So I grew up reading books about World War Two.
As a kid my dad and my grandad were always big into military history, and I was a hungry reader; I started reading about The War – the only war ever, the big boy war – because like any kid I liked machines and like any kid with probable undiagnosed autism I really liked stuff; numbers, systems, information. And there was so much information about the war! I would read histories of the whole conflict, books on the eastern front, the western front, about German tanks and Soviet planes and Japanese warships, British commandos and (I guess) American guns. World War Two occupies a special place in history, the meeting of the final gasps of the age of European imperialism with its bloody, full-scale wars of death and destruction, and the beginning of the information age, the relentless modern documentation of all that exists.
-the Panzer IV Ausf F was the first model to use a long-barrelled 75mm gun capable of firing armour-piercing shells, which changed its role from fire support vehicle to main battle tank, usurping the Panzer III, which had too small a turret ring to be upgraded with a 75mm gun –
-Chiang Kai-shek blew the dykes of the Yellow River in Henan in 1938 to stop the Japanese advance, killing hundreds of thousands of people-
-the FG42 was a weapon designed for the German Fallschirmjager or paratroopers, and was one of the world’s first assault rifles-
-the Red Army tried to train dogs strapped with explosives to run under German tanks-
-On the 10th of June 1944 men of the Waffen-SS Panzer Division Das Reich killed 643 civilians in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane-
-the Japanese Zero fighter achieved a kill ratio of twelve to one in its early deployments-
An endless array of facts. Britain’s pulpy Commando comics too were part of my childhood, bought for £1 every weekend as a treat when I went to go buy my dad the Saturday newspapers.
-Battle of Britain, Scramble!, MERCY FOR NONE, VLR – Very Long Range, Tank Buster, JAP TRAP, DEATH FROM THE SKY, Phantom Nazi–
Simple stories. Contextless narratives of machines and men clashing in exciting scenarios taken straight from history and made my childhood toys. My grandad made a toy tank for me out of wood and thrilled I painted it with him in German colours, because the Germans had the coolest tanks. I imagined battles that had never been, thought about how this or that moment in 1939-1945 could have gone differently.
I knew the war. But I didn’t know the war, not really. My grandparents remembered the Blitz, but nobody from my family who served was around when I was a kid. I met a Holocaust survivor, a friend of my father’s, a Jewish man who as a child had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, and I read his book and he told me his stories. I listened respectfully and he did make a deep impression on me. I thought I had learned, that I understood his experiences. But let’s be frank, as a stupid kid I was more interested in Panzer General. A CD-ROM where sprites of German tanks stormed Poland, Russia, D-Day (you could only play as the Germans). I played Panzer Commander, a crude simulation game where you drove low-poly tanks around barren maps. I really liked playing as the tanks of the Großdeutschland regiment.
-On 22 April 1941, soldiers of the Infantry Regiment Grossdeutschland committed a war crime in the town cemetery of Pančevo when 35 men and one woman were executed as a reprisal for the deaths of four German soldiers.-
And then technology improved. Medal of Honor, Wolfenstein, Battlefield 1942. All the places and events and weapons from my books now virtual, removed even further from real history. Wake Island was a place where I drove Jeeps after Japanese soldiers, Stalingrad where me and other strangers were fighting like hell to take out the Soviet players holding that last flag. “Control 35 authentic Axis and Allied vehicles”, the game promised, and brother, you could. It was the post-Half-Life PC gaming revolution and post-Saving Private Ryan in war movies, and ‘authentic’ was the big deal; it was the 2000s, and World War Two had finished over half a century ago.
-one explosive online battle-
-prepare to face the enemy-
-fight your way to victory in the most intense battles of World War Two-
But Battlefield only really worked with friends, was too much of an obvious shooting competition, not authentic enough. Shooters like Medal of Honour were scripted movie-adventures, not full of database noise enough. In the name of authenticity, in the name of giving the generations raised on the decontextualised data of old wars more numbers, more of that severed past, where could you go?
In the 1990s the pioneering work of Sid Meier’s Fireaxis and Will Wright’s Maxis had created the worlds of Civilisation and SimCity, which took real-life and decontextualised it with much more success than old Panzer General, with much more detail than Battlefield. Civilisation gave you human history as a digital boardgame, Mao Zedong and Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt as avatars for human players to rewrite history with. SimCity simplified and de-ideologized modern urban planning into a game of number-balancing. In Civilisation, history ends with modern globalisation and neoliberalism. SimCity was inspired by libertarian Jay Wright Forrester’s book Urban Dynamics. These games were not actually separate from the history and politics they appropriated. But they looked it.
