What to Do When Your Video Game Gets Co-opted by Neo-Nazis

[millais]

Instead of censoring Deus Vult entirely, Paradox could have locked it behind a DLC paywall, like they do with everything good/functional in their titles.

 

[Dubu Kimchi]

The Paradox games have always been popular with nationalists of every shade, you get to 'correct' history and masturbate over your perfect Serbian clay. It was through the old paradox boards that I learned about the Byzantine nationalists.

 

[stuffandthings]

Nobody had time for sexuality development in an age where the average lifespan was 35.

Ancient Greece would like a word. Even the briefest dive into historical sources from any time of western civilzation will give you tons of fags. Ever read The Divine Comedy? 1300 AD, named FAGS in both hell and purgatory.
There has never been a time or place, "too real for fags." The mistake is equating modern mores on sexuality to a historical game at all. If you're a gay ruler in the game, you should still have to marry for heirs, and deal with your political opponents making propaganda hay from how faggy you are, just like good old James I had to.

 

[inception_state]

Crusader Kings 3 also represents a wider range of nationalities and sexualities than its predecessor. Crusader Kings 2 relied on a finite number of fixed character portraits, meaning racial representation tended to divide the world into white, brown, and black populations. The latest version of Crusader Kings offers depictions of race and nationality that better reflect the dynamic reality, with populations mixing and evolving over time.

“In the border areas, between, for example, let’s say North Africa and Spain, after a few generations, you can tell that there have been intermarriages and that the people growing up there look like they truly belong to the area,” Maximilian Olbers, the game’s content design lead, told OneZero. Similarly, instead of imposing a binary of heterosexual or homosexual, character sexuality will develop on a spectrum.

So... you're saying it will be super easy to mod in "stone all the gays" decisions, or turn Rhodesia lily white? I'm sure this will solve 100% of Paradox's problems.

This community imagines a past in which Europe was solely racially white

We wuz vikangz and shit. I'm sure this is the guy on reddit who always chimes in with "well AKSHUALLY explorers brought back a handful of Africans as a curiosity once, checkmate racists!".

If you're a gay ruler in the game, you should still have to marry for heirs, and deal with your political opponents making propaganda hay from how faggy you are, just like good old James I had to.

CK2 actually handled it pretty reasonably. You had a reduced chance of having kids relative to a straight ruler, and took a reputation hit.

 

[Y2K Baby]

Niggersvult

 

[Stoneheart]

This community imagines a past in which Europe was solely racially white, isolated from outside influences, entirely patriarchal, and organized militarily against threats from non-Christian brown people

what? people dont play christians... they play Ragnar and slaughter everybody they come across.

I would also like to say that Crusader Kings 2 features an option to Expel the Trump's Chosen People from your land… that’s a plus in a video game if you ask me.” He was referring to the game’s “Sons of Abraham” expansion, which adds significant content around medieval Judaism.

im pretty sure expel the jews wasnt part of that DLC or the patch. but im to elderly to remember and to lazy to look it up.

“Crusader Kings 2 is a great pro-white game,” says the user “88whitecanada.” Worse, online communities of gamers provide gateways to radicalization. Terrorists regularly cite medieval fantasies in manifestos, which are often published in online spaces frequented by gamers, creating a potential feedback loop of hate.

i have seen way worse than those 2 quotes on discord servers dedicated to paradox games.

The anglophone alt-right took it up as a rallying cry, turning what seemed like humorous invocations of premodern interreligious warfare into an actual cry for modern violence against Muslims.

remove kebab is favourite slur of the paradox forum and its based on modern warfare in central europe..

Crusader Kings 3 also represents a wider range of nationalities and sexualities than its predecessor. Crusader Kings 2 relied on a finite number of fixed character portraits, meaning racial representation tended to divide the world into white, brown, and black populations. The latest version of Crusader Kings offers depictions of race and nationality that better reflect the dynamic reality, with populations mixing and evolving over time.

they did the same in stellaris, i have breed humans with starfish, works pretty okay.

