, just as Nietzschean as the original monomyth and the conquering of the fear of death. After all, Nietzsche saw the unpredictability and absurdity of life as the reason for the fear of death anyway. 

In this way, we can view the “two worlds” that the Monomyth talks about - the physical and spiritual worlds - as Blazkowicz’s life killin Natzees, and his life as a whole person,. If we do this, the Hero’s Journey could be viewed another way:
Step 1: Blazkowicz is killin Natzees. Step 2: but he wants to kill ALL the Natzees. Step 3: He winds up in the 60s where he meets Anya. Step 4: He falls in love with Anya. Step 5: He can defeat the Nazis but Step 6: They have taken Anya. Step 7: He goes back to Deathshead’s Compound. Step 8: He has changed in that he now wants to live, but as we said before, he then (until it is revisited in the sequel) dies.

So why does The New Order end like this? 

Well, there’s an argument that it’s just a tragic ending, or perhaps that this is The New Order’s stance on fighting fascism - that the ultimate sacrifice is a necessary part of it. Or, that it’s simply the natural conclusion to the journey of someone who wants to die.

However, I think it has more to do with Blazkowicz as a character, and what Machine Games are doing with that character, and with the Wolfenstein franchise in a wider sense.

I think you can start to see this if you look at it from the point of view of the developer making a game that could either have a sequel, or be a standalone. They need an ending that lets the character grow and find reasons to live only if the audience of the game enjoyed their version of Wolfenstein enough to want more. 

After telling Anya they have no place in this world, BJ has a flashback in the elevator to Fergus being dissected. The first time, in the game, the camera cut away when this happened, but now, in the flashback, we see everything, so the need to confront not only Deathshead but ourselves for the decision to sacrifice our friend is a fresh pain.

In another interview, Matthies said “Our philosophy when we build the narrative is always to reveal whatever needs to be revealed to the protagonist and the player at the same time”, which makes it strange that this information is revealed at different times to the protagonist and player. This is done very deliberately so that closure over Deathshead’s murder of Fergus (or Wyatt) is reinforced as the goal.

Then, Blazkowicz reaches the top and has to confront it literally, fighting the robot that Fergus is trapped inside and then retrieving his brain and killing him. He then has to fight Deathshead himself and defeat him. Logically, this draws his loop to a close. He is back to where he was at the start, changed by the journey he has been on.

So, in terms of the Hero’s journey, why does Blazkowicz die at the end despite learning to have something to live for? What is the ending of The New Order? 

The hero is in familiar surroundings but they want something. They travel to a new place and have to adapt. They get what they want at a great price, and return to where they started, having changed.

Where does the ending fit into that and what is it?

I think, the ending to The New Order, is a question mark on the end of the Hero’s Journey.

The hero returns to where they started. Having changed?

Section 4: Passing the torch

The team who created New Order and New Colossus clearly love Wolfenstein. MachineGames pitched for the project twice, and on top of the continuation of some characters from older games, there are a couple of little nods to old Wolfenstein. In New Order there’s a little secret passageway in Deathshead’s compound, and the final boss battle is against a Nazi in a big robot suit, kind of what Wolfenstein is most famous for, and we’ve been promised an appearance by mecha-Hitler in Wolfenstein III (which is actually a terrible idea but I don’t have time to get into why and I have confidence in machineGames aaaaaaaaa--)

I bring this up, because I think there’s a strong case for the presence of a meta-narrative in New Order and New Colossus. That is to say, I haven’t seen it discussed and I’m not really confident it was intentional, so this is in part what I’ll call an “aggressive reading”, which is where you disregard authorial intent to put forth a reading of a piece of media despite it. This will be that only in part because in my opinion MachineGames were essentially projecting their experience into the game to some degree.

When MachineGames secured the Wolfenstein project, as discussed previously they decided to give the character of Blazkowicz an interior psychology that was vulnerable and intimate. The sad thing about the game industry is that decision was, essentially, a bit of a gamble. It shouldn’t be a gamble to try to create well-rounded characters, but hey-ho, it was. 

Therefore, when they created New Order, they were creating a story about a character who has always before been a mindless Nazi-killing machine, but now was going to have real emotions and character. Because of that, the story, in which the character himself meets a woman and falls in love and becomes more sensitive and as I’ve already said, conquers his fear of living - well, that’s a meta-narrative.

