To their credit, Paradox itself enforces a ban on portraying genocide within their game or its modifications. Whether the past should be turned into a meme-ridden narrative like the various alternate histories discussed is a fair question, but not the topic of this essay. Thus, if I come to make statements like ‘Germany should be more fascist to balance out Russia’, this will relate to the in-game narrative of the game in question, and not to the actual course of history. War is no game, but Hearts of Iron 4 certainly, and the discrepancy between these facts may come to sound rather cruel in the following. Since this is a grand strategy set in a relatively recent era of history, it inevitably turns real historical trauma into the basis for gameplay. Nevertheless, this work can be vital in keeping a game popular HOI4 would suffer a massive drop in playerbase without the modding community to keep the game fresh in between expansions.Ī second warning I want to give before we begin concerns the way I will be discussing history here. Fan projects are almost always an unpaid enterprise, and so they are developed at a significantly slower pace than whatever work they spin off from. I will discuss them here in a rather arbitrary order, and with the caveat that many of them are unreleased or unfinished products.
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At least, such is my thesis.īy the end of this chapter, you may understand part of this chart Chapter One: Categories of ConflictĪmong the variety of alternate mods for HOI4, I have discerned various categories based on their setting or place within the community. By analyzing a niche of the whirlwind present, we can see how the past is remembered and reshaped to symbolize the ideals of the future.
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This is a time where the barrier between online and offline culture has dissolved, where the mass conflicts of the past seem unimaginable but the future is almost guaranteed to hold further tragedy. The Second World War was certainly a turbulent and tragic time in history, and the way both HOI4 and its unofficial spinoffs engage with it could say quite a bit about our current political moment. Indeed, the narratives of these fan creations are what this investigation is all about. Particularly the latter is something I will come back to, since the narratives these mods create are both consistent and all over the place from a political perspective. Demographically, these gamers are not far from the stereotype: predominantly young, male, and politically confused.
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In these places, developers and players share memes, teasers, and ‘developer diaries’, a trend picked up from the publisher where creators will share specific areas or subjects of the mod in progress. They congregate in dedicated subreddits or Discord servers, and in recent months many of them have bonded together into the so-called ‘Paradox Modding Cooperative’. There is a distinct subculture to the people who produce and peruse these total conversion mods. What distinguishes the Alternate History mods for HOI4 from the game’s broader community, or from the genre in general? To me, the difference is found in the degree of dedication and internal coherence. It may seem odd to single out a fan community in such a niche way. It is this phenomenon that I want to focus on. Mods of the latter variety are called ‘total conversion mods’, and many of them alter the setting to an alternate history scenario, where some divergence in the past has caused an entirely different setup for total war. Highly varied in content, mods can do anything from simply changing world leader portraits ( like giving Stalin a bigger moustache) to shifting aspects of setting and gameplay completely. These mods are distributed through various means, but many if not most of them are found on the Steam Workshop, a platform provided by the digital distribution service known as Steam.
![hoi4 axis victory mod hoi4 axis victory mod](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Tg1KySLrgww/maxresdefault.jpg)
Besides the sharing of memes and discussion posts, this community uses tools provided by the publisher to develop fan-made modifications, or mods for short. Like many other games developed by Paradox, HOI4 has a lively fan community, active on various social media platforms such as Reddit, Facebook and Paradox’ own forums.
![hoi4 axis victory mod hoi4 axis victory mod](https://i.imgur.com/pNTtrPH.jpeg)
While the victory conditions are mostly set by the players themselves, the game’s mechanics set up the rise of a global conflict akin to the historical WW2, and it can thus be called a war game first and foremost. It is called Hearts of Iron 4, or HOI4, and allows players to take control of any nation in the world from 1936 onwards. In 2016, a Swedish game publisher called Paradox Interactive published the latest entry in their line of World War 2 grand strategy games. Content warning for: warfare, genocide, antisemitism, and gamers Introduction