The Virtual Life – Surviving The Times With Wolfenstein: The New Order

Major Spoilers for Wolfenstein: The New Order.

It’s been a bad week.

Wait. Understatement.

Let's revise: It's been a blindingly bad week, the kind where you fall into a tizzy of rage and want to call up everyone who’s ever done you wrong and hold them accountable for it all because beneath your kind smile you’re actually holding two decades of pettiness and rage hostage.

I do not do this.

Instead, I lay on the floor staring at a little black spot in the ceiling that has been there since I moved in. When I’m angry or upset, I often focus my attention on something so my anxiety doesn’t overtake me.

It’s not working. I reach for my drink when I hear that familiar voice: Again? BJ Blazkowicz, massive as a mountain, says while standing over me, the disappointment in his voice clear and resonant as bell chimes.

"Oh no. Not you, you rent-a-Virgil. Go away. I'm not well."

“What else is new? Get up.”

He drags me over to the console. I turn it on.

“I don’t want to.”

“But you’re going to.” He puts the controller in my hand. “What happened this time anyway?”

“It was—”

“You know what? It doesn’t matter. Just play the game.”

He settles next to me on the floor. I select Wolfenstein: The New Order on the dashboard.

“Well,” he says, looking at me, imaginary eyebrow on an imaginary body cocked.

I press X.

BJ Blazkowicz, impossibly strong and noble, dips beneath the surface of the water as gunfire from Castle Wolfenstein cuts through the waves, tearing his comrades to pieces. He doesn’t care. He’s focused. He is, as he says, here to settle a score with an old friend and end the war.

He infiltrates the castle. He finds his target, but the battle doesn’t go his way. Misfortune and a couple of bad moves leave him at the mercy of his arch-nemesis, Dr. Deathshead, who is essentially every Nazi goon you’ve ever seen chopped up and strung together to create an impossibly evil Frankenstein’s monster of Nazi goons.

BJ manages to escape the castle, but not without sustaining an injury to the head that leaves him out of commission for years. When he wakes up, the Nazis have won the war and rule the planet. Most of the people he loves are dead.

BJ Blazkowicz failed and it cost the world.

“I always forget how good that first level is,” I tell BJ once we hit a loading screen.

“It definitely sets the stage.”

We sit quietly for a minute. “I didn’t deserve it.”

“Deserve what?”

“What happened. I didn’t deserve it. I’m a good person.”

“That's true, but you don’t believe it.”

I don’t.

“Relax. We’re just getting started.”

“I want my drink.”

He pushes the small glass of bourbon away from me. “Just play the game.”

I know every level of Wolfenstein: The New Order as well as I know my childhood home. Every corridor, every secret, how many enemies are in every room, how the key to defeating everyone lies in mastering both sliding and gunning at the same time. Everyone asks me why I love it so much.

I like how the gameplay feels, I say. I like that it tells a great story in a genre that rarely tells a competent one, I explain.

These aren’t lies but they aren’t the whole truth.

I press X again and resume the game.

BJ Blazcowicz wakes up from his coma. The Nazis have invaded the asylum where he’s been kept, killing the family of the woman who’s taken care of him, Anya. He rises up. He slays them all like some modern, bloody Beowulf. He and Anya drive to see her grandparents. They explain the situation to him. He vows to take down the Nazi regime.

He and Anya grow close. They eventually meet up with the resistance base buried in the heart of Berlin. As the group plans to take back the world, BJ Blazcowicz dreams of a patio. There’s a barbecue. There’s Anya, leaning over to kiss him. He dreams of a quiet life with the person he loves.

He dreams of the impossible.

“Why her?” I ask him as I throw a knife into the neck of some guard.

“What do you mean?”

“Anya. Did you really love her or was it one of those deals where the world was a scary place and the two of you just sort of fell into each other?”

“Can’t it be both?”

I shrug.

“You know it’s okay, right?”

“What is?”

“To cry.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

I blast a Nazi in the face with a shotgun. The body falls and hits the floor with a satisfying thud.

“Your mouth is doing that twitching thing. It’s okay to be upset.”

“Right.”

“If you’re gonna be that way, be that way then. Also: you missed one.”

He’s right. I’m being sloppy. A Nazi I ran past peeks around the door and fires at me. I slide beneath the hail of bullets and fire a pistol round through his belly. He drops.

