Playing with the Third Reich: Conceptual Relocation from Nazi Film to WWII Game : An Experiment to measure Filmic concepts in Digital Games

Abstract: Film produced by Nazi Germany has been a classic that has drawn scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines as well as innumerable cineastes from various cultural backgrounds. The simultaneous rise in the number of players acting as observers and operators in digital games with a WWII theme has drawn recent scholarly attention since it is thought that this pattern is contributing to players' hazy understanding of historical events. In order to close the gap from earlier studies that there is no future perspective for these concepts refined from Nazi films, nor relevance to films in the field of Game Studies, I proposed a new connection between Nazi films and WWII games based on the conceptual relocation of Fascist Aesthetic, Futuristic Utopianism, and Steel-like Romanticism. In this relocation, Fascist Aesthetic has kept its elements from Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films but expanded to the pursuit of death and violence in the Wolfenstein series (WWII FPS games), Futuristic Utopianism in Piel's science fiction trilogy derived from the passion for technology of the Weimar period, his original designs in the Sci-fi trilogy have proved to be an inspiration for WWII games. In Walter Ruttmann's industrial films, steel-like romanticism was portrayed as a romantic sensation from the production of large-scale, intricate weapons by dedicated German workers to achieve the reactionary modernism, but in WWII simulation games, it evolved into a nostalgia for the weapons built by the Reich. As a result of this change, a trustworthy commemoration of the Third Reich is vanishing from visual culture and its grim past has been changed by simulation.