The focus on personalities may similarly push players to think differently about the past. After Paradox gave me early access to the game earlier this month, I opened the game with battle. But it soon became clear that the real work here was building relationships, using both coercion and favoritism, with my vassals. Alas, I got too distracted trying to marry off my son and avoid the fallout of the Norman conquest of England to spend much time in the great big world of Crusader Kings 3 before the demonstration period ended. Further exploration will have to wait.

go back to civ, noobfag...

CK2 actually handled it pretty reasonably. You had a reduced chance of having kids relative to a straight ruler, and took a reputation hit.

you could also send Trans people to china or get them from there.

there is even a challenge to go from a tron back to a normal person with the help of Satan...

 

[inception_state]

im pretty sure expel the Trump's Chosen People wasnt part of that DLC or the patch. but im to elderly to remember and to lazy to look it up.

According to the wiki, it was added in Sons of Abraham. I thought it was in vanilla as well, but it turns out it's just a super old DLC (2013).

From a game mechanics perspective, it's probably one of the worst decisions in the game though. It's hilarious that Paradox caught shit for including it, when they clearly meant it as "here's why expelling the Jews is a terrible idea". Now it looks like they're just throwing all subtlety out the window.

 

[usernames can change now!]

Either this can be modded for great lulz or the game is DoA to actual fans like HoI4

 

[Marissa Moira]

Just wait for winter to roll around.

 

[CatParty]

Also this is really really fucking dumb. This goes back to how people were blaming Doom for Columbine just because Eric and Dylan said that their shooting would be "like fucking Doom." Let people play games however way they want.

 

[Wych Elm]

I'm sure these changes will greatly please the actual paying customers and not at all annoy them with inane navelgazing and finger wagging.

 

[HeyYou]

This community imagines a past in which Europe was solely racially white, isolated from outside influences, entirely patriarchal, and organized militarily against threats from non-Christian brown people. In fact, none of these beliefs about the Middle Ages are true, but a video game set in the Middle Ages allows people to create their own fantasies of the past.

I don't get this shit, especially coming from a historian. Just because Medieval Europe had a wide variety of cultures and in-fought all the time doesn't mean that it wasn't white, oftentimes isolated from outside influences depending on the area, patriarchal, and organized against brown Muslims. You cannot make this time period look nice, it was brutal and awful. White nationalists like it for that exact reason. Instead of lying and claiming that white Europeans weren't completely fucking xenophobic towards Muslims, you should be teaching people how and why they viewed it that way. And yet every Medieval historian has crawled out of the woodworks to claim Europe was super nice and diverse like in modern times, and that we could learn from it, instead of cultures being forced on populations by conquerors, like in the Levant and Europe by the Catholics, or Spain and Eastern Europe by the Muslims. It's only recently that historians have been fighting back against this notion, at least in the case of Al-Andalus. I'm not even going to get into the Spanish/North Africa example Paradox gave. Imagine if Spaniards start looking like Arabs after a couple generations, modern day Spanish people will be fucking livid.

Otherwise, nothing about this sounds like it will deter white nationalists. Changing culture names and having dynamic sexualities isn't going to do anything, they're either just going to mod it out (changing culture names back, banning the gay side of the sexuality bar, preventing certain cultures from having certain skin tones, etc) or play around it. They're not even removing Deus Vult, despite journalists claiming they would do so.

 

[Synthetic Smug]

This is what folk devils look like when the descendants of the Church Lady no longer believe in God or Satan, and dorks play vidya instead of D&D.

It's always somebody else's fault.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Nobody had time for sexuality development in an age where the average lifespan was 35.

Let's have some fun with this. I'm not meaning to sperg out or argue, I just want to talk a bit about lifespans.

I read the other day that over a century ago, about every other child would die before their fifth birthday.

So, let's construct a best-case scenario where every other child dies at exactly 5.

Now, let's suppose that we're averaging lifespans for the general population, and we want to solve for x, where x is the average population of those who don't die before their fifth birthday. Suppose the population consists of n many people. Then we may take the average and break it up into two separate sums, a sum of those children who died on their fifth birthday and a sum of those who didn't. Each sum would be of 0.5n many people, so we may factor the n out and cancel with the denominator. Really, what we have is half times the average of those who die before 5 and half times the average of those who die after. The average of those who die before 5, by our supposition that this is a best case scenario, is 5.

