Paradox Interactive and Horrible Events
History is full of horrible events which could and should be studied, if only to understand why they occurred so that they may never take place again. Paradox Interactive is a games studio which specialises in making strategy games that often include some of humanities lowest points, whether it be the crusades, as discussed in my last blog with the Crusader Kings series, or the transatlantic slave trade as can be seen in Europa Universales and the Victoria series, or the horrors of the Holocaust and the general grief cause in WW2 as seen in Hearts of Iron. When does depicting accurate history in video games become an issue?
Starting with the easiest to discuss in my opinion, Hearts of Iron 4 is a game which is a strategy game set in the second world war but should almost exclusively be taken out of that context and placed in the context of a team vs team strategy fight. With both sides (the axis and the allies + Comintern) having nation-specific buffs and de-buffs, there is an aspect to the history at play but with so much of the history and gore of the war being sanitised and condensed into simple numbers where balancing cost and effectiveness of weapons, divisions and vehicles trumps sparing civilians lives. This can be seen largely in that the game has no real interest in discussing what it means when you loose 2 million men as Germany as it does not affect the levels of production in the factories, just lowers the remaining manpower pot you have. There is no discussion as to the civilian casualties of “strategic bombing” (see: Terror bombing) besides a base war support counter and that your factories and rail lines are slightly damaged and need repairs before they can be operational again.
The biggest sin in my opinion is that the holocaust is not even mentioned. Not once in the game is there even a section which speaks as to the horrors of the holocaust or the cost of human lives. Even when looking at a strictly military aspect to it, the cost to manpower and resources of maintaining the camps, if you want to get cynical. Whilst plenty of other atrocities happened during the war (the Katyn forest massacre, the treatment of the colonies from the British, the internment camps in the US), those are often forgotten and often played little part in how the war played out and thus can be forgiven for not always being included, but key aspects to the war (for instance the Holocaust and the treatment of India by the British) had huge impacts on the war and how resources were allocated.
One response to this that I actually agree with is that including a way for the player to interact with the Holocaust will do one of two things, either bad actors (people who already agree that genocide is actually a good thing) with strive to commit as much genocide as possible, or normal people will sanitise the genocide by taking the least dramatic actions at every turn, or might avoid the genocide entirely, either for moral or gameplay reasons. additionally how would Paradox include this in the game in a way that would want to make players choose the historical path to see the true evils of the system whilst not simultaneously advantaging the player for choosing genocide. So I understand that having players be complicit in genocide is not a desired goal, for moral reasons but also financial reasons. I can at least hope that any game that seeks to make genocide look good or make players commit genocide will not be received well by most player bases.
Moving onto the game that precedes Hearts of Iron chronologically, the Victoria series, this game has a bit of a different issue, which is A, that it includes the transatlantic slave trade as a way for players to directly benefit from slavery without any real downsides to it except that their population MIGHT be slightly displeased with that, but also B, shows the nationalistic sides of the era, but again, without any real way of saying that yeah, maybe we shouldn’t be killing each other because some king wants more power or because we think our country is just THAT cool.
Sticking to point A for a bit, the Europa series includes this too which is a bit of a bother to me in that participating in the slave trade has no downsides to it. Players are given the option to put humans in chains, ship them to the new world and nothing will come of that except huge profits. Whilst this is in line with the times, I do believe that some kind of point should be made, even if it is exclusively a piece of text that condemns the slave trade within the game. I understand that Paradox Interactive may not endorse slavery, but having been around some of the circles that play Paradox games a lot, plenty of their fan base does (there is a huge problem with racism in the map games genre).
The second point is a little more abstract and has been removed from the latest of the Victoria games, Victoria 3, only because combat in that game is so tedious and boring. Looking more at Victoria 2 then, for many of the countries to actually do the goals the game has laid out for them through the decisions, many require expansion, which is almost exclusively done through combat as there is no way to peacefully exchange land except through crises which is a very tedious and boring way to play the game. Whilst I understand that the game must be exciting in some way as in Viccie 2 the economy system is so complex and user unfriendly that combat is mostly the only thing that people can really interact with easily, it doesn’t remove that the game does create a large sense of nationalism as the goal is to expand at the quickest rate that you can, and this goes for all countries in the game.
Crusader kings, the earliest in all of the games series, takes this nationalism and flips it to religious fanaticism, where the end goal is to be as powerful as you can become with your family line, explicitly through the use of religion and exerting your religion on others. This is done through the crusades when playing as Christians, or the Jihad when playing as Muslims, with player-made religions being able to also have their own religious wars. Whilst arguably the least problematic of the bunch, it still directs players to directly be violent to those that are different and believe something else.
As seen through all the examples, Paradox Interactive, through depicting history does depict some of histories worst moments, but fails to condemn them within the game itself. Whilst the studio might independently say “We don’t support genocide or violence of any nature”, that does not translate to players who will not exterminate a religious minority for 5 more ducats of income in Crusader Kings. It does not prevent players from doing as much slavery as they can with no remorse and cashing in on the available profits and thinking “well, maybe human suffering is okay if the rest of civilisation can make this much off of that suffering” in EU4 and it does not prevent neo-Nazi’s from playing Nazi Germany or making whatever country they are from into a fascist state because fascism is easily the best form of government in HoI4 due to the fact that you can do whatever you want and expand a lot easier.
In short, Paradox wants to depict the history, but does not want their games to pass judgement on said history, which itself IS judgement. Without any kind of condemnation from the game towards the player, either in the gameplay (slave revolts costing huge amounts of money and making the populous at home more abolitionist for example, showing that the slaves are not just a form of profit but PEOPLE) or even just a piece of text saying “hey, we’ve allowed you to do this so that you can see and understand why people did what they did, but we want to remind you that these horrible things are not just history, they are part of who we are and we have to remember this when looking towards the future”.
As a last remark I wont talk about Stellaris and how it enables the absolute worst in people, making genocides commonplace and making it pretty hard to create a utopia that isn’t built on the suffering of other species. I understand these are just games, but they affect the way we think, the political choices we make, the way we look at the world around us. Never forget that.