At the start of New Order, Blazkowicz has a dream of a family cookout in the suburbs: two kids, a wife, him relaxing in a loud shirt on a deck chair. This feels like a really deliberate contrast to a scene in an earlier game by a different developer where Blazkowicz’ ideal holiday is just: killing more Nazis. Here we get to see right away, BJ Blazkowicz wants to be a person: he wants to be a real boy.

After the assault on Deathshead’s compound, Blazkowicz slips into a coma, which he stays in for 14 years. He narrates how he can feel time slipping past him. I read this as a statement: That Wolfenstein is out of date. There were other ways MachineGames could have sold their premise - Nazi world in the 1960s - but they chose to sit the player down with Blazkowicz as the world passes him by.

Blazkowicz only awakes from his coma to go on a killing spree. In the scene where this happens, his washed out, greyish vision is brought full colour with every act of violence he witnesses. It is as if the game is telling us the only language Blazkowicz speaks is violence. He only gets up and properly returns when he gets his chance to stab a Nazi with some cutlery, escape the asylum and rescue Anya.

I’ll say it outright: this is patently ridiculous. Nobody is getting up from a 14 year coma and murdering 30 Nazis. But we’ll get back to that.

Next, Blazkowicz starts to bond with Anya. He speaks Polish, he meets her family, they do some more bonding on the train to Berlin.

Late in the game, near the end, Blazkowicz has another vision of his suburban life, but this time with Anya. This story of Blazkowicz coming to accept wanting a life with this woman could also, I think, be read as Wolfenstein as a franchise accepting its new incarnation - its new life - as a story with a real rounded character at its center: a franchise that could start to care.

This is why I say that New Order ends by asking “Having changed?”

The ending in which Blazkowicz presumably dies doesn’t necessarily proclude the possibility of a sequel - I mean after all, they did make a sequel. It does however, neatly wrap up MachineGames’ attempt at making a Wolfenstein game, if nobody wanted it.

If nobody had liked the new Blazkowicz, and nobody had bought it, and there hadn’t been the money for a sequel, then MachineGames would have been able to say we tried our best, we made something great, shrug and move on.

In fact, the attitude to death throughout the first game almost feels like a reflection of this attitude. Blazkowicz is going to try his best, take as many Nazis with him as possible, and if he dies, then that’s it and that’s okay - he did his best. 

Coming back to the metaphor of the ocean as allegory for a blissful abyss, a peaceful death: this too, works, maybe works a little better, in relation to the game itself. If nobody likes it, it will simply slip away into the ocean of content that is made and forgotten, but in some way, it will have made the world a better place anyway.

At the end of New Order, Blazkowicz watches from the window of Deathshead’s compound as Anya, carrying a lantern, helps the prisoners escape. He is fatally wounded and resigns himself to a peaceful death. He recites the poem that appears at the base of the statue of Liberty, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

And then, he orders his friends to fire at the compound. And that’s it, IF nobody likes it.

But people liked it. Actually, people loved it! So, MachineGames had to come back and make a sequel, which makes this part of the meta-narrative quite… interesting.

The plots of New Order and New Colossus are noticeably similar: so similar, in fact that the differences between them are even more noticeable.

At the start of New Colossus, Blazkowicz is also extremely badly wounded and has been in a coma for a long time. Not 14 years this time, just several months. Can he jump up and kill a Nazi with a fork? You know he… can’t? 

The difference here - Blazkowicz is actually in a wheelchair - is so striking, it feels like a direct message from the developer: Hey, that bit from the last game, that was too much. These games are silly, and that’s all good, but that was too much. We want to correct some things in this game.

From there, if you read New Colossus as setting out to correct some things from New Order, you get a pretty interesting picture. In New Colossus, Blazkowicz is captured and sentenced to death, but then he bursts out of his restraints and kills all the Nazis in the court building and finds his way into a side-room where he finds his mother, who is long dead, which is when you realise that he is dreaming. He’s fantasizing. He can’t escape.

And that’s when he is sentenced to death, and we as the player have to sit through the first-person perspective scene in which he is beheaded by General Engels. We watch her take his head and drop it 60 feet into a pit of fire, and we know that we’ve completely lost.

Of course though, this is Wolfenstein, so we get to do some silly, fun stuff to get around that. Instead of that being the end, the footage rewinds and it is revealed that Set and the others piloted a drone to catch his head and take it back to their base where they attach it to the body of a Nazi supersoldier clone they stole. Perfect. Cheesy. Nonsense. Beautiful.