Now, note that the other expression would also be the SAME NUMBER as the average of 0.5n many people who all live the average lifespan of those who don't die before age 5. So we can make that substitution, changing our expression to be 0.5 times the sum of n many people living x years of age. We get 0.5nx/n, so we get 0.5x.

Thus, we're left with 0.5*5 + 0.5*x = 35.
0.5x = 32.5
x = 65

I may have fucked up along the way, but the gist is that we can demonstrate that in this best-case scenario, where all children who die less than or equal to 5 years old die at exactly 5 years old, and that every other child does at such an age, the life expectancy for that other half is 65.

Modern life expectancy at birth? 71.

Truth is, mortality really wasn't that much higher in the past.

 

[Y2K Baby]

Let's have some fun with this. I'm not meaning to sperg out or argue, I just want to talk a bit about lifespans.

I read the other day that over a century ago, about every other child would die before their fifth birthday.

So, let's construct a best-case scenario where every other child dies at exactly 5.

Now, let's suppose that we're averaging lifespans for the general population, and we want to solve for x, where x is the average population of those who don't die before their fifth birthday. Suppose the population consists of n many people. Then we may take the average and break it up into two separate sums, a sum of those children who died on their fifth birthday and a sum of those who didn't. Each sum would be of 0.5n many people, so we may factor the n out and cancel with the denominator. Really, what we have is half times the average of those who die before 5 and half times the average of those who die after. The average of those who die before 5, by our supposition that this is a best case scenario, is 5.

Now, note that the other expression would also be the SAME NUMBER as the average of 0.5n many people who all live the average lifespan of those who don't die before age 5. So we can make that substitution, changing our expression to be 0.5 times the sum of n many people living x years of age. We get 0.5nx/n, so we get 0.5x.

Thus, we're left with 0.5*5 + 0.5*x = 35.
0.5x = 32.5
x = 65

I may have fucked up along the way, but the gist is that we can demonstrate that in this best-case scenario, where all children who die less than or equal to 5 years old die at exactly 5 years old, and that every other child does at such an age, the life expectancy for that other half is 65.

Modern life expectancy at birth? 71.

Truth is, mortality really wasn't that much higher in the past.

Nigga be talking.

 

[ThatDutchManace]

In CK2, you could use homosexuality as an advantage. If you want to own a piece of land, maybe you could seduce the owner's rival? Or maybe the pope? It was just another tool for your political intrigue actions. And you still need an heir if you want to continue playing.

I bet that they will add full-fledged transgenders now. Complete with HRT and everything. I mean, it's not like it's the medieval age or something!

 

[CrunkLord420]

I have low expectation for CK3. I feel it's going to be in a "The Sims" situation where it's actually a regression in content only to be built up by DLC over the years.

Victoria is a series that could actually use a serious refresh considering how old Victoria 2 is at this point.

 

[Spamy the Bot]

Can't at least whitey have freaking Video Games? Geez.
Article written by David M Perry.

Let's see the author:

Ah. K.

Edit: I really don't want to do the old song and dance of looking up Twitter and search for the term, but one need to consider that the authors are always like this. It's like they hate fun or something. I will be mildly skeptical of them when they talk shit of my group, namely Medieval nobility.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

In CK2, you could use homosexuality as an advantage. If you want to own a piece of land, maybe you could seduce the owner's rival? Or maybe the pope? It was just another tool for your political intrigue actions. And you still need an heir if you want to continue playing.

I bet that they will add full-fledged transgenders now. Complete with HRT and everything. I mean, it's not like it's the medieval age or something!

I had a Latin Empire game going once - started as Norman Italians, the Muslims pretty much immediately conquered Greece, and then I won the Crusade to take it back - where I kept a harem of viceroys going that way. Tons of levies and a stable throne when all your vassals crave your cock.

 

[HumanHive]

I have low expectation for CK3. I feel it's going to be in a "The Sims" situation where it's actually a regression in content only to be built up by DLC over the years.

Victoria is a series that could actually use a serious refresh considering how old Victoria 2 is at this point.

Too bad nobody knows how Victoria 2's economy code works anymore. If 3 happened, it'd be simplified and full of mana buttons.