I’ve been walking in a fog all day (brain fog) The Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) has just returned from committing treason with the leader of Russia by his side today. I am trapped in a dream. I have been trapped in a dream since November the 9th of 2016. It has to be a dream, because even reality can’t be this strange.
I’ve been playing Wolfenstein: The New Order off and on now for about six months. The Wife gifted me with Wolfenstein: The New Colossus for Christmas last year, and I refused to play a sequel without playing the first game first. You have to experience first things first. Old Blood is the second game. This confirms my theory on thirds. First third is good. Second third can be better. Last third? Hardly worth the trouble. I’m tracking down Old Blood so I can play it next. [Editor’s note: Have it now] The relationships which seem long established in the game’s story are there because Wolfenstein was perhaps the first stealth video games, and Id preserved much of what it saw as essential from previous iterations of Wolfenstein when it created The New Order, including an easter egg tribute to their first game Wolfenstein 3D.
I took the right approach on insisting I play New Order before playing New Colossus, because I probably would never have given this series of games a chance if I had played Wolfenstein: The New Colossus first. I couldn’t finish that game when I finally got to it. Hell, I barely made it out of the submarine, where the game begins, I was laughing so hard. Laughing at the unreality of maneuvering a wheelchair through bulkheads with openings that could not possibly be rolled through in a wheelchair, while firing a automatic weapon two-handed and not being propelled backwards down the companionway from the recoil. They program in sight drift when firing a weapon, but they don’t do the half-dozen other things that are even more essential for believability.
Games are not reality, after all. Reality is so unreal that many of the things we experience would never work in a fictional universe. No one would believe that what was happening could happen. I mean, the party that could not accept a President getting a blowjob in the Oval Office willingly puts a lying, cheating scumbag into the office of the President? That could never happen. So the simple fact that a thirty-six inch wide object cannot fit through a thirty-two inch wide door is clearly not going to be believed. However, we are talking first person shooters (FPS) here. A first-person shooter from the originators of the FPS, id. Except that id didn’t allow its name to be placed on the sequel to Wolfenstein: The New Order, a smart move on their part.
In the age of Trump, it is easy to believe that the Nazis won the Second World War. In the age of Trump, it is easy to believe that a secret Jewish organization called Da’at Yichud created all the weapons that the Nazis stole. Stolen technology that allowed them to win the war by developing an atomic bomb first. Not hard to believe, at all.
No, the hard part to believe about this game is how this one man could possibly make a difference in this obscene world that he finds himself in. This cold, hard fact is why Wolfenstein: The New Order is the game to be playing in the age of Trump. Because he does triumph, in the end, and his is not the only triumphal moment.
This game is a tour-de-force for id. It reminds me of all the hours I spent playing Doom all those years ago, when the internet was the future and the future was full of hope. They released an updated version of Doom last year. I’ll probably have to play that game next.
I’ve been walking around in a fog all day, as I said at the beginning. Walking in a fog with the oft-scribbled statement of those unfortunates who have had their long-term memory sealed off from their short term memory looping through my mind. I’ve just woken up for the first time! Caught in a bootloop, like a bad operating system install. The cutscene in the Kreisau hideout has been haunting me.
Not just any time you sleep in the hideout. You have to be playing the Fergus timeline. In the Fergus timeline one of the changes is the character of Tekla. A mathematician, she is obsessed with calculating the probabilities of success in the Kreisau’s fight against the Nazis. One of the instances when you tell Blaskovitz to go to sleep to get his health upgraded (Fergus’ perk) has an additional cutscene. Blasko goes to sleep, only to be startled abruptly awake to find Tekla sipping coffee beside his bed, watching as he and Anya sleep. The dialog for this scene keeps drifting through my mind, following I’ve just woken up for the first time! hard on it’s heels. I tried to find the scene in the game for hours today. I knew it was there, but I just could not find it. I played through all the chapters in the Kreisau hideout looking for it. Luckily someone else spliced all the Tekla scenes together,
Where do you go when you lose consciousness?
Tekla, Wolfenstein : The New Order
You have a brain, a brain is a biological computational device running on electrochemical process. Your consciousness is an emergent property of said process. In other words: you are an electrochemical process. Fundamentally you have experience of continuous existence. You are you, at this point in time. You have sensation of riding along this continuum of being you, into the future. On occasion brain can be subjected to trauma, temporarily discontinuing electrochemical process. Such as a boxer being knocked out. As this occurs the brain is no longer running. It’s electrochemical generating process. Hence consciousness is lost. You lose consciousness. At this point in time, your consciousness, all that is you… your continuum of being you has caused to exist in the physical world, Now, moments later, the electrochemical process may start up again… allowing consciousness to emerge out of the information stored in the brain.
But I wonder. Where are you in the meantime?
Must we not assume that at the point when consciousness is lost, the person dies? If a new consciousness appears or not in the same brain is entirely inconsequential to the dead consciousness. The new consciousness is simply a new person. Because it emerges from the same brain it has access to all the memories and cognitive structures… as the dead consciousness, so it thinks it is the same person But in actuality it is just an impostor. Inheriting the body and brain from the previous, now dead, inhabitant.
Pretty deep stuff for an FPS video game, isn’t it? But that is the quality of the production all through Wolfenstein: The New Order. It feels like reality, the camera bobbing ever so slightly as you watch the cutscenes, as if you are an observer over the shoulder of someone else, breathing carefully so as not to attract attention to yourself. Hoping against hope that these impossible people will achieve an impossible thing and destroy the Nazi machine even in its hour of triumph.
But I could not find the scene in the game again. I could not find it, like a memory that fades into the mist when you look for it. Did I wake up today a different person? Will I wake up tomorrow a different person? Who is asking this question? Play Wolfenstein: The New Order. Kill all the Nazis. Win the war. Or maybe we should believe we can win the battle against the fakir who currently inhabits the office of the President? If you think we can’t win, play this game. Maybe it will change your mind.
Postscript
I can tell I was suffering from brain fog when I wrote this. I toss random concepts around in the article like they just came out of the fog and hit me, with no considerations made for the person who might be trying to follow along and make sense of all these random thoughts written down in no particular order.
I’m torn between rewriting the whole thing and just leaving it as is. That is the way I was back in 2018 for much of the year. I’m more than a bit surprised to have survived to look back on that year. I really didn’t think any of us would survive Trump’s presidency.
