[LINK] "Europa Universalis IV is The Best Genocide Simulator of The Year"

[rfmcdonald]

I meant to link a while ago to April Daniels' Gamemoir essay criticizing historical simulation games like Europa Universalis IV for not accurate representing indigenous peoples in the Americas as groups possessing agency. It's a long read, but good.

It took me a while to figure out what it was, but something felt a little strange about colonizing the Americas. It couldn’t be that I was not comfortable with playing a ruthlessly expansionary state. I mean, have you read the first part of this article?

Perhaps it was my uneasiness with gamifying a genocide that I directly benefit from, even centuries after it started. (Yes, white Americans, you ARE the beneficiaries of genocide. Get used to it.) That’s probably part of it, but a greater part of it, I think, is how the game portrays that atrocity.

When you finally get a ship over to North America, you’ll notice that things look a little different. Europe is crammed cheek to jowl with minor duchies and single-province powers, at least in the early game. There is no square inch of territory unaccounted for. But when you get to the Americas, you’ll see a lot of “empty” territory. The provinces and territories that are not claimed by any power or nation can be colonized.

You do this by sending a colonist to that province, and watch as its population grows. Once it hits a threshold, it becomes a productive city, and you can recall your colonist to do it again elsewhere.

Except that there wasn’t any “empty” territory in real life. There were people who already lived in the Americas, and in Africa, and in Asia. Entire cultures rose and fell, for thousands of years without European involvement. But when you get to where a lot of these people lived in Europa Universalis IV, you are presented with a blank spot on the map, and a suggestion that nobody who matters lives there.