is it wrong to assume from the title that it presents the crusades as morally righteous?
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there’s apparently an upcoming book of interviews with old jp game devs that’s not written by a crazy jerk
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Yes. It definitely presents entirely cynically and any righteousness is imported by player desires.
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when they announced hearts of iron 4 the paradox forums had a 300 page thread debating whether or not the holocaust should be an event chain or a national focus the player can select to pursue. half the guys in the thread had SS officers as their avatars. hearts of iron and crusader kings definitely have the worst fanbases, esp. hearts of iron because the intersection between paradox guy and wehraboo is lethal, but the most vocal pdox fans spend all their time bitching about the lack of genocide options or sjws and are definitely all racists
looking for what the literal percentage of racists playing paradox games is, is absurd anyway. like the steam discussions and their forums are always packed with fucking stormfront wannabes, one of the most popular mods on the stellaris workshop until they took it down was the one that made the humans all white. it may not be 100% true but it sure seems like a lot of people who play these games are racist! ck2 is kind of an outlier anyway because it picked up a lot of normie appeal their games dont usually have. my point was that its good that paradox tries to limit the appeal of their games to these morons in recent years, i want them to clean out the impentrably shitty community around these games
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I like Crusader Kings because I can be the Normans in Sicily and be racist against Italians; specifically, the Pope.
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Not a new game, but Otokomizu releases on Switch in Japan later this month.
What
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this is the only kind of racism paradox games should allow
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As somebody who spends a lot of time on other forums, I feel like I have to affirm that “forum users” are not a representative sample of a game’s audience. The variety of positions they advocate for can’t be ignored, but it’s not a complete picture. The complete picture may be better or worse than the preview afforded us by the forum sample. For example, the World of Warcraft forums ca. 2015 portrayed a player-base that is by turns entitled, illiterate, and incomprehensible, but it wouldn’t adequately prepare the observer for the number of players who would just sit in trade chat spamming pro-Trump memes.
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I am entirely comfortable saying that the audience for Paradox games almost certainly has a much higher percentage of white nationalists and weird ethnofascists than other games’ audiences because Paradox games permit them to act out their contrahistorical fantasies of the victory of purity. All I’m saying is that the ability to do that doesn’t make Paradox games worthless. Which you aren’t saying either. Just clarifying.
On the other hand, and this is the Dark World possibility, it could be that Paradox’s audience has the exact same proportion of white nationalists as everyone else, you just only hear about it more because Paradox games enable them to address their fantasies in a specific way most games don’t. Scary!
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what, this is the real world possibility. You don’t hear about call of duty players being a bunch of ethnonationalists because thats a normie game, so their loud racist population is easily contextualized as just that, a loud racist cadre.
Celebrity alt-right types are more likely to be Civilization let’s players but aside from an occasional essay about the colonial neoliberal politics of that series of games, no one says most Civ players are white nationalists.
I just operate under the assumption that most gamers are racists but I would definitely single out Civ players as well if they had a history of loudly proclaiming their desire to reclaim the lebensraum from the moorish hordes invading Europe as refugees whenever they have the chance. Civ also is a lot softer about its bad politics while pdox games let you really dig into doing some terrible shit, which is why cuba is probably right about the way pdox games enable racists to address their fantasies. I love pdox games but the community has always been terrifying. Yeah I made a generalization when I said “most” but that doesn’t change the fact that the reputation around them is totally deserved.
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i hear about call of duty players being racist and sexist constantly actually. its horrible. ive been teabagged so many times by dudes with trump, n words and f slurs in their name/clan… the customization options for banners are full of pepes and rape jokes and dead poeple of color. like patricia hernandez got tons of shit from call of duty bros (which is a well known short hand for shitty dudes who play call of duty!) when she brought it up on kotaku
honestly I think people have talked about it less because its accepted that call of duty is the bottom of the swamp where the worst of the worst gamers hang out!
i also dont play civ because people tend to be weird classist dudes who hate taxes and think their country isnt stolen
like gamers as a whole have been under fire for this forever, i dont see why there would be LESS asshole racists in a game about taking shit over! any game where theres real world history or room at all for fascist RP attracts horrible people
i think its possible to enjoy these games without being a racist, and find other people who enjoy them that wont call you slurs behind your back, but pointing out a pattern in the playerbase isnt shitting on the game itself
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i just want to add that playing games like this as an afab is out, cuz even if the dude isnt racist or homophobic, as soon as he hears your high pitched voice they think you need a fucking mentor and if you dont they talk down to you endlessly OR WORSE HIT ON YOU OR DOUBLE WORSE THEY DONT HIT ON YOU AND MAKE INCREDIBLY DISGUSTING UNCOMFORTABLE SEXUAL COMMENTARY ENDLESSLY
i have NO problem with saying that most people who play crusader kings/civ/call of duty are sexist as shit
i kinda want a mic that pitches down my voice so i can just bro out and be normal. like im not even a woman but BOY LETTING THEM KNOW THAT WITH THIS VOICE IS EVEN WORSE. then they wanna PROVE youre a woman
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i played crusader kings 2 for about 45 minutes the other day. 10 minutes was waiting for it to load and eventually determining that it crashed. 15 minutes of that was trying to find the “unpause” button. the rest of it was squinting at the tiny menus.
i think this game might suck?
(i did end up scaling up the menus but you have to restart the entire game to make this apply. that was another 7 minutes probably)
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git gud casul
pdox games have only slightly more coherent UI than a fucking john tiller game which is one of the many reasons why I love them
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all I want is a tutorial that tells me to hit a button AND shows me where the button is, or at least shows me a picture of it!! Instead of telling me to “click the speed widget” which doesn’t mean anything!!!
The only way to learn how to play a Paradox game is to watch 40 hours of a let’s play on youtube
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