Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVa: The Fires of Industry

This is the first half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the most popular strategy games on the market today. In the last part (split over two posts), we discussed how HoI4 models domestic politics and ideology. In both cases, game design considers – in particular the desire to streamline domestic politics to highlight the military aspects of the game and the desire to simply avoid the topic of crimes against humanity altogether – congealed to create a game that fails to accurately represent the history of the period and worse yet errs in a consistent direction. On the one hand, the simplified political model, combined by a game design ‘need’ to make the Axis powers ahistorically strong, leads to a political system that values state power, is unconcerned with the role of regular people and in which authoritarian government forms offer the…