Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVb: Iron Ends

This is the back half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa) 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 front half of this part, we looked at how Hearts of Iron IV understands industry and production, the game’s economic model. On the one hand, the military production model is interestingly nuanced and complex and the decision to simplify the civilian half of the model, in light of the game’s focus, makes a fair bit of sense. On the other hand, the game stumbles quite badly in that it – mostly for reasons of balance (a desire to make Nazi Germany more likely to win than it was historically – constructs an economic world where discredited Nazi theories of economics which were quite decisively humiliated during the war itself are instead represented as right and true. HoI4‘s economic system (unintentionally) employs the…