As of Thursday the 23^rd of January, 2025, almost every single strategy game I own has been deleted. Gone. All the saves, all the mods, all the time. 4200 hours (a little over five months if you really want to rub it in), gone. 

And it was a long time coming too.

For those of you who know me personally, this might come as quite a shock.

It came down to two things: Time, and an ever-creeping sense of unease (not in that order). I never have enough time, a fact to which I imagine most of you—students or otherwise—can relate.  

It always seems to get away from me, as if tiny elves were tugging the limbs of a clock forward every time I glance away. As a student and a writer for this esteemed rag, it was not super helpful when every moment I had an ounce of time to kill—a speck of an hour or two—it would disappear into a game. 

It wasn’t always one of these games highlighted, and it wasn’t always a game, but at the end of the week, the biggest culprit would always be one of them. 

The ever-creeping sense of unease came from the deep, deep, moral problems presented by these games. For as much as most of them are just well-hidden spreadsheets, the subject matter those spreadsheets mask really ishorrible. 

I never got into Stellaris (for a few glaringly obvious reasons), but I think this highlights my point better than any words I could stutter out. (All screenshots by the author unless otherwise noted).

Just as a quick run-down, there is this one video game company called Paradox. They make strategy games. As far as I’ve seen, they’ve never not occupied the top-sellers in the strategy section of Steam. 

As of writing, they have three different games on the top ten of this aforementioned section. Hearts of Iron 4, my obsession, has over five million players alone, with almost a quarter of a million positive reviews. Somehow, HOI4—a WW2 simulator—is one of the more permissible games in the franchise.

“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic—Joseph Stalin.” 

That quote is probably misattributed, but oh well. To my 15-year-old brain, obnoxious, embarrassing, and listening to some incredibly cringey Soviet remix dubstep/heavy metal horseshit, this was the coolest thing on Earth.

As I booted up the game for the first time, I was more than willing to spend hours meticulously going through my army composition and economy, prepared to bring glory to the Soviet Union. (Also, yes, 15-year-old me was in 2019. If anybody feels like calling me a whippersnapper or pointing out just how recent that was). 

I would sit in my living room, the heat from my Alienware laptop burning a grid into my thighs that would stay for days, as I excitedly hyper-focused on collapsing the Italian line in Libya or launching daring naval invasions into the Japanese home islands. Out of all of them, Hearts of Iron 4 is the only one I don’t regret playing.

Which I did. A lot. In the base game sweatily crafting battle plans, using cheats, and using mods that allow you to paper over his atrocities so well it’d make the KGB blush.

Of course, I played the other nations. Canada, Germany, USA, Italy, France, Japan. You can play them all. Is there any mention of the horrors of the period? None—not a single one for Germany. 

Not for the Soviets. Not for the Japanese. There is an event for China about the destruction of the Yellow River Dam which does mention the deaths of civilians, and also a throw away event about Nanking. But aside from that? Nothing. 

The creators of the game have said before in interviews that they didn’t want to allow the possibility of civilian casualties cause by players (terror bombing, rape, mass murder, and oh, umm, Gee, the fucking Holocaust?), because they didn’t want to create “a war crime simulator.” 

Which is very strange, considering the rest of their games. 

Europa Universalis 4 (take a wild guess on what that translates to) is one of their other most popular games. In it, you play as any nation in the world from 1444-1821. As you can probably infer, the game is particularly focused on Europe. They have all the strongest nations, the wealthiest, and all the most detailed mission trees and mechanics. As I think we all know where this is going, let me just skip to the point: One of the metas of the game is genocide. 

Not like, indirectly, there is no coy manoeuvring around the topic of colonialism, like Catan does. You unlock “Colonists” by completing missions and spending points, and in order to clear the way for colonists, you can send in an army, and press the “Attack Natives” button.  

