Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

"We're Not Gonna Take It.": The Countercultural AAA Aesthetics of Wolfenstein: The New Colossus

Hans-Joachim Backe's analysis examines Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (MachineGames, 2017) and argues that its apparent flaws are in fact deliberate components of a unified aesthetic.

• The paper argues that Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (MachineGames, 2017) has apparent flaws that are deliberate parts of a unified aesthetic, and that critics and sympathetic reviewers missed the coherence between its narrative and ludic systems.
• The central thesis is that the game deploys Bakhtin's carnivalesque as a poetics of defamiliarization that stages the death and rebirth of first-person shooter conventions.
• The analysis reads the game's Nazi ideology as absurdist rather than endorsing, and interprets protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz's trajectory from an idealized Aryan body to a frail, grafted figure as an inversion of fascist notions of virility.