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From Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943) to Inglourious Basteras (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), the cinema has taken on the cultural task of visualizing World War II. Increasingly, however, this task has also been taken up by new media - video games, in particular - resulting in new perspectives on the social and political meanings of the war in contemporary America. World War II video games - which are some of the most popular games featuring military combat - participate in the cultural nostalgia for the war to which recent films like Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001) contributed. The nostalgic Zeitgeist of the 1990s manifested itself in Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw's books on the "Greatest Generation," the release of a number of World War II-themed films, and the construction of the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC. These texts and events rewrote World War II as the last "good war" in which military force was justified and the United States played the role of world savior. The war era is still often seen as a time of moral authority and consensus, in which the whole nation united for a common cause. By the 1990s, the World War II video game had established itself as a resilient formula and an important way that the cultural memory of the war was activated for a growing segment of the population. In sharing some of these nostalgic ideologies of the war, contemporary World War II video games draw explicitly from cinema. In this essay, I explore how contemporary video games adapt the World War II combat film genre for their own cultural work.
The fact that in the case of the video game the "viewer" becomes a "player" means that the relationship between the user and the media changes. The interactivity of the video game appears to promise a different relation to the narrative and experience of the game, as well as a different relation to history. I contend that World War II video games reflect contemporary fantasies of the war as evidence for the assured triumph of the West (and particularly the United States). The victory of the Allied powers is literally played over and over again - both in various...