Aggressiveness: 10. Ferocity: 10. Come visit his country …
As some of my readers know, I have been having fun conquering the world as Japan in Hearts of Iron 2, and that I’m reporting it all cynically in the tone of a Japanese leader forced to war to defend Asia against colonialism. Before I played Japan I had a go as Germany and didn’t do very well – the Soviets declared war on me in 1942 (I can’t think why!) and I got wiped out because my army was busy trying to secure oil in Africa.
Something noticeable about Hearts of Iron (HOI) and its successors is that there is no genocide option, even though some people believe the Holocaust was crucial to German war aims and so should probably be in the game. I understand that there is some debate about whether the Holocaust was a net benefit for the Nazi war machine, but some historians argue that the Holocaust policy developed slowly, piece-by-piece, in response to changing economic and industrial demands, and was actually primarily driven by the need to secure economic resources, especially food. Taking this as the basis for the Holocaust, it’s easy to imagine that a mechanism to represent it could be included in the game, to make it easier for certain countries to develop rapidly in the run-up to total war, or to respond to war needs.
The easiest way would be to incorporate a slider, that runs from 0 to 100 representing just how horrific your intended genocide is. Maybe 5 just means marriage and employment restrictions, while 100 is the fully mechanized destruction of entire races. The process is abstracted, and essentially represents a transformation of money, manpower and transport capacity into a reduction of supply needs and an increase in industrial capacity (or even an increase in supplies). This is pretty much what the historians I linked above argue: that the Holocaust was designed the way it was in the steps it was because it was aimed initially at seizing the economic assets of European Jews, to make production more efficient, and then at restricting their food consumption in order to ensure that other Germans didn’t starve. This is also what Stalin was doing with his “dekulakization” in the 1930s – forcing small, unproductive landholders off of their smallholdings into large collective farms, and because these farms were intended to feed many more people than those who worked in them, the excess population of smallholders would have been an economic deadweight – hence they were sent to the camps to die. Plus of course, when Germany invaded Eastern Europe they expropriated huge amounts of food and money, and essentially instituted a policy of starvation to ensure that no untermenschen used food that could have been feeding Germans. Under this analysis of the Holocaust, it was beneficial for the German war effort. If so, it should be modeled in the game in the interests of historical plausibility[1]. Wouldn’t it be great if when you were starting to lose you could slide your slider up to 100 so that you weren’t vulnerable to blockades? The computer could even use the demographic composition of your empire to give you options about which race to exterminate. We’re all about historical plausibility, right?
Suggesting such a process sounds kind of sick, doesn’t it? Which is why Paradox Interactive made a specific, explicit decision not to model this in the game. I remember somewhere a statement from Paradox about this, but I can’t find it any more – maybe it was in the Hearts of Iron manual that I no longer have. Anyway, we can find this on their forum rules for HOI3:
NOTE: There will not be any gulags or deathcamps (including POW camps) to build in Hearts of Iron3, nor will there be the ability to simulate the Holocaust or systematic purges, so I ask you not to discuss these topics as they are not related to this game. Thank You. Threads bringing up will be closed without discussion.
NOTE: Strategic bombing in HoI3 will be abstracted and not allow you to terror bomb civilians specifically. Chemical weapons will also not be included in the game. Any threads that complain about this issue will be closed without discussion.
Not only did they decide not to model these things, but they make very clear that they aren’t going to talk about their decision. We all know why: games that model the holocaust are beyond poor taste, and any gaming company that included such a mechanic in their wargame would be toast pretty fast.
It is, however, okay to model genocide in Europa Universalis 3. Yesterday commenter Paul pointed me to this post in which someone trying the game for the first time talks about how uneasy the colonization process makes her feel. I agree with a lot of this writer’s criticisms of the way the Native Americans are portrayed in the game, and I would like to add two.