Of course, you have to weigh the cost/benefits, as it costs Military points to do, and you can almost level up your mil tech. Oh yeah, did I also mention there is a “Convert Culture” button? It costs diplomatic points, and if the culture in question isn’t accepted within your nation, it will provide debuffs. 

This is just scratching the surface. 

About half of the map (Earth) is empty at the beginning of the game, suggesting that there truly was nobody in central Russia, North America, or Oceania when the Europeans arrived. There is a game mechanic called “Institutions” which are basically just vaguely European inventions, events and eras, that spread out almost exclusively from Europe, and every nation that doesn’t have them has their technological advancements slowed. 

I don’t know if the crux of me finally deleting the games was from the content itself, or just the disgust of its impact on others. In a world in which Donald Trump handily wins a second term, and a world where colonialism isn’t universally acknowledged as evil, the fact that these events had been made into a literal fucking game is insane to me. 

Not that I don’t think there is a space for historical strategy, and it can be argued that it is necessary for these games to show the horrors of the past, unfiltered, but not like this.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve only spoken about Paradox games and not even all of their major games. Victoria 2 and 3 (Set in the Victorian era, both better and worse than EU4 in a variety of ways) and Stellaris, a game in which you can create species (if you want to try to be fair, most of these species have tentacles or are robots or plants or whatever Star Trek shit you want to create) and attribute to them strengths and weaknesses, and then go around colonizing the universe. 

I refer again to the above image.

All this, to say it was time for a change. I almost never played EU4 without mods, choosing instead to play the fantasy mod Anbennar, and fucking around as dwarves and gnomes, but even then, the insidious bones of the base game’s mechanics still showed. As I grew older, and the ignorance of puberty began to melt away, I found it harder and harder to brush past the glaring issues. 

I woke up, or more accurately sat up, at 1 AM, walked straight to my computer, and just as easily as you can pass (pro or anti) child labour laws in Victoria 3, deleted every single one of them. 

I don’t really know why. 

Well, I mean the reason why is glaringly obvious. I just don’t know what instinct, what notion entered my mind right before I went to bed, what silent twinkling of twilight entered my subconscious, but I’m glad they’re gone. 

It’s as if a burden has been lifted from my shoulders, from my attention, and from my consciousness.

Now, in all honesty, I haven’t removed every strategy game I own. There are a few Total Wars kicking around, and most of my games I own have at least strategic facets to them, but the main culprits are gone. 

In some way, I hold some sort of strange nostalgia. In the months leading up to me and my girlfriend dating, I would constantly tell her about the progress of my little artificer Gnome nation in EU4 (if that ain’t rizz, I don’t know what is). 

Whenever I see any meme about the Soviet Union, I think warmly of my deeply embarrassing and stupid 14-year-old obsession with it. Whenever I see a map, I can name both modern and 500-year-old names for countries and nations, or cite an obscure historical figure or events off the top of my head. 

These games will probably always be with me. The odds of me never re-downloading HOI4 again are slim. There will come sometime in the future when I have both the time and appetite to make my little tanks go, to feel the utter satisfaction of running circles around the Germans in Danzig, or the smug satisfaction of watching my Air Force decimate a poorly managed enemies’ ground troops.

But for now, they are gone. Dead. Reminders of who I was. 

Of course the community will persist, Paradox will continue to release DLC and new games. If you want a glimmer of hope, every new Paradox game progressively becomes slightly “better” (you can take better to mean “woke,” less morally deplorable, or better at hiding what I’d consider a deep philosophical and moral failing that requires nuance and thought which is seemingly not pressing enough to bother to care about). 

Whereas Victoria 2 had an almost empty map of Africa, now Africa’s cultures and nations are more accurately represented. That’s umm… you know… a drop in the bucket?

Anyway, they’re gone from my Steam library now, completely absolving me of any guilt or further thought about how such terrible things could be portrayed to youth. 

Me and the mappies have parted ways. Civilization 7 (another series with… a “history”) is being released soon and I will almost certainly give in and try it, someday. 

Until then, however, I am free.