And at the heart of it all? Don’t get captured by Nazis, you won’t break out of your restraints and kill them all, you will just be executed.

At the end of the game even, Blazkowicz faces the General who has been the antagonist all along, but this time, rather than a big fight on the top of a castle, he simply sneaks into the studio where Engels is being interviewed and kills her. It’s simple, it’s effective, and it perfectly utilises the unique element of surprise that you could only have if your enemy had personally executed you and had no idea you were still alive.

Throughout New Colossus this message is revised. In the New Order it was die trying your best. In the sequel, it’s live, to try your best another day. Ultimately, The New Colossus ends up correcting the message of New Order into one that says to embrace life and keep living.

This is because the arc of New Order, as I said before, was about conquering that fear of living, but at the same time, accidentally or deliberately, it’s also just good practical advice for fighting fascism. Live so that you can keep fighting.

But why would the creators of a video game want to give advice on how to fight fascism? It’s not like there’s any fascism going on in the world today. Is there?

Section 5: Since when was killing Nazis political?

The Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, usually just called the holocaust memorial, is one of my favourite pieces of art, because the physical construction of the memorial is an astonishingly clever execution of physical metaphor. The memorial comprises concrete blocks rising out of a stone floor, and the metaphor, although not a direct allegory for one thing in particular, creates an analogous feeling that represents many different feelings relevant to remembrance of the holocaust.

The concrete blocks vary in size, generally smaller at the outside and taller in the middle. The blocks at the center are so tall that you feel trapped, pressed in between these uncaring, rigid, cold things. Once you have been through the center of the memorial and felt that unease, and you return to the outside - the start - of the sculpture, it might strike you that the blocks furthest out from the center don’t sit within the lot that the memorial occupies. They start sooner than you realise, and they start so small and low to the ground, that you could just walk straight over them and never notice they were there.

I knew some of this before I first visited the memorial. What I didn’t know, was that as you walk into the sculpture, the floor itself also changes in height, making the relative heights of the concrete obelisks change too, and with them the impact of that feeling of claustrophobia. That too, happens in such a way that you don’t realise at first. After all, it’s hard to tell when the ground underneath your feet is the thing changing your perspective.

Wolfenstein: The New Order was released in 2014. In 2014, killing Nazis was a very specific cliche in video games. In 2014, killing Nazis was exactly the kind of thing that people who didn’t like video games would point to to say that they aren’t a legitimate art form. In 2014, Obama was president, liberalism was in full swing, and ebola was one of the top ten political stories of the year according to The Hill. 

In 2014, gamergate was just beginning.

In 2014, I vaguely knew my brother thought voting Labour was a good thing, I had just started university, and I didn’t know what all these feminists were getting so upset for all the time. I felt very threatened by the people who were saying that the things I liked had big problems with them, especially when it kept getting more attention, especially when it didn’t subside, and on some level, especially because I knew they were right, but I felt embarrassed by being called out: by them asking me to change.

As it turned out, a lot of other people, who also liked the things I liked, also felt just how I felt - and that was gamergate. Young white men were moving to protect the things they liked in 2014 and into 2015 and suddenly all these anti-feminists were getting popular on YouTube. Now I personally never got into watching anti-feminist YouTubers. I liked to laugh at feminists on Tumblr who I thought were being ridiculous, but watching someone else do it just made me think they were a bit sad and lame. Now I’m thinking about it, that probably should have been some sort of clue…

In 2015 though, I increasingly saw the people who were trying to stop feminists from ruining things also talk about how diversity was going to ruin things too, and I started to think you know, these guys are like, racists. 

I started to see friends I’d gone to school with share around anti-immigrant media and kinda shitty hot takes that amounted to racism dressed up as a “spicy meme”. I started to think, you know, it’s the conservatives who cut your sister’s job as a nurse dude, not the muslims. By 2016 I would see posts on Facebook and think Romanian immigrants aren’t the reason you can’t find a job, there was a huge recession not that long ago and the people in charge are doing everything to help big corporations instead of making more jobs.

I can see that there were two political forces at play here, but I’m telling this from my point of view because it felt very connected at the time, and I hope my experience translates for anyone watching who opposes racism, and hates Nazis, but also thinks feminists are just making a big fuss over nothing.