- Terra nullius: by making colonizable land grey and devoid of units or cultural structures of any type, the game essentially buys in to the legal fiction of terra nullius – that no one owned the land or had a use for it before white people came. This legal fiction was overturned in Australia in 1994, and where not openly declared the general principle often underlay the willingness of white invaders to breach treaty agreements (as they did again and again, for example, when dealing with native Americans). In the game, although the natives are known to be there (you get a count in the colony window), they are not represented as unit types and structures the way Europeans are – the land is not owned in the sense that European land is owned, it just has some people on it. Terra nullius is a pernicious and evil concept that does not reflect the actual state of indigenous life, only the racist perceptions of the colonizers, and it’s sad to see it being reflected so clearly in this game
- Elision of native struggle: A common phenomenon in western popular and academic depiction of colonization is the minimization or dismissal of indigenous struggle. This is very common in Australia, and until the publication of Blood on the Wattle, popular understanding of Aboriginal history was that they didn’t really fight back, a belief that derives from early 20th century racial ideas of Aborigines as “weak.” Obviously in the US this is not so readily done, but for example the Sand Creek Massacre used to be referred to as the “Battle of Sand Creek,” though there were very few Indian soldiers involved, and popular lore about Custer’s Last Stand doesn’t usually include awareness that he was attacking a civilian camp at dawn when he was beaten. In the game, native struggle is implied in the aggressiveness and ferocity statistics for each province, and the effect they have on colony growth, but it is not actually visible or witnessed through the need to coordinate military actions against active opponents as happens in any European conflict between even the most irrelevant powers – it is a low background noise to your successful colonization, mostly
I think these two points show that the designers of Europa Universalis haven’t just implemented a game with a colonization strategy; they have implemented a game with a colonization strategy that implicitly reinforces common modern misconceptions about how colonization worked that tend to underplay its genocidal and military aspects (see also the way natives are absorbed into your population once it becomes an official province – this takes about 20 years and is in no way reflective of how colonization absorbed real native populations – such absorption took more than 100 years in Australia, for example, and only occurred at all through massive force and state coercion). I don’t really think this is a moral decision, but I also don’t think it’s defensible. There are lots of other ways that the game could have been designed, from making America the same as Asia to having a single Native American “state” and a different conquering mechanism – or, as April Daniels suggests, just a better and richer experience playing the Natives. There is DLC for this, but that’s not a defense, and neither are the butthurt bleatings of the gamers in the comments. It’s also noteworthy that the people attacking Daniels in comments of that blog are tending to subscribe to the same misconceptions that are buried in the game itself – there wasn’t much war, might makes right, smallpox did it not us!, natives really did get merged into the colonial population without a fight! This kind of response just shows that the west hasn’t come to terms with its colonial past yet.
So here’s what happened: Paradox spent years developing a game set in Europe in which they explicitly avoided modeling a genocide that occurred in Europe and that was crucial to the historical plausibility of the game; they also spent years developing a game set in Europe in which they explicitly developed a model for genocide that occurred outside Europe and that is crucial to the historical plausibility of the game. The former decision was probably (to the best of my recollection) made for moral and political reasons; defenders of the latter decision want me to believe it was for game mechanical reasons, even though the model they developed happens to reproduce some common misconceptions about how the native American genocide unfolded. I’m unconvinced. I think the designers didn’t consider one genocide to have the same weight as the other. Which isn’t to say that they consciously made that decision, but neither did all the cowboy movie directors in the 1980s who made multiple movies that included the Sand Creek Massacre, but didn’t ever get around to depicting Babi Yar from the Nazi perspective. Our culture makes some stories acceptable even though they are steeped in evil, and some stories unacceptable. Many people reproduce those stories without thinking, and that is what the designers did. (It’s also worth noting that Paradox is a Swedish company, and Sweden was not a colonial country in recent time; maybe for them the horrors of world war 2 are much closer than the horrors of genocidal America, and everything that happened in that period in those far-flung places is just a story).
