Recently, a high-profile game has come under fire for using realistic settings and events to depict a bloody conflict. The game's makers - whatever their intentions - are so short-sighted that they've completely ignored the history and images that the game so obviously invokes. Exploiting memories of human tragedy for the sake of entertainment is sick, and wrong. And doing so in a hyper-realistic manner only amplifies how disgusting these tragedies can be.

Of course I am speaking about the biggest first-person shooter of the year, Wolfenstein.

World War II is a topic well-covered in modern gaming - so Raven and Activision decided that just another sequel wasn't enough. Wolfenstein has taken the last steps toward jaw-dropping, gut-wrenching offensiveness, by portraying the Nazis as they really were, occult weaponry and all.

These hideous realities of the war - so gross and inhumane that history books, even Wikipedia, refuse to record them! - dial Wolfenstein all the way up to 11 in "realistic traumatization." The game features the same particle cannons used by real Nazi monster-men. It showcases the Veil, where countless men died mysteriously, but probably painfully. And Germany's horrifying, invisible assassins are strewn around as ordinary enemies!

Who is holding these monsters accountable for their flagrant disregard and reckless insensitivity? Must we really force our brave veterans to remember being tossed about by powerful, psychokinetic Nazis? Or the tense moments when their Veil Shields ran out, and they risked their lives tangoing with a Tesla cannon?

Wolfenstein is just too real. It is impossible to interpret as anything other than a caustic, flippant insult to the men and women who perished in the tragedy of World War II, and to their families. Regardless of how fucking sick it is to vaporize Nazis.

---

This post began as a Monthly Musing about how human tragedy isn't sacred, at least not in the context of entertainment or the arts. But eventually I realized that I was just making fun of that anxiety-ridden dickbag who thinks a burning White House goes "too far" in our retarded post-9/11 social climate.

Seriously, guy, go fuck off in a sandstorm. Asshole.