Last spring, I gave a tough assignment to the students in my NYU class on literary and cultural representations of the Holocaust. “By Wednesday,” I told them, “I want you to kill Hitler.”
Their task was to master Wolfenstein 3D, the 1993 computer game that confronted its players with a heavily pixilated, mech-suited Fuhrer strapping large guns, and proved to game developers that a “first-person shooter”—a game in which players navigate three-dimensional worlds, in first- and third-person perspectives, mowing down foes with machine guns, chainsaws, and plasma cannons—could be a massive hit. In the years since, the genre has become one of the most popular and highly grossing entertainment formats of all time, with yearly sales in the billions of dollars. With such success has come, inevitably, controversy: The Columbine killers played a follow-up to Wolfenstein 3D before their rampage, increasing concerns about the effects of video games on children and teenagers.