Historical trappings are extremely popular with video game designers. The Assassin’s Creed (AC) series, for example, has made a great success of combining beautiful recreations of historical scenery with the sort of conspiracy fueled story lines that propel Dan Brown novels and the Nicolas Cage headed National Treasure series to the heights of popularity.[1] The Assassin’s Creed games present a fascinating vision of historical agency, where historical change is explained through a hybrid of extreme individual agency—in the form of the game’s protagonist(s)—and the unending trans-historical battle between competing secret societies.[2] This is a very cyclical vision of history. We (through the player character, Desmond Miles and his ancestors) can battle Evil but the struggle will repeat itself time after time.

As a historian and life-long gamer I find these aspects of my beloved hobby in turns fascinating, endearing, and befuddling.[3] The question of agency—whom or what produces historical continuity and change—is one of the most contested and controversial philosophical and historiographical problems in my profession. Entire fields, such as the history of American slavery and abolition, have been riven by big-stakes arguments over such questions.[4] Few things are better at sparking heated debate (and more than a few eye-rolls) than bringing up the “agency question” in a seminar room or at a conference.

Video game designers and writers wade into this intellectual battlefield in ways that will likely surprise and frustrate most historians. I want to explore how historical agency is represented in modern gaming by looking at two recent games from Paradox Interactive—Europa Universalis IV (2013) and Crusader Kings II (2012). Both are “grand strategy games,” a genre very different from Assassin’s Creed. Born out of war and strategy board games—from the old stand-by Risk to much more complex games like Settlers of Catan—grand strategy games allow the player to take control of a nation-state, cultural group, or civilization and shape its future. To make matters more interesting, a video game allows many more facets of the human experience to be modeled than a board game does.[5]

The most well-known and longest lasting example of such games is the Civilization series. The Civ games, however, make no claim towards historical accuracy.[6] The games developed by Paradox Interactive do—sometimes in an almost over the top sort of way—and this is where questions of historical agency become most interesting.

Crusader Kings II (CK2) allows a player to take control of the ruling patriarch or matriarch of one of the reigning dynasties of the Mediterranean basin during the medieval period, roughly from 867 to 1453.[7] All characters in CK2, taking a cue from roleplaying games, have traits, from “zealous” and “brave” to “envious” and “lustful,” which provide key bonus and penalties. The core gameplay revolves around gaining and managing positive traits and avoiding negative ones. These traits impact virtually every other aspect of the simulation—one’s economy, how much territory a ruler can personally control, how much other characters within the game approve of one another, etc.[8] Virtually all aspects of human experience within CK2 are reliant on this system.[9]

The vision of historical agency presented by Crusader Kings 2 is deeply personal, a simulated “great man” history that most modern historians will find distasteful. Great kingdoms and empires rise and fall, largely, on the character of their ruler. Have a queen who is “brave,” “diligent,” or, above all, a “genius?” Then you’re golden but, if your ruler’s son lacks those traits, prepare to watch your foolishly spent thirty-plus hours of “work” vanish into tears and pixelated agony. The central causal agent of history, then, is the individual. Political, economic, or social forces may impact the agent but, in the end, history is in his or her hands.

This is somewhat complicated by how CK2 models religion and gender. It is through religion that the game comes to include non-elites.[10] Common people will rebel against rulers who do not share their faith or appear to be in favor of their particular religious variant. Managing these possible outcomes is an ongoing concern but one that remains individualized. The specific choices of the player’s dynast are the central crux by which the religious systems within the game work.

Crusader Kings II is most interesting in that it chooses to actually work patriarchy into the core of gameplay and make it the central factor in the simulated lives of its female characters.[11]Dynasties with female heads will find themselves facing discrimination from male monarchs and men at court. To acknowledge the key role of marriage alliances in medieval politics, rulers gain benefits (and penalties) from their spouse. Female members of the court are central to the game’s “plot” mechanic—which allows the player to assassinate rivals, seize property from vassals, and other dastardly things. All this, however, remains focused on the level of individual action.

The historical agent, then, in Crusader Kings 2 is above and beyond all else the individual. The “great man.”