I think there are some big questions buried in EU3, which we also need to ask when we play GTA or watch some nasty slasher pic, and April Daniels asked some of those questions in her blog post. Those questions are also relevant to the genocide issue in EU3 but they’re bigger than that. Why do we make games about war and killing at all? Why do we think it’s okay to drive around LA killing cops but we universally object to rape stories? Why are we so complacent about the destruction of whole cultures in Australia and America, but so touchy about mass murder in Europe? And why do some fanboys get so stupidly butthurt when people who enjoy the game (or the movie) analyze it a little more critically than wow!wow!wow!? My Ottoman Empire has begun its colonial project, in Cameroon and Cayenne and St Helena, and I’m playing that part of the project with the same sarcastic amusement with which I describe the Empire’s “reclamation” of knowledge in Northern Italy; I will probably kill a lot of natives if I have to, and convert the rest[3]. I’m not particularly fussed about this. But I’m also aware that this game is racist on many levels, and it includes genocide as a central mechanic. Some people may not be comfortable doing that, and they may want to write about it. I think it’s possible to simultaneously enjoy the game and accept these things, but I also think the game could have done better on this issue. If I’m going to kill natives and steal their land, why should it be different to the way I kill Germans and take their land – is there something the designers want to say here? There is a long, long way to go before people in the west can accept and understand the genocide that made America and Australia possible, and the deep wounds colonialism left on Africa. Until we do, I guess we can expect that games like EU3 will fall short of genuinely trying to describe the histories and cultures of the people who were exterminated.
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fn1: though actually a very interesting experiment would occur if paradox were to include the Holocaust as a single historical decision that was actually bad for the German war effort, and secretly spied on players[2] to find out how many clicked “Yes, do it!” even though the decision is negative.
fn2: or used NSA data
fn3: actually since I westernized[4] I’m so far on the “open-minded” slider that I can’t actually generate missionaries, so I can’t convert anyone. I’ve conquered so much of Europe that my culture is more christian than Muslim. What to do…?
fn4: racist much?
Compromise and Conceit 
January 6, 2014 at 8:28 am
I haven’t played EU IV (yet, as I want to import a Norse empire from CKII), so my thoughts are based on reading rather than play experience. But the things that struck me while reading the linked article were:
1. The author started up a colonialist empire, colonized the Americas and then complained as though she was forced to do so because there was no explicit “Are you sure you want to genocide the native populace?” question. At the end of the article she says she’ll play again, but stick to European based nations. It’d seem that there was always the moral option she wanted to see explicitly called out. She simply had to not colonize the Americas despite playing a nation with bonuses towards that objective.
2. In my understanding of the game play, to model modern morality, she could have allied with the native Americans and then vassalised and absorbed them (which appears to be a gradual federation/merger process similar to the American or Australian states uniting). Then the colonial process (which is pretty abstract [1]) would instead represent your Native American allies convincing other smaller tribes to join up and organising them rather than your settlers slaughtering them.
3. In game, there does need to be a decision on how small a tribe to represent and what level of population/organisation needs to be set as the cut-off for being a nation (i.e. showing up on the map). That doesn’t mean the choices made were correct (terra nullius), but at some point we need to accept “OK, aboriginal tribe X gets into the game, but the Lower Putney Baker gang don’t”. Selecting this point will require determining who you want to piss off.
4. In game, the most racist/biased model is actually the tech advancement rate, with “Western” representing the best and (I think) Native American being the worst [2]. Given the starting point of the game, this could be better modeled by:
a) having a renaissance process available for all cultures that allow them to go through a cultural advancement and then get better tech progress
b) by default setting the European nations to have already been through this (which did best represent the tech process that was in place over this time period)
c) adding an (unhistorical) random option that makes slabs of continents get allocated a random tech level so people can play a game were the Americas invade Europe.
Allowing the renaissance option to be available without being “Westernization” would allow other nations to have some chance. Copying someone else (be it the Western nations or someone else who had a renaissance) should still be easier than doing it yourself.
