I liked Hidden Nazi Mode, but I considered it one large practical joke more than anything else. Forgive me for a bit of pretension.
Nabokov applied Fichte’s ideas of thesis-antithesis-synthesis to his fiction, though he erroneously credited Hegel for the concept. There was a surface or thetic layer, a secondary antithetic layer, and a third synthetic layer; the meaning of the first was cleverly subverted by the second, and both were consummated in the third for the purpose of artistic sublimity. The Nabokov fan forums go nuts over this and quibble all day like paranoiacs over how this applies to various books; there is no right answer, of course, though there are frighteningly many wrong ones. But even in books where it was not intentionally implemented, I have found it a remarkably useful means of analysis.
Hidden Nazi Mode was sort of like that, if the end result of the synthetic layer was not a feeling of wonderful artistic delight but a smile and a nod at a troll well done.
The essay tells you that the work is open-source for the purpose of verification: so a teacher or parent may ensure that the game is about nothing more than what it claims to be. And, should you quickly scan the code, it seems to be the game it promises–a simple jaunt about little rabbits and feeding them. Of course, there is more to it than that, but the twee, basic impression it might leave on a child or the historically-uninformed will be our thetic layer.
I had read multiple reviews before playing the game. I read them again, afterwards. Given HNM’s extreme reliance on metatextuality for any semblance of meaning, I consider them inseperable parts of my experience with the game: perhaps that’s a bit silly, but it’s how I felt it. They all, to some extent or another, seemed to agree on the idea that HNM was a deliberate rebuttal of its accompanying essay–even with the source code fully accessible. On the antithetic layer, it emerged as an argument that it was ultimately impossible to scour things clean of objectionable content, no matter how accessible: the numerous references to the Holocaust fundamentally undergirded the work, even if they were just in service to a cute little bunny game.
Personally, I didn’t much like this argument, even if I thought it was the one HNM supported: the essay claimed that the cultural elements had been placed to create a certain dark atmosphere in preparation for the Nazi mode, and had simply been left in because some people liked them. Thus contextualized, the uneasiness that these symbols evoked was obviously the point of the game, and it was hard to say that HNM was a good example of inescapable subliminal messaging when it wasn’t subtle in the least. Anybody with sufficient worldly knowledge could see that “Victor Gijsbers” deliberately wanted it to be read this way. There was a point to be made, but this did a poor job of it. Besides, you could still censor it, if you were a concerned teacher–take bus number 20 to Morrison Square, enter a bakery filled with nondescript gentile food, put Beethoven and Brahms on the piano, Locke on the bookshelf. Just punch in a few different numbers and letters.
And then I went and found the actual hidden Nazi mode.
I thought it was extremely funny, personally, and at once it shut up everything I had objected to. The reviews, the essay, and the rest of the game itself all had egg on their face: The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode really was just a hidden Nazi mode. It was not a poor treatment of credulity and concealment in text, about how we could never be sure if there was hidden Nazism, but a prank. And in its own small way, the essay was thus vindicated: if you’d really probed the source code, you’d have found the secret. I thought it was a great joke–and, at least by my lights, untangled the contradictions that had made it so frustrating. The fact that it undermined everything before it was the reason it worked.
I’ll make no claim to this being anything more than a ramble. I don’t have the correct interpretation, of course, and I won’t even argue for having a more correct interpretation than others; I played this game in about an afternoon and didn’t dwell on it much further. Perhaps I have hallucinated the reviews that I mentioned: perhaps I have committed the even more grievous sin of misrepresenting them. In any case, they were key to my experience, and I don’t expect anybody else to feel the same. But the way I had it, Hidden Nazi Mode was a very satisfying troll, and I rather liked it. I was strongly reminded of Signs and Symbols, by the forementioned Nabokov, which also uses the Holocaust to set up meaning in order to spring a practical joke. Perhaps I have read Signs and Symbols into it too much.
It definitely didn’t feel like a serious work. Maybe it was a bit too edgy, but I don’t think it was outright disrespectful. The invocation of the Holocaust was effective enough to set up the gravitas of the supposed argument on the second layer, and subsequently puncture it. There was a decent enough rationalization there, the way I saw it. You could do worse. Hell, when I was an immature youth, me and some other members of the tribe would make cracks that were a whole lot worse.
