Glancing over some of the games in my collection, I was struck recently by what so many people have already observed: Gamers LOVE killing Nazis.

I mean, seriously. It has to be a full-on fetish by now. It would not surprise me in the least to discover an entire server farm hosting nothing but pornography involving the killing of the soldiers of fascist Germany, but frankly I’m terrified to Google it. If www.BadGirlsKillNazis.com is an occupied domain, I’d just rather not know about it. (Must….resist…urge to click…)

This is nothing new, of course. Any gamer who’s been half-way paying attention could immediately list for you a dozen games that feature blonde-haired, blue-eyed bull’s-eyes. Me? Straight off the top of my head I’ve got Brothers in Arms, Medal of Honor, Company of Heroes…. right on this site you can find Day of Defeat: Source game servers and Call of Duty game servers. You get the point. IGN even named “The Nazis” the #1 Most Memorable Villain in gaming history. The game they were featured in? “Too many to count.” Tell me about it.

There’s just something hopelessly nostalgic about blowing away a bunker full of Nazis. Perhaps it’s just that the Nazis have been the target of choice for much of my formative years: my first ever game was Wolfenstein 3D at the tender age of 8 (thanks Mom and Dad!). As I sat in the posture I would soon lovingly call “my gaming stoop,” my legs swinging in the air above my dad’s office floor, I stabbed guards and shot German Shepherds and threw 20 pounds of lead at the ugly grump pictured to the right. Little did I know that that was just the beginning.

So what gives? Well, out of necessity, action games feature a struggle against good and evil and, well, who’s more evil than the Nazis? They’ve become such a catchword for unspeakable, zero-shades-of-grey über-evil that even Cthulu’s starting to think the whole thing is a bit silly. Be that as it may, you’ll have to look very hard to find someone who thinks that the Nazis were something other than scumbags, so a game pitting the player against the Third Reich has basically unlimited market appeal. A game against, say, the evil forces of the Democratic Party would find their potential audience cut neatly in half.

Another reason is the nature of the conflict in which Nazi shoot-em-ups are based: World War 2. If you’re looking for a setting that features epic real-world struggle and a universally despised antagonist, look no further in history than 1939! No wonder WW2 games have become an almost developmental cliché.

And while it may be that terrorists are beginning to edge in on the Nazis’ turf as the end-all be-all of video game bad guys (Counter Strike, America’s Army and Call of Duty 4 to name a few of the game servers we love around here), the Nazi, yelling his German commands to halt and surrender, will always have a special place in my heart… and in my crosshairs.

P.s. Good news! Upon further research, BadGirlsKillNazis.com is up for grabs! You’re welcome.

Valve recently offered a free play weekend on Day Of Defeat: Source servers. This worked about as well as you’d expect a horde of uneducated, untrained idiots running out onto World War II battlefield to, without the real-world benefits of massively accelerated Darwinian evolution. Imagine a preschool in the middle of a minefield. Here were some of the worst effects:

1. Sorry!

The fearsome battlecry throughout the European theatre, at least during that part of World War II that took place during July 4-6, 2008. These people spend hours on end killing each other in all manner of virtual battlegrounds, but the idea that bullets can actually hurt people seems to genuinely shock them. Without the magic ammunition which teleports through teammates and weaves between your friends, many of the new players were actively worse than useless. There’s nothing like that feeling when a grenade rattles next to your from behind, and you hear “Sorry!” over voice-comms before detonating.

This picture of stupidity becomes a full three-dimensional hologram of stupidity when the revenge killings start, people actively hunting the accidentally homicidal teammate. The game is then pretty much over - the Germans don’t exactly have a hard time when half the Allied team is re-enacting the bloodier parts of the Civil War on the streets of Palermo.

2. Machine Gun The Sky

A glimpse into the mind of a newbie DoD player:
“Right, so this game has classes.”
“Oh sweet, a big machine gun!”
“Take this brakkabrakka-what-the-f” *dies*

Another fact of life on DoD:S servers is recoil. It turns out that a machine which fires hundreds of rounds per second by setting off explosions behind them moves a bit, unlike other games which would have you believe that an automatic weapon is as handy as an iPod that shoots bullets. Day of Defeat can’t yet simulate the effects of running while carrying twenty kilos of gear, but rest assured that it would if it could.

In the meantime enjoy the sight of new players firing their StG44 from the hip and the recoil flinging the gun barrel (and their vision) into the sky like they were trying to kill God. Oh, and you’re holding a gun and they are literally presenting their soft underbelly.

3. The Anti-Rambo

Teamwork is essential on a Day Of Defeat Server. The classes are so specialised as to make the Team Fortress classes look like nothing but changes of clothes. The central flags flat-out tell you that you need more than one-person, and if that isn’t clear the reinforcement respawn system is built to tell you “Work together you assholes”.

Which doesn’t stop the flock of newbies scattering every single time, running as far away from each other or support as they can get, and basically proving that a lone commando triumphing over a horde of enemies only happens in movies or games with a single player mode.

4. Snipers Sucking (even more than normal)

Fact: 90% of snipers on every FPS game in the world suck. If you disagree with that it’s because you’re one of them. But on a game like DoD, where even the standard combat class is a long-range high-accuracy fighter, this problem is turned up so high the knob breaks. The M1 Garand rewards accurate shooting, while the Kar 98 will practically marry you for a headshot (or at least drop the target, which is the main thing).

Which is why seeing rejects at the bottom of the score table, who honestly couldn’t hit a tank from the inside with one of these workhorse weapons, taking up a teamslot with the specialised bolt-action sniper rifle is sickening. They’re still never going to hit anything, and now you can’t even use them as self-propelled enemy detectors.

5. Accusations of Camping

For the last time: “Camping” comes from random-running around killfests like Quake, where rocketjumping was more of a glitch than a feature and perching yourself in an impossible location and killing anyone who walked under really was an asshole action.

In an objective-attacking map, where the entire point is to destroy fixed targets and protect your own, the idea of somebody deploying a machine gun to actually defend is not called “camping”. It’s called “understanding the game and being a much, much better player than you”.