Few taboos exist in the blood-and-gore world of shoot-'em-up PC games. But game makers have traditionally respected one rule: no Nazi protagonists.
Last year that rule was challenged on at least two fronts. In November, Activision released Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a game in which players take the role of a US soldier on a mission "to thwart Heinrich Himmler's occult and genetic experiments." The multiplayer version, which pits players against one another online, allows some players to fight as German soldiers.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein is not the first videogame with a Nazi protagonist. That distinction belongs to Day of Defeat, another realistic first-person shooter, which was released for online play last January. Unlike Castle Wolfenstein, Day of Defeat was not issued by a major game maker. It is a modification of the popular science-fiction PC game Half-Life, created by 17 young programmers writing code in their spare time.
Reflecting society
Todd Hollenshead, chief executive of Id Software, which produced Return to Castle Wolfenstein for Activision, described the games as a result of the renewed interest in World War II evidenced by films such as Saving Private Ryan and Enemy at the Gates.
"The trend you're seeing with new games is, to some extent, a reflection of what's going in the culture," Hollenshead said. "For instance, you've now got games with terrorists and counterterrorists. And World War II games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Day of Defeat reflect what you see in popular movies."
Yet Day of Defeat not only shows battlefields decorated with swastikas and Nazi posters but also attracts many players with an enthusiasm for neo-Nazi role playing. The game tries to recreate specific World War II battles. Soldiers on the German side wield Gewehr 43 semiautomatic rifles, Luger pistols, so-called potato-masher grenades and, when the ammunition runs out, Hitler Youth knives. In some games, a battle is signaled with a rousing call to arms broadcast in German.
The presence of swastikas and other Nazi symbols is so pervasive that the game might be viewed as illegal in Germany, where the dissemination of Nazi thought and symbols is banned. The programmers are moving to avoid any trouble in Europe.
"We're working on a version that won't present problems," said Matt Boone, who led Day of Defeat's programming team. "We want to make sure Germans can play the game and not break the rules."
The chat rooms that combatants use to type messages to one another during games have also become battlefields of a sort, with players using Nazi-inspired names and expressing neo-Nazi sentiments.
A recent scan of active Day of Defeat game servers revealed a list of Axis players with noms de guerre such as Mein Kampf, HitlerYouth and ZyklonB, although it is hard to determine whether the names were chosen simply to get attention. In a recent game, a player on the German side using the name AnneFrank was questioned about that moniker. "Oh, you know," the player said, "I'm just trying to keep things spicy."
Point of view
Some groups of players called clans who routinely play Day of Defeat together also refer to themselves with Nazi labels. A well-organized group of German students based in Singapore calls itself Clan SS, a reference to the ruthless Nazi military divisions responsible for some of the war's worst atrocities. "Yes, German," said Lorien Stoetzel, who identifies himself online as the clan's "Oberfeldwebel," meaning platoon sergeant. "But we're not neo-Nazi freaks. Everyone asks me that, but we're not."
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