In 2016, after losing some votes to UKIP in the previous year’s general election, the conservatives made a conscious effort to appeal more to far-right voters, and then shortly after, held a referendum on whether we should stay a part of the EU or whether we should beat our economy with a large stick until we have to sell our country to Google just to get out of the debt incurred from leaving the most profitable market we’ve ever been in. Following the Brexit vote, other countries started looking into having similar referendums, fueled by similar fear-mongering about immigration that took place here. 

Over in America, liberalism had left lots of poor people out in the cold and was starting to squeeze the middle class too. So naturally, they needed a candidate who believed in actually investing in the people, in improving healthcare and creating jobs, who gave two shits about what ordinary people wanted. For some reason though, the Democrats decided to endorse Hillary Clinton.

Online, I saw a lot more people shifting to the right, becoming less trusting of immigrants and even refugees. I saw the gamergaters who I’d seen laughing at feminists before now laughing at Hillary, peddling rhetoric from Trump’s people and occasionally even saying “Make America Great Again”. Offline however, I saw every expectation that Hillary would win. I expected it myself. When Hillary lost, however, retroactively everything I’d been seeing came into sharp focus.

Trump’s voters divide roughly into thirds. One of those thirds have household incomes below the median average for the US, which would presumably make them the “white working class” that keeps getting blamed for his victory. Another third of his voters have household incomes above $100,000 dollars though, which makes that pretty suspect to me. I personally feel like gamergaters contributed quite a lot though, which is interesting.

In his book, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an essay calling Trump “America’s first white president”. In short what he said is that while Clinton offered nothing that people were generally interested in, Trump was able to appeal to the identity of whiteness. In the absence of anything meaningful from the other side, people found racism to be better than nothing.

The thing that the middle class young white gamers who make up gamergate, and the working class white people blamed for Trump’s victory have in common in my opinion is a misplaced blame for bad circumstances. I’ve seen lots of working class and lower middle class white people feeling hard done by because they can’t get a job or afford to get on the property ladder or save up for the things they want, but rather than blaming shithead conservative politicians who have been making such expertly wrong decisions you’d think they were actually trying to burn the country to the ground, they’ve started blaming foreigners. I’ve seen lots of gamergaters feeling shunned and attacked by society, feeling like games aren’t treated as legitimate and meaningful, but rather than blaming games journalists who are giving 10/10 ratings for games with new shiny gun mechanics, they’ve been attacking the people who want to hold games up to the same standard as other media.

This brings us around to 2017, and the release of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. I actually can’t count the number of reviews I’ve seen now that claim that A) they liked the first game B) they don’t like this game, and C) it’s because of the SJWs. As I’ve said in the previous section, New Colossus is very similar to New Order, except that it builds off the ideas from before in more interesting ways and if anything, just explores its characters more.

I’ve been talking about the period between 2014 and 2017 from my perspective, because while the right wing generally rose in that period all across the world, I became more left wing. In 2014 I knew my brother was voting labour, and I didn’t get what all the feminists were on about, but by 2017 I was a socialist and a feminist, not to mention much more entrenched in my anti-racist and anti-fascist beliefs. I wanted to point out that counterculture of becoming more left-wing because although the New Colossus is similar to the New Order, MachineGames consciously added more left-wing content in this game. I’m talking particularly about Grace, the black feminist resistance leader, and Horton, the Anarchist-Marxist from the New Orleans ghetto. 

These characters were clearly written in response to the rising right-wing nonsense, but from where I’m standing, their inclusion shouldn’t be enough to deeply offend players. Remember earlier, when I quoted Jens Matthies saying “The goal is not to have a protagonist that's so neutral that you can project yourself into them; the goal is to have a protagonist that is so relatable that you become them"? Well, In the game, Blazkowicz is initially skeptical of Grace’s anti-racism, and her feminism, and he outright yells at Horton accusing him of being a naval-gazer who won’t get his hands dirty. But if the player related to the protagonist in the way that Matthies hopes, they’d do what Blazkowicz does, and basically grow up and get over it.

The issue here, as far as I can tell, isn’t the differences between the game and its predecessor, the issue is where these players are coming at the game from. If they’re starting from a more right wing place than they were before, the game is going to seem much more radical.

It is really important to note that New Colossus actually messed up on the issue of class. In the game there are representations of the KKK which make them out to be stupid and incompetent, which to be clear - I am cool with representing racists as incompetent idiots. 

