Such is the hold that Adolf Hitler exerts on the Western imagination that, more than four decades after the end of the Second World War, my British schoolmates and I were still singing rhymes about his testicles. Where I grew up, in South London, our preferred version of the popular wartime ditty “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball” placed the Führer’s absent gonad in the opulent Royal Albert Hall. (“His mother, the dirty bugger / Cut it off when he was small.”) Our fascination with Nazism went well beyond the playground; it also extended to our computer screens at home. My tumble into puberty was marked by the release, in 1992, of Wolfenstein 3D. In blocky MS-DOS graphics, the video game told the story of an Allied spy (shown bare-chested in the airbrushed cover art) shooting and stabbing his way out of a German prison. It was quick-paced, crudely gory, and elegant in its moral simplicity. I was hooked. My parents were dismayed.

Wolfenstein 3D and its celebrated precursor, Castle Wolfenstein, from 1981, were the earliest examples of what would become a dominant genre in video games. It didn’t take long for other designers to realize that the Second World War made for an ideal dramatic backdrop, and that Nazis, with their pristine Hugo Boss uniforms and irredeemable yet easy-to-parse philosophy, made for ideal antagonists. Who could complain about massacring virtual Jerries when to raise such objections would be to condemn our grandparents’ generation, whose accomplishments we were routinely called upon to observe with poppies and stern minutes of silence? The real glut in Second World War-themed video games began with Medal of Honor, from 1999, which Steven Spielberg pitched between the releases of “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” The Call of Duty series followed with no fewer than three major works—in 2003, 2005, and 2006—each one casting the player as an American, British, or Soviet hero in the historic struggle against Fascism.

Then, suddenly—through a combination of overfamiliarity and, perhaps, the artistic urge to reckon with, or at least to face, the Iraq War—killing Nazis fell from fashion. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, released in 2007, shifted the fight to contemporary theatres of battle, with their newfangled weapons and gadgets—the squealing night-vision goggles, the drone’s-eye overhead views. Other titles followed, including the 2010 reboot of Medal of Honor, which was set in contemporary Afghanistan. (There were, of course, occasional exceptions; 2012’s Sniper Elite V2, a game centered around the Nazi rocket program, featured an “X-ray kill cam” that allowed players to watch their bullets tear, almost pornographically, into the enemy. Hitler’s bollocks were a common target.) But the video-game industry, for all its crowing about how much more money it rakes in each year than Hollywood does, has always followed cinema’s example, and cinema, for the past decade or so, has remained enamored of the Second World War: “Inglourious Basterds,” in 2009; “The Imitation Game,” in 2014; “Allied,” in 2016; and, in recent months, “Land of Mine” and “Dunkirk.” Today, the old Nazi-stomping trend in gaming is resurgent.

The latest offering, Call of Duty: WWII, came out last Friday. It begins cinematically, with excerpts from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s D-Day prayer read gravely over period footage, then delivers a series of greatest-hits encounters across France, through Belgium, and into Germany. (The military adviser for HBO’s “Band of Brothers” consulted on the game.) Aside from a few brief diversions, you play as Private Ronald Daniels, a member of the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division. In the first and most familiar scene, Daniels lands on the beaches of Normandy. Films have long captured the boom and whistle of the invasion, but perhaps only here, in a video game, do you begin to grasp the full capriciousness of the slaughter, the ten thousand tiny variations on death by machine-gun spray. For anyone who can make it to the sea wall in less than two minutes, the game offers an “achievement,” a kind of digital medal awarded to those who have won the ballistics lottery against appalling odds.

Like its forebears, Call of Duty: WWII is more a theme-park ride than a depiction of the true chaos of war: you follow the drama along clearly defined rails, shooting the targets as they pop up, always listening for the telltale “ting” (reminiscent of a hotel concierge’s bell) that indicates an empty clip. Much of the game is delivered with the blunt spectacle of an action movie. In one scene, you chase a train full of Nazis while hanging out the window of a Volkswagen Kübelwagen. (Was there ever a more satisfying make of car to proclaim in a pantomime German accent?) But there are also more ponderous and thoughtful interludes, a fairly recent development in the series. In another scene, set in a frozen Belgian forest on the eve of the Battle of the Bulge, you thoughtfully place a case of ammunition beneath a squad-mate’s Christmas tree, which sags under the weight of its tin-can baubles. Then there’s the game’s epilogue, which, via a tour of an abandoned concentration camp, attempts to acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust in the rather challenging context of a video game that, elsewhere, includes zombie Nazis.

Where Call of Duty: WWII focusses on the personal and politically vanilla motivations of its onscreen characters, another new game, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, deals explicitly with the theme of resistance. Like Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle,” it imagines an alternative reality in which Hitler has won the war and invaded the United States. Jack-booted German officers and hood-wearing Klansmen patrol the streets of America by day, and the game goes out of its way to portray them not as mere pop-up targets for the trigger-happy but as cruel, morally decrepit deviants who must be stopped because of what they stand for. This gives Wolfenstein II a resonance with the contemporary political landscape that its creators couldn’t have imagined when they began development. The recent rise of nationalism in Europe and North America has emboldened the far right to such an extent that conservative pizza-makers feel the need to publicly demand that Fascists stop buying their products. Thanks to the movement’s successful co-opting of young, disenfranchised men—a big video-game demographic—the use of Nazis as cannon fodder feels, ludicrously, somehow transgressive and confrontational.

If Call of Duty’s marketing has stopped short of making explicit its resonance with contemporary events, Wolfenstein II has followed through. A viral campaign staged on Twitter encouraged players to “punch Nazis,” a dig at the white nationalist Richard Spencer, who was famously punched on Inauguration Day, and at the many white-liberal think pieces that have since suggested that reasoned debate is the appropriate response to an ideology premised on violent racial exclusion. The game’s tagline, “Make America Nazi-Free Again,” makes clear its developers’ feelings on Donald Trump. (Curiously, Trump’s brother Robert serves on the board of directors at ZeniMax, Wolfenstein II’s publisher.) The game itself apparently received some last-minute updates before it was released, including a newspaper interview with a “dapper young KKK leader,” another Spencer reference. Was this a cynical publisher’s attempt to profit from a few memes? Maybe. But if these games manage, even ambiently, to communicate why the Allied forces fought Fascism, as well as how and where they fought it, their status is surely elevated from slick shooting galleries to something morally instructive.

For now, the culture war rages. Thousands of players who claim to want their games to be politics-free have taken the political action of “review-bombing” Wolfenstein II and Call of Duty: WWII in online stores, leaving disgruntled reviews in an effort to damage each game’s aggregate score and thereby hurt the developers financially. V-Day, it seems, is still some ways off.