5. There is a element of time since the atrocity that factors into where gameplay can go. WW2 is still living memory while the race for Africa is a history book (despite it ongoing impacts). To compromise, I’d support EU IV having more options of “The natives really don’t want you settling this area. Are you willing to negotiate and find compromises?” or “Some hothead has juts killed a bunch of innocent people. Your nation is scum, ain’t it?”. That would acknowledge what really went on and provide some possibility of playing a better world than the one we’ve really had. The other option is either a) no game because colonization is wrong or b) every tribe gets represented and individually crushed.
[1] i.e. just sending a colonist and having them sit in the new province for a while.
[2] Barring DLC, which makes it the equal best.
January 6, 2014 at 10:04 am
I agree with most of that except point 1. I read that article more as being the complaints of someone who was expecting to enjoy the colonial experience along with everything else but then realized that it’s a bit sick. Buyer’s regret? I don’t have a problem with someone deciding the gameplay suddenly seems a little too close to home, and writing an article about it. It’s not like sticking a label on saying “this is a genocide game” suddenly makes the game immune to criticism for being a genocide game.
I have the impression that 2 is not possible for the majority of the territory you’re on – you just take it, and there are no native institutions to ally with as such. I could be wrong though. When I have colonized a little more and experienced it I think I will write some thoughts on it. In general the colonization process seems much flatter and weaker than the European war process, and I guess for us post-colonialists this is a bit disappointing. Rather than suggesting it should not be in the game, I think it would be nice to have an opportunity to go about the colonial process differently. If it were more richly described and the natives were given the agency they actually had in real life then you could attempt to negotiate different colonial paths – from genocidal through conversion to collaboration. I don’t think there is a genuinely good colonial option in real life but you could model a richer diversity of Victorian-era models than the game currently allows. Your point 5 suggests some options for how to do it through random events and national decisions.
Re: your point 4, yes this “westernization” idea is pretty atrocious. I hadn’t conceived of alternatives but your renaissance idea is an excellent one. We know that Islam spread through Asia primarily by trade, and the game starts with Islam penetrating Asia all the way to Malaysia; and yet the Muslim states have much worse progression on trade tech than the westerners. This is both ahistorical and terribly punitive if you want to start a small Asian state. Setting up different tech starting points and allowing revolutions on the way would make for a much more interesting Asian/Muslim experience, and make some small states really fun to play. We know, also, that some Indonesian and Chinese explorers probably found Australia, so starting some small Asian states with good naval tech and the possibility of a random colonial tech event would make for a really interesting Asian development scenario. The Pacific Island expansion, for example, indicates that some Pacific nations had the Quest for the New World national idea long before the west did. But in game they are low tech and advance slowly.
This game is really interesting and absorbing, but I would have thought that by the 3rd or 4th iteration they would have fleshed out some of these non-European elements of the game.
January 6, 2014 at 2:13 pm
Paradox appears to offer a core game play (i.e. European in EU, Christian in CK) in the base game then expand it in DLC. Given the depth of game play, I don’t object to this business model. I also think that playing with anything less than all the DLC is basically deliberately hamstringing the game. So I dislike anyone who disregards DLC for games like this, then criticizes the base game for not supporting stuff that makes the developer some money (which I believe the author of this article did).
Hopefully the random Americas generation DLC coming out in Jan will do something to address this in EU IV. I won’t be playing the game until I’ve got a chance to look at that.
“I have the impression that 2 is not possible for the majority of the territory you’re on – you just take it, and there are no native institutions to ally with as such.”
The comments from the linked article suggest that major native groups are there (i.e. the American Indian tribes that you’d have heard of), but not all of them (i.e. in my brief looks I couldn’t find a way to play as an Australian Aboriginal tribe, but I did find names for such tribes/nations to be mentioned).
January 6, 2014 at 2:34 pm
Haha, were you thinking of playing an Aboriginal nation too? I had considered that as a challenge – try and develop Australia to the point where you can fend off British colonists and maybe even ally with Britain to stomp NZ[1].
From the linked article the suggestion is that there are only one or two nations in the whole American continent, and because you don’t have colonial powers if you play as one of them you can’t do much – there is not much land to conquer. Just adding the colonial option for native Americans from teh get-go would fix that (I wonder if that can be hacked with a single line of code?)
