"Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, deals explicitly with the theme ofresistance. Like Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle,” it imagines an alternative reality in which Hitler has won the war and invaded the United States. Jack-booted German officers and hood-wearing Klansmen patrol the streets of America by day, and the game goes out of its way to portray them not as mere pop-up targets for the trigger-happy but as cruel, morally decrepit deviants who must be stopped because of what they stand for. This gives Wolfenstein II a resonance with the contemporary political landscape that its creators couldn’t have imagined when they began development. The recent rise of nationalism in Europe and North America has emboldened the far right to such an extent that conservative pizza-makers feel the need to publicly demand that Fascists stop buying their products. Thanks to the movement’s successful co-opting of young, disenfranchised men—a big video-game demographic—the use of Nazis as cannon fodder feels, ludicrously, somehow transgressive and confrontational...
The game’s tagline, “Make America Nazi-Free Again,” makes clear its developers’ feelings on Donald Trump. (Curiously, Trump’s brother Robert serves on the board of directors at ZeniMax, Wolfenstein II’s publisher.) The game itself apparently received some last-minute updates before it was released, including a newspaper interview with a “dapper young KKK leader,” another Spencer reference. Was this a cynical publisher’s attempt to profit from a few memes? Maybe. But if these games manage, even ambiently, to communicate why the Allied forces fought Fascism, as well as how and where they fought it, their status is surely elevated from slick shooting galleries to something morally instructive."
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