On the surface the vision of historical agency presented by Europa Universalis IV (EU4) is much more palpable for most modern historians. EU4 focuses on the early modern period, between 1453 and 1823 and the simulation’s modus operandi is for the player to manage political economy and diplomacy of a particular society—from international trade, central banking, alliance systems, and the slave trade.[12] The individual ruler and dynasty is traded for the nation-state as the unit of player control. Things, above all the economy, that were pushed into the background in CK2 are brought to the fore here. At the same time, however, the player has less direct control over all of these forces than in CK2.

This is best seen in how EU4 treats religion. Spiritual conflicts, like in Crusader Kings 2, play a key role in the game’s simulation. The way EU4 models religion, however, is much more complex and outside of the player’s direct control. The religious turmoil of the early modern period, such as the Protestant Reformation, is on full display and the subsequent political and social turmoil is fully modeled. One of the central dilemmas of EU4 is how to manage this—should your nation-state move toward religious tolerance or toward cultural and spiritual conformity? Yet full mastery of these systems remains out of the total control of the player. Put another way, in Europa Universalis IV, the Reformation is coming for you and there’s only so much you can do about it.

The same can be said for the game’s other mechanics—from the international economy to military affairs. Like in all simulations, aspects of the complexities of human civilization are simplified and abstracted. In Crusader Kings II this is done to put personal agency front and center. That game’s dynasts are the masters of their particular corner of the universe. That is not the case with how historical agency is handled within Europa Universalis IV. A player, instead, often feels like they are riding in a vehicle that they can’t entirely control. Sure you might be able to steer some or maybe slow the damnable thing down in the margins but in the end its final destination isn’t entirely under your control. Historical agency in CK2 is abstracted to show how the player’s choices influence the historical simulation. The opposite is true in EU4. The game is designed show how the constraints of historical simulation limit the player.

The sheer Eurocentrism of EU4’s vision of historical agency, however, is something most modern historians will find deeply troubling. That particular facet is baked in the game’s very title. The central historical actors of the simulated drama presented by Europa Universalis IV are Europeans; there is no way around this. The game nominally allows you to play as most states or societies of the period, from the Powhatans of Virginia to the Ashikaga shogunate of Japan. Cultures and polities outside of the Mediterranean basin, however, are modeled in much less depth and offer much less to a player than their European counterparts.[13] This extends even to China, an inarguable early modern political, cultural, and economic heavyweight. [14]

Colonization, along with religion, is one of the key themes of Europa Universalis IV and it is within the colonization system that the game’s Eurocentrism is cast into sharp relief.[15] Native peoples are reduced to two variables: “aggressiveness” and “ferocity.” This does not even begin to model the complexities of the interaction between aboriginal peoples and would-be European colonizers. For a game which simulates the intricacies of the European politics, trade, and military scene so well this is a particularly awful disappointment.[16]

As I see it, then, the visions of historical agency presented by Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV are deeply flawed. CK2 presents history as the story of great men and their families, which modern scholarship long ago revealed to be hollow, and sidelines much of the complexity of the medieval world in service of that design decision to put individual agency front and center. Europa Universalis IV avoids this trap and produces a vision of historical agency that is multipolar and much more interesting—players’ decisions are much more both shaped and shaping the historical simulation than in Crusader Kings II. EU4 does, however, have a troubling Eurocentric vision of whose historical agency is most important to model.

As strategy games both are great successes. They present themselves as more than just games, however. [17] As historical simulations both Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV seek to capture (at least some) of the nuances of both the medieval and early modern periods. Each game tries, and often succeeds, at treating its historical settings as more than just window dressing. That is what makes their visions of historical agency both so fascinating and troubling to me. Each reproduces a flawed and outdated vision of what historical actors and forces matter.

This is not a matter of research or detail. In many ways both games are as researched and detailed as one could ask.[18] My concerns are a matter of interpretation. How should the able research by Paradox Interactive’s designers be deployed? How do conceptions of whom and what historical actors are fit within game design? How can the current scholarly consensus on these questions inform the decisions made by game designers?

These are open questions. While I do believe that the answers provided by Paradox Interactive’s latest offerings are flawed, there is an interesting discussion of how history can best be represented in gaming—strategy or otherwise—out there waiting to happen.[19] I hope that this, and the several previous posts the Junto covering relating issues, might just spark such a dialogue between designers, gamers, and historians.