Also I take your point about DLC but I didn’t realize that was the way the game is viewed, and four or five hours of research to learn how to play on various forums didn’t give me that impression either. I certainly haven’t felt the need for any DLC and my game hasn’t been lacking anything for it, so I think that view might be idisocyncratic[2].
I have heard that EU IV is buggy as all hell, and i’m deep into an EU3 game, but if htere is a random Americas DLC I would be very interested to get it and try. I found links to another DLC that enables one to play any province on the planet … I’m thinking of giving that a try and playing Australia. Now I know more about the game I’m also interested in two other scenarios:
1. play a weak Asian nation and start the game with a university blitz, so you basically get dragged up through tech levels rapidly by your western neighbours and can very rapidly dominate Asia
2. return to attempting to play one of the small SE Asian Island states that I was playing before, with the goal of establishing the pirate kingdom I read about in one of the Flashman novels.
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fn1: which is obviously not colonialism because reasons.
fn2: i.e. I don’t think that way and I’m going to arbitrarily define myself as normal
January 17, 2014 at 8:22 am
Looking through an EU4 wiki, I just saw there is one native assimilation related event – but you have to be the US for it to trigger. The event is:
Cultural assimilation of Native Americans
George Washington and Henry Knox has formulated a policy to encourage the assimilation of Native Americans and transform their culture to European-American culture. Education is the primary method in the acculturation process for minorities and the immigrants from Europe has caused a growing public support for education to encourage a standard set of cultural values and practices for the majority of citizens to share. The six-point plan for civilization as formulated by George Washington: 1. impartial justice toward Native Americans 2. regulated buying of Native American lands 3. promotion of commerce 4. promotion of experiments to civilize or improve Native American society 5. presidential authority to give presents 6. punishing those who violated Native American rights.
Choosing to go with it increases revolt risk and colonial growth rates, leaving the natives along gives a minor hit to your diplomatic points (assuming I’m reading it right).
The American events actually look very interesting, but (for my limited understanding) they appear to only be about Britain and the US. It’s a pity. Allowing other nations to have colonies spin off with a series of event chains would be interesting too, as would presenting some of the US options to other nations.
January 17, 2014 at 8:38 am
Actually, on this topic I just spotted that the latest EU4 DLC (Conquest of Paradise):
also offers the possibility to play as a Native American nation and master the federation mechanics and national ideas that are unique for the nations.
The age of exploration is brought to life in this epic game of trade, diplomacy, warfare and exploration by Paradox Development Studio, the Masters of Strategy. Europa Universalis IV gives you control of a nation to rule and to build into an empire that lasts through the ages.
Maybe they listened to the colonialism rants on the internet.
January 18, 2014 at 3:07 pm
Maybe they listened to the colonialism rants on the internet.
This thread got linked to on 4chan a few days ago, and on that 4chan thread people were complaining about this very thing, and also complaining that Paradox had “spoiled” the game experience by making America hard to conquer. They were blaming it explicitly on the post I linked to in the OP (and of course, referencing the “bitch” who wrote it). But maybe this was Paradox’s plan all along?
I have now had a bit more of a chance to play some colonial aspects of the game (including sending a colonist to Australia! Perth will be muslim soon …) and I have to say that any suggestion that the colonialism gameplay is not a genocide mechanic is just laughable. Consider my actual play experience from Boina, Madagascar.
1. I colonize Boina. It has 8000 natives with relatively high aggressiveness and ferocity
2. There is an uprising. I lose some colonists
3. I send a squad of 2 Maurician Infantry (probably mixed German/French troops) to Boina to “keep the peace.” Colonial growth is at this stage at -2/year due to “tropical” and “native resistance”
4. There is an uprising of 4000 native troops – my Mauricians slaughter them and they retreat.
5. Check the native population: it has reduced to 6500. Colonial growth is now positive.
6. This happens two more times, both times my Mauricians triumph
7. Check the population number: it has reduced to 0. Colonial growth is now 20/year, the maximum possible in a tropical environment.