The problem starts to become apparent when you contrast the Klansmen to the Nazis. In reality, the Nazis were stupid and badly organised and constantly in-fighting. In reality, the Nazis often rode into battle on horses because they neither had enough equipment nor utilised it well. In reality, some Klansmen were middle or upper class educated men - most notably of course: the father of the current President of the United States. In reality both posed a genuine and serious threat to the lives of racial minorities. A really key difference between these two groups of bigots is that the Nazis were in charge of a nation, while the Klan have only ever been essentially a cult.

A nation has the power to create propaganda and create propaganda the Nazis surely did. In his video about propaganda Dan Olson points out that the idea that we have of the Nazis is the one they wanted us to have of them, and my problem with New Colossus is that it essentially buys into that idea of the Nazis as cruel, cold, and inhumane, but also powerful, intelligent and efficient.

So why does it matter? New Colossus isn’t the wokest thing in the world it doesn’t avoid classism - it’s still pretty good, right? Well, White supremacists have quite a history of positioning racial minorities as the opponents of the white working class. Their conspiracy theory, white genocide, is basically that Jewish elites are manipulating policy and economics to bring in immigrants who will work for less money than the white working class, depressing wages, kicking them out of their jobs and then replacing them.

Now, naturally, that sounds pretty nuts, but to get people to buy into it, they strip away the parts they know people won’t accept until they reach a version of it that people can start with and build it up from there. 

You don’t believe in the secret conspiracy of jews? Okay well globalists are manipulating the economy. You don’t buy that? Okay well nobody is manipulating it immigrants are choosing to ruin our economy themselves. You don’t believe me? Well you’ll agree immigrants are making things worse. You don’t? Well at least you’ll agree things are pretty tough for working class joes like you and me.

In this strategy the cornerstone of agreement is appeal to the white working class, so, when you’re making a game in which the bad guys are white supremacists, and you’re trying to be as inclusive and diverse as possible, and you’re releasing it in 2017 after the election of an openly racist President whose victory has been blamed on the white working class by practically everyone on the left, cutting the jokes at the expense of those dumb southern hicks in favour of a more nuanced take might have been in everyone’s best interest.

And if you want a more nuanced take on the white working class in America, I strongly recommend reading White Trash: The 400 year untold history of class in America by Nancy Isenberg. I’ve been reading it and I’m basing some things on it that I’m going to talk about in my Bloodborne essay, and it’s honestly fantastic. If you want to get a really detailed understanding of who has been oppressing the white working class for centuries (spoiler: it’s the white upper class) then I really can’t suggest you read this strongly enough.

What New Colossus does do well though, is shift from being a game where the player kills Natzees and shoots Natzees and punches Natzees to being a more practical approach to How to Defeat Fascism. 

In New Order, the objective is to take as many Nazis with you as possible before you get taken out, and it ends with a big fight against a Nazi in a mecha-suit. In New Colossus however, the objective is to incite revolution against the fascist state, to reclaim America, and it ends with Blazkowicz and pals commandeering a television station so they can make a speech to the nation and thereby liberate them. I think that kicks ass.

Slavoj Zizek has talked about “state-condoned rebellion”, essentially things that society is comfortable with you saying even though it goes against popular opinion, because it still flatters them in another way. I’d say, Kurt Vonnegut, even though I love his writing, takes part in this, being one of the edgy American writers who liked to point out that George Washington owned slaves. This fact doesn’t tear down American democracy, because part of the American mythos is that people in the past were of-their-times and theories of liberty from historical figures were hypocritical and therefore theories about treating everyone equally are just a bit too idealistic. What doesn’t sit comfortably with the American mythos is pointing out the closeted white nationalism of republicans in recent decades, and the open white nationalism of the current administration.

It didn’t sit right with a lot of Americans when Bethesda’s marketing team tweeted “Make America Nazi-free Again”.

A lot of gamers who had become Trump supporters got angry about this tweet, despite the fact that the objective of the game is to literally… make America Nazi-free again. Let me be clear about this: you could read that tweet as being in line with Trump’s objective to make America great. You could see being Nazi-free and being great as the same. You could do that, if you didn’t know what Trump really about, but we all do.

We know that Nazis marched in the streets of America in 2017. If you don’t know that, please watch this video.

