As a Paradox fan, I can promise you that Drew Durnil did not make a mod about recolonizing the world. Someone else did, and he made a video where he watched the AI play a game with that mod active. Is his computer a racist?
Bc like as far as I can tell the mod op is criticizing is basically allowing you to let’s play real horrors that have happened, not just like a generic fantasy conquest.
I’m no history expert, but I am fairly confident that the European powers of 1933 (the start date of HoI4) did not recolonize the United States of America. Hell, at that point, they hadn’t even decolonized Africa from the first time they colonized it. France still had massive colonial holdings, that their government fled to after the fall of France to Nazi forces.
Ppl are straight up saying “hey this hurts me personally” and your first instinct is to tell them that it shouldn’t hurt them. Even if you can’t understand why it hurts them, why can’t you just respect the fact that it does? You don’t need to understand in order to respect it
No one is responsible for your feelings but you. They’re not denying that it hurts them, they just can’t respect the fact that it hurts them because that hurt is logically unreasonable. The reason they can’t respect it is because they understand the reasons behind it, not despite them.
I’m not reblogging this to lecture u or make u feel bad, but just genuinely ask you to try and look at it from a different perspective.
You are, but moving past that, could you do the same? Could you understand, let alone respect, why other people might not care that you have decided to feel pain over someone watching a historical map simulator playing itself? Who is to blame there? The creators of the game, for making a game about WW2 that allows... the conquest of territory? The modmaker, for rearranging the starting playing piece in a natural outcrowth of creative exercise? Drew, for running the simulation? Or, again, his computer, for playing it? Hell, unless you decide to play as Hitler, your computer plays as Hitler literally every game you start.
The idea that someone would willing role play either of them makes me viscerally uncomfortable and upset. Even if you’re ok with it does not mean others are not allowed to be upset
It also doesn’t mean others have to be upset that you’re upset at them just because unlike you, they have a sufficient grasp on the difference between fact and fiction and the ability to interact with and participate in ludonarrative exercises that they can recognize would be undesirable to experience, if not straight up morally abhorrent, if done in real life?
In Crusader Kings 2, I can play as King William the Conqueror, but the game doesn’t end until 1453, and in order to play much past the 1090s, “I” (as King William) must marry and sire an heir, who I will play upon King William’s death. Why is conquering England so much worse than conquering Ireland as his ahistorical son, who was born through actions I undertook in the game to propagate my bloodline and allow my game to continue?
Are Alec Guinness, Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellen, Robert Carlyle, Bruno Ganz literal Nazis for engaging in perhaps the most serious and complete form of roleplaying as a Nazi, by portraying literal Hitler in a serious dramatic movie, that attempts to accurately portray the dictator’s life and character? These five men have more accurately roleplayed Hitler than any Hearts of Iron player I’ve ever seen (as most Hearts of Iron players diverge significantly from Hitler’s personality and from recorded history; merely as a consequence of winning WW2 whether they play as the good guys, such as America or Free France, or the bad guys, such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union).
But if you know you are not racist, then they’re probably not talking about you
Except, by the standards of those people making those sort of posts, they are a racist/Nazi. Before Tumblr banned the porn and everyone disappeared, I used to get called a Nazi all the time for simply stating that it was a mistake to strengthen and embolden the fascist oppression narrative by acting in a way supportive of theur worldview. I have a whole tag dedicated to it, “Pouring Jet Fuel on Nazis”.
You being upset by anyone who would choose to play as a historical villain, apparently regardless of their motivation (or even complete lack of motivation) for doing so, demonstrates that. Sure, some people play these games for the vicarious racism, but when most EU4 players decide to literally press a button to totally exterminate the native population of a province, their only thought is to make the Number Preventing The Map From Turning Their Colour go down faster.
In EU4, I enjoy unifying Japan. Usually, one of the first things I do upon unifying Japan and unlocking colonialism is to colonize the Kamchatka Peninsula, cross the Bering Strait to colonize the Aleutian Islands, and then colonize the west coast of America from Vancouver to Baja California before the Europeans get there.
Is this an “acceptable” fictional colonial genocide to you? If I colonize the New World as Finland, who is European but never became a colonial power, is that okay?