I saw my dad cry once. It was at a funeral. It ranks among the most disturbing things I’ve ever witnessed in my life. I wonder if that’s why I don’t do it much, the crying. I’m not alone in that, I know. I think of the legions of men born and unborn who won’t cry because their fathers inadvertently teach them that it’s something to be ashamed of.

I walk over to the man writhing on the ground. I put a bullet through his eye. He goes still. I reload the pistol and step into the next room.

At this point, I’m halfway through the game. We’re about to hit the worst part of The New Order: a one hour section that has you navigating sewers and train tracks. I put down the controller.

“You’re not done,” says BJ.

“I just want to go to sleep,” I say, starting to rise and head to the bedroom.

“If you go in there, I can’t help you. You won’t sleep and you’ll just feel like garbage all night long.” He’s right. I sit back down. I load the level. I swim through sewer water. I hit some switches. I solve bad puzzles. I yearn for something, anything to shoot. I want the familiar, rhythmic action of this game’s gunplay. I want my escape.

“I’m scared,” I say aloud suddenly.

“Of what?”

“That I will never be worth anything to the people I love. That I am tiresome and too broken.”

“Everyone feels that way but it’s just your brain screwing with you. And it’s worse for you because you want to believe it because then it gives you a reason not to try.”

“To try what?”

“Being human. Hurting. Understanding. Adapting. Living.”

I don't say anything in reply. What is there to say?

Night's not over yet. Go to Page 2 to finish it.

I make it past the sewer level. I kill some jerks in an underground trainyard and then find myself transported to a boat. The goal here is to take over the U-boat so we can use its armaments to launch an all-out attack on Castle Wolfenstein. That means killing everyone on board, of course. Not a problem. I’ve done it countless times.

I sprint around corridors, shoving knives into backs, tossing grenades that turn men sleeping in their bunk beds into splatters across the wall. I am untouchable. Not even the hulking bullet sponges can get a shot at me.

People can trash my writing. They can say things that hurt me, they can briefly rob me of my happiness, but no one will ever take away how good I am at this game.

It is a small dumb thing. But it is my thing.

“It’s four in the morning,” I say. “I have work tomorrow. Maybe I’ll try to sleep again.”

“You’ve come this far,” he says. “We’re literally at the last level. Just kill Deathshead.”

I frown and push on.

“Oh will you cheer the hell up? We’ve killed our way through like half the Nazi army. We’re winning the war.”

“Yeah, but you don’t win the war, remember? That’s what makes the ending so good. It has just the right amount of light. You buy the resistance a small slice of hope by nuking a castle, hardly a guarantee for a happy ending.”

“Okay, point taken, but we’ve made a huge dent in the Nazi problem. HUGE.”

“I guess so.”

BJ sighs. “Look: I get it. You’re hurting and you’re not sure how to deal with it. But you’ve got to accept that people are people and they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do and that you are going to end up wherever you end up. There’s precious little you can do about either of those things. You just have to ride it out and make the most of it. You might even find yourself enjoying things. There are worse things to cling to than hope.”

I nod.

“Good. Now stab that Nazi scum in the face. Right in the eyeball. Yeah, just like that.”

BJ Blazckowicz makes a choice. He finds Anya and the rest of the prisoners who have been taken captive by the Nazis.

“I believe there are still places on this earth where people can go and live happily,” she says.

“I believe so too, “he says. “But not for me and for you.”

The dream is dead. He lets it go so that maybe one day it can be a reality for other people.

He finds and kills Deathshead. With his dying breath, the evil doctor pulls the pin on a grenade and blows BJ’s chest open. BJ doesn’t seem to mind all that much, laying out, bleeding all over the floor. He came to do a job. He got it done. Whatever happens now is out of his hands. But he’s done all he can.

He has no regrets.

We watch the credits roll. “See,” he says. “Don’t you feel better?”

“Marginally,” I admit.

“There you go. Just take it one day at a time. You’ll be fine eventually. Trust me.”

I try to think of something to say but he’s already gone. I turn off the console and head to bed.

In a few hours I’ll get up. I’ll go to work. I’ll write some words about giant robots swinging swords and men blasting monsters away with shotguns. I will slowly shift myself back into a functioning form, righting my life for a time until it’s derailed again by unforeseeable events.

But I’m not too worried. I’ll have my little slice of alternative history to help me get back on my feet again that happens. Because that’s what you do, right? Take the ride. Hope it doesn't throw you on a sharp turn and break you. Know that it will. Get up, wipe the blood from your nose, reset your bones, limp back to the driver's seat. Do it all over again.

There is no other way.