Do you remember back in 2014, when franchise reboot Wolfenstein: The New Order was first announced? Everyone was furious about the title's marketing campaign, with many gamers taking genuine issue with the gleeful abandon in which the game's Nazi-killing themes were represented.
Oh no, wait, actually no-one gave a shit. It basically wasn't an issue. Roll on a mere three years later and we have folk fuming over such concepts. Nazis have been getting obliterated in Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, et al for decades, no-one batted an eyelid. Yet now, suddenly, we're supposed to start wringing our hands and applying pseudo-intellectual pontification over such matters? What happened?
One of the reasons people cry foul with The New Colossus' marketing is because they see today's climate (in rare cases, perhaps themselves) referenced within it. A climate that may not have seemed quite so contemporary back in 2014. The Wolfenstein narrative is a fictional tale about the successful rise of global fascism. If people want to complain that Bethesda are cheaply "exploiting current events," then how did we let those events become current?
The issue here isn't that Bethesda chose to adapt real-world political slogans, or genuine feelings of civil unrest, in order to sell their wares. Hell, they were making these games years before such slogans were in the public zeitgeist. No, the issue lies with us folk, for allowing such a gross climate to return to a state of prominence, thus being ripe for artistic reference in the first place.
But that's just the tip of this particular political hot potato, another topic for another time, maybe. But right now, gather your arms brothers and sisters, 'cos we got Nazis to smash.
via destructoid http://ift.tt/2zU53Z0