-It’s kind of hopeless to approach simulations like that, as predictive endeavours. But we’ve kind of caricatured our systems. SimCity was always meant to be a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model of the way a city works. – Will Wright-
-It was an admittedly simplified understanding of political history, but that was intentional. Unlike our military games, which relied on technical manuals like the Jane’s Fighting Aircraft series, research for Civilization tended to come from more generalized history books, some even aimed at children. I wanted to simulate the overall experience of building an empire without getting bogged down in the specifics of how existing empires had done it. – Sid Meier-
People really liked to think they were outside of politics, anyway. Liked to enjoy history as a sprint to the finish, to build cities as an exercise in the simple management of zones and numbers. What was the harm in that?
-If this game was any more realistic, it’d be illegal to turn it off! – SimCity 2000 boxart-
I became a total Republican playing this game. – Larry Borowsky, SimCity player, 1992-
Paradox Interactive aren’t famous for first-person shooters, or real-time strategy games, or even Sid’s boardgame 4X games. Their flagship in-house games are called ‘grand strategy’, intricately-detailed simulators not of cities or ant colonies or theme parks but periods of human history, simulating the economics, wars and geopolitics of differing eras from the highest point of view possible (much of the time in grand strategy games is spent looking at a map, zoomed out as far as you can go, studying the whole world as a series of coloured abstractions of nation-states, empires or kingdoms). Crusader Kings lets you play Medieval Europe – Europa Universallis is for the early modern era. The Victoria series covers the age of Victorian imperialism.
Hearts of Iron, meanwhile, is all about World War Two.
When I was a kid Panzer General would start on the Spanish Civil War, with you as the Condor Legion battling Spanish Republicans. In Hearts of Iron this is one of the start points possible –but you don’t have to win it, or send in troops, or even really bother with it at all. You can fuck off Spain and have Germany invade the USSR in 1937 or as Japan stay out of China, focus all on the war with the US like the IJN wanted to. You can pour British money into tank development and spend the 1930s preparing to attack France – you can rewrite the USA into a fascist economy and conquer Mexico while everyone in Europe is doing their own thing. What SimCity did for the idea of the city – here is the playground, kids, go nuts with it– Hearts of Iron does for the deadliest conflict in human history. We’re way beyond Commando comics, toy tanks, Battlefield and Panzer General now. In the past we were limited by the scope of the project; Panzer General aimed to simulate being a, uh, panzer general. Medal of Honor was a game about the infantryman’s experience in the style of my pulpy Commando comics. Even Battlefield’s free-for-all multiplayer simulations of whole battles did not move beyond that.
Hearts of Iron does not stop at individual battles or events, moments here and there. It aims to swallow World War Two whole and shit it out for the consumption of the player at leisure, predigested. In Hearts of Iron history begins in 1936, fascism, communism and liberalism make numbers go up and down, and the individual perspective of the war, the experience at the ground level, is as absent as the existence of real citizens in SimCity, as abstracted away as Civilisation’s leaders drifting contextless through a floating timeline of recognisable, meaningless emblems of human history coming and going as pieces on a game board. Video games, the artform of the 1980s, the creative success story of the neoliberal age, the great poachers of theme, aesthetic and thought in the service of the creation of ever-greater, more enjoyable virtual experiences, are still struggling to completely conquer reality. The uncanny valley and the limitations of human labour and the failure of VR remain persistent. But with the existence of a game where you can’t just play as a Panzer general or a Wehrmacht soldier but as Hitler himself, the SimFührer in his computerized bunker looking at his virtual map of Europe, encompassing every aspect of the Third Reich and the war it waged against the world, the medium of digital entertainment has in some sense at least succeeded in conquering history.