A few years ago, when I was decidedly not a feminist, a friend sent me something that said “if someone is pointing out the behaviour of men who are behaving shittily and that offends you as a man, you need to think about why” and naturally enough being a radical shithead at the time I got offended by it. I was wrong. I was associating those bad behaviours with being a man, and I shouldn’t have been, because ultimately that’s a kind of self-hatred. If those behaviours were part of being a man, then I’d want to stop being a man. They aren’t, I can’t. But you can stop supporting Trump.

So now I can say this: if someone says that Nazis are bad, and that offends you as a Trump supporter you need to think about why.

To be clear, the primary criticisms of New Colossus weren’t for having bad stereotypes of the white working class or of people from the South - they weren’t even for having what I’m sure a lot of players think of as a less fun ending. I’ve seen those criticisms, but they are never the main thrust, the real problem people have with the game. The main issues people have with New Colossus are the same as they have with any other game that they think the “SJWs got to”. It’s that the game contains a black woman who speaks her mind and is the leader of a group, it’s that the game has “unnecessary diversity” and is part of the “progressive agenda”. 

It’s telling that a lot of these reviews call New Colossus “part of a trend of SJW games”, because that’s exactly it - as soon as these guys have labelled a game as being part of this trend they try their hardest to find any reason to hate it. They don’t hate the New Order though, even though at its core it isn’t that different, because they remember it from a time before they became radicalised.  After all, it’s hard to tell when the ground underneath your feet is the thing changing your perspective.

Section 6: Mother of Exiles

"Just remember my boy. It will end better than it began."

―Zofia Blazkowicz comforting her son

In this section I’m going to wrap up my deep-dive analysis of Wolfenstein, before I go on to write seven more sections on the prevalence of gut-punch storytelling and why I think Wolfenstein does it better than any other game. Before we go though, I’d like to wrap up what I’ve been discussing here.

Philosophy Tube has a great video called Why The Left Will Win. In it, he talks about communities of vulnerability and communities of strength, as discussed by Stacy Clifford-Simplican. Communities of strength are united, or attempt to be united by, common strength or an identity relying on power, and because they rely on strength and power they have to remain powerful and hide their shame or they’ll fall apart. Communities of vulnerability are united by common needs or vulnerability. Because communities of vulnerability have nothing to lose, because they come together to solve a problem, they’re inherently stronger, and inherently harder to stop.

Nazis have been reaching out to people in communities of vulnerability - oppressed working class people, even gamers who feel under attack from feminism - and trying to co-opt that community, and bring people into a community of strength. They lose people along the way as those people realise they’re Nazis, or need the community of vulnerability more, or just basically don’t want to be in a community that spends all its energy all the time on attacking people.

Wolfenstein shows this really well. In the New Order, all the members of the resistance need to get rid of the Nazis personally to survive or have a loved one who does. In New Colossus, they are able to reach out to the rest of the country and extend their community of vulnerability to them, because practically everyone is miserable under fascism.

Blazkowicz actually says in the trailer for Wolfenstein: Youngblood, “It’s not about the pain you can deal; it’s about how much you can take”. This line, although obviously produced to be a cool grim line for a game trailer, actually reflects a community of vulnerability and its advantage over a community of strength pretty well. Communities of strength have absolutely zero resilience.

As I said earlier, New Colossus is about how to actually overthrow fascism, which is why the story proper ends with the resistance taking over the TV network - rather than dying in a big fight with a mecha-villain. Blazkowicz takes the safest, most sensible opportunity to get the drop on Engels and kill that fucker dead.

After the story proper you get to play a series of missions taking out Nazi commandants in different maps you played earlier, progressively liberating America as you do so. At the end of the extended missions, there is a totally new map in New York that you’ve never seen before. In this level you have to fight various Nazi robots in almost pitch darkness until you can find your way out of this underground maze to a pier where your target is standing alone, guarded by one last big robot. Killing him doesn’t trigger a second credits roll or a new scene, it just leaves you there on the shore, looking across the remains of Liberty Island, and the huge torch still somehow held above the waves. 

Where New Order ended with Blazkowicz reciting the poem The New Colossus, Wolfenstein II ends with him actually looking out across the sea AT the New Colossus, the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles. Where New Order used the ocean as a metaphor for blissfully passing away, drifting out to sea, and out to oblivion, New Colossus ends with America won back from tyranny, and you, as Blazkowicz, looking out across the sea at hope on the horizon.