So what happened in this dynamic? I sent some European troops to my colony to kill all the natives so my colonists could flourish. This is commonly referred to as “genocide.”
Also my Cameroon territory informed me a few years back that they would begin trading slaves. My choices in response to this consist of pressing the button “excellent,” as there is no other.
It would be good if they made some generic events for the big empires, that could trigger randomly, perhaps drawn from quite a long list. As it stands, if I am playing in a world where Castille colonizes a huge swathe of America, there doesn’t appear to be any option for it to have a war of independence. This could theoretically happen to any large, distant colonial outpost for any major empire. There could be a series of smaller events that affect the size and nature of this rebellion too. It also seems that in general, if rebels don’t occupy an area that coincides with a pre-existing nation, they don’t form a new nation, even if (as in the case of Castille in my world for about 3 years) they hold a large swathe of territory for a long time. That would make life more complicated!
January 18, 2014 at 8:54 pm
re cultural assimilation – IIRC the Cherokee tried this. Imported teachers, apprenticed their young men to trades, invented an alphabet, began printing. The reward was the Trail of Tears.
Found out recently that the first move of the conquistadors was to marry Aztec and Inca nobility and – in the Aztec case, learn Nahuatl. Absent the impact of disease, they would themselves have probably been assimilated quite quickly (or at least ended up as hybrid rulers, much like the Brits in India).
January 19, 2014 at 10:51 am
“This thread got linked to on 4chan a few days ago”
Fuck. Let’s burn this thread to the ground before an unstoppable pestilence flows through the link [1]
[1] I’m not referring to the tg board on 4chan, but some of the others are horrid.
“if I am playing in a world where Castille colonizes a huge swathe of America, there doesn’t appear to be any option for it to have a war of independence.”
I’m still working my way through CKII to EU4, but I’ve recently seen some comments complaining that you don’t have the same control over overseas colonies. Maybe their arms length vassals by default? I’ll let you know in about 6 months when I get to EU4.
“Found out recently that the first move of the conquistadors was to marry Aztec and Inca nobility and – in the Aztec case, learn Nahuatl. Absent the impact of disease, they would themselves have probably been assimilated quite quickly (or at least ended up as hybrid rulers, much like the Brits in India).”
Wow, that’s interesting. Where did you see that? Is there an good book on it?
January 20, 2014 at 11:31 pm
Well, I can’t have been very popular on 4chan because it seems to have not infected me. Maybe I’m too small a host …
I too would be interested in the aztec story. I know nothing about it!
January 21, 2014 at 4:30 pm
Came across it in an article on marriage strategies and conquest (Ottomans did it too, in the Balkans). I’ll see if i can find it.
Just finished Peter Watson’s The Great Divide on the cultural and other differences between the New World and the Old. Fascinating, if often speculative. Glendinning on the Aztecs is well spoken of, but I haven’t yet read it myself.
January 21, 2014 at 6:52 pm
Here’s a link to some neat charts of Ottoman and conquistador marriage alliances: http://www.academia.edu/t/fnJvX/2788860/Entangling_Elites_a_visual_comparison_of_the_marriage_network_of_the_Ottomans_in_Southeastern_Europe_14th-16th_century_and_of_the_Spanish_Conquistadores_in_Central_and_South_America_16th_century_
June 27, 2016 at 12:45 pm
Holy crap. My kid plays this and I hate it. He does evrything imaginable. Any strategy at all. He has recently, after I read the book “Night” constructed a genocide against jews for fun. How is this game fun? Destroying an entire culture, 6 million people, for fun?
June 27, 2016 at 4:33 pm
Thanks for commenting Rebecca. I’m not sure what game your child is playing – Hearts of Iron doesn’t allow any genocide. Europa Universalis does but as far as I know Jews don’t exist as a separate killable group. Are you sure you’re right about what your child is doing?