–How Hitler could have won:
>don’t terror-bomb Britain, focus on RAF facilities
>Demand Mussolini not be a retard with Balkans
>Don’t siege Leningrad, take it immediately
– Twitter user ‘Royalist Weeb’-
-I knew I wanted each civilization to have its most iconic ruler at the helm, but German law prohibited any media that mentioned Hitler by name, regardless of context, and it felt wrong in any case to create a game where he could potentially come off as the good guy. – Sid Meier-
-Will showed me the game and he said, ‘No one likes it, because you can’t win.’ But I thought it was great. I foresaw an audience of megalomaniacs who want to control the world. – Jeff Braun, Maxis cofounder-
In the end I never got into Hearts of Iron. But I was a little kid who without really comprehending what fascism was thought the Germans were the ‘cool’ side in World War Two – and I have played hundreds of hours of Victoria, various Total War games, and Civilisation and SimCity. When I see people today online, who claim to be various types of esoteric right-winger, whose perception of history seems to be definitively moulded by this contextless world of savescumming, gaming and “map-painting” – I realise that I’m not so different. I enjoy alternate history novels (have written most of one, set in a 1980s version of Japanese puppet state Manchukuo) and reading Wikipedia articles about historical topics and binging pop-history or military history books on holidays. I understand that a lot of these people didn’t start out as fascists or Bushido militarists or Pinochet fans or believers in the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire – they, like me, grew up on depoliticised, gamified, datafied history, and like Japan’s database animals, as Hiroki Azuma calls the figure of the otaku, couldn’t help but collect as much of it as possible, not to fit into any grand narrative or greater understanding of anything but simply because it was data, there to be collected, as some people collect stuffed animals or robot figures or anime girls.
Even more than other otaku hobbies, though the collection of history can be toxic, because while Civilisation, Hearts of Iron, Battlefield etc. all pretend in that SimCity fashion to be apolitical, in fact they are political, and by ingesting history as statistics, neat facts, anecdotes and aesthetics you poison yourself, and can find yourself caught in the sort of insane drift that leads to you proclaiming that you know how Hitler could have won the war because you did it in a video game once. And that you’re not a Hitler fan, no, but just saying…don’t those Wehrmacht boys have nice uniforms, isn’t the Tiger tank an impressive machine…and then one day you’re posting online about how hah, Hitler was right anyway, fuck you leftists/commies/society/girls etc., and you start up another strategy game and see which contextless war you can figure out how to win today, as the most based faction with the best uniforms and highest weapon stats and the nicest flag.
It doesn’t have to go that way. About a decade ago I visited Auschwitz for myself, in the middle of winter – I saw the ruins of the gas chambers and the skeletal remains of the old barracks for prisoners, their intact chimneys sticking out of the endless white of the snow like strange brickwork trees. I walked upon snow-dressed grass where the Nazis buried those they shot en masse at the end of the war, and I felt a sincere horror I’ve never felt before or since. I realised what that old Holocaust survivor I had been so privileged to meet in my youth had been trying to tell me, the man who I had listened to but not really heard. It was a humbling moment. It helped to shake me out of my tendency towards being an otaku of history, to know that it was real; of course, I knew that it was real, but over the years, while I’d never been close to becoming a fascist – Commando comics and Medal of Honor had a kind of morality to them, even if Battlefield didn’t – my perspective on history had become blurred, smudged by so much ingested data, retained information, context-free fact-collecting. I got away from that stuff a bit eventually, and my Auschwitz trip is a memory that always helps me to remain grounded. And there’s plenty of other people who play and love these games who never needed anything like that in the first place, who are just normal people.
So no, strategy games do not make you a fascist. They don’t teach history, either. They remove it from itself. There’s nothing wrong with that – I’ll play some Total War today, I’ll read a bit of a historical novel later. But if you’re going to take part in the neoliberal commodification, gamification and destruction of all of history’s myriad meanings, miseries and ideas, it helps to at least always try to be aware of what the symbols you’re playing with in that sandbox of yours mean. At the very least. Because one day it might be too late and you too might be Based_Mussolini1488 on social media, posting desperately about how fascist Italy should have invented the hydrogen bomb. Or it could be worse than that. The resurgence of fascism, the return of the far-right, the reappearance of people believing in defiance of all logic in broken hateful old 1940s ideologies – Will Wright, Sid Meier, Creative Assembly and Paradox Interactive didn’t make this happen. But in their depoliticising of history and politics for the purpose of game design – well, to quote the weird, too far gone Twitter user whose dumb tweets inspired this article: “Sid Meier and Creative Assembly raised a generation of boys the west abandoned…And they raised them to conquer.”
Conquer? Not really. Not at all. But these games did influence some people to believe that conquest – history, war, violence, the clash of ideas and the suffering of human beings – is as simple as a video game. And that’s dangerous in its own way too.
lateral thinking 
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