Every teenage boy of the last two decades has his 100 Nazi scalps. A thousand unmarked digital graves litter every square inch of the beaches of Omaha and the train yards, docks and barracks of a hundred occupied territories. The ghosts of the virtual dead are packed so tight in the stone hallways of Castle Wolfenstein that it looks like Pac-Man level infinity.

You could lay the bodies head-to-toe in a line from here to the sun and back. In fact, I would venture to guess more video game Nazis have died in the past 30 years than there are humans who have ever lived. The video game Nazi will be remembered only as an end-of-level statistic. Eventually вЂ“ provided the player sticks with him вЂ“ the commando will emerge victorious and alive. When Patterson dies, he returns, regenerated, to a checkpoint just a few minutes earlier, rearmed and ready to begin his assault afresh. And in part because he knows that, unlike the gruesome demises of his foes, his own death is a temporary setback. He scoffs, in part, because вЂ“ as the game's hero вЂ“ he's better, smarter and stronger than the entire military might of the Third Reich. Let us call him, for argument's sake, Jimmy Patterson. Most often his angel of death is a lone American commando, a man trained since birth for this battle and this battle alone, a man who scoffs at the odds stacked against him. Or is stabbed or strangled or blown up and scattered to the wind like straw. He fizzes into being, examines his uniform, wonders perhaps why he is holding a rifle and what exactly he is fighting for and, within seconds, takes a bullet in the head. He is born into this world only to be killed moments later, a newborn convert of a hateful ideology. Take a moment to pity the video-game Nazi, for his life is nasty, brutish and short.

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