Somebody reviewed the latest EU game and wasn't when she got to colonization part. The reviewer ends by saying
It's a fun game. A masterful game. A work of passion and talent. But I can't enjoy it without reservations or recommend it without caveats. The moment you begin your colonization effort, the game takes a dark and troubling turn. It never really recovers from that. Now, if you don't mind, I'll be over here, attempting to unify the Holy Roman Empire into the modern state of Germany. And not doing any colonization.
:D. I wonder what the review of HOI4 will sound like.
http://gamemoir.com/2013/09/23/europa-universalis-iv-is-the-best-genocide-simulator-of-the-year/ (http://gamemoir.com/2013/09/23/europa-universalis-iv-is-the-best-genocide-simulator-of-the-year/)
"I knew going in that I'd playing a game about a topic that, in real life, is horrifying to my (white, privileged) progressive sensibilities. I thought I was prepared for it."
really?
"(Yes, white Americans, you ARE the beneficiaries of genocide. Get used to it.)" - i cant be arsed finding the face palm meme but please imagine it is here
theres 2 sides to my rage coin here - rant and curse about peoples inability to separate 'game' from 'real', an inability to sit in a big comfy chair and relax and play your favourite game for what it is, on the other side, is this someone just whining and moaning because 'games journalism' and short of giving it a thumbs up or down you have to take a stance on something and complain
i note with ever decreasing 'bothered' that as much as she hated it, appauled by her own actions, she kept pressing next turn and playing it.
As with all offensive media, theres an off button and an uninstall button, play it and enjoy, dont and switch off - dont play and be offended and write about it expecting anything over than 'youre dumber than i thought' - at least from me anyway
I played the Aztec and dominated the Americas... that's until Spain came.
Quote from: jomni on September 08, 2014, 07:33:48 AM
I played the Aztec and dominated the Americas... that's until Spain came.
and did you cry at your own moral outrage and attrocity?
feel free to write a blog about how disgusted with yourself you are
;D
Quote from: undercovergeek on September 08, 2014, 07:35:08 AM
Quote from: jomni on September 08, 2014, 07:33:48 AM
I played the Aztec and dominated the Americas... that's until Spain came.
and did you cry at your own moral outrage and attrocity?
feel free to write a blog about how disgusted with yourself you are
;D
There's no moral outrage for a society that relies on human sacrifice for survival.
Her poor white privileged sensibilities. ::)
She could've played as the Aztecs. Then she could've warred on her neighboring states and committed human sacrifices with rocks. I suppose it would've been just fine for her delicate "progressive" sensibilities, in that case?
F'ing Revisionistas. ::)
These people kill me. It's all about feeling guilty. If they feel guilty enough, they think everything is ok.
Look, world History is full of people taking land from other people and killing them. News flash! Native tribes in the Americas routinely attacked and slaughtered neighboring tribes....Europeans were just better at it in the 16th century.
I hate these people...these people that think I should feel guilty because I live in land taken by my ancestors from someone else. Well who doesn't live in land that didn't t belong to someone else at some point.
Quote from: mikeck on September 08, 2014, 07:51:07 AM
These people kill me. It's all about feeling guilty. If they feel guilty enough, they think everything is ok.
Look, world History is full of people taking land from other people and killing them. News flash! Native tribes in the Americas routinely attacked and slaughtered neighboring tribes....Europeans were just better at it in the 16th century.
I hate these people...these people that think I should feel guilty because I live in land taken by my ancestors from someone else. Well who doesn't live in land that didn't t belong to someone else at some point.
eskimos?
Moral preening and expressing faux outrage is the new black. If you can be just a little bit more of a martyr to your own sense of white guilt than the progressive next to you, you win and get to be condescending in a smug, passive-aggressive way.
The mindless white idiots who parrot the conventional wisdom being vomited out at campuses and in the media have been conditioned to feel an almost pathological need to feel morally superior over other whites they deem to be less progressive.
It's pathetic. Oh well, I'm sure the vapid twat who wrote that drivel can squirm her thighs together in delight as she reads the comments on her "review" and nail herself a little more firmly to her cross.
Quote from: Silent Disapproval Robot on September 08, 2014, 08:08:15 AM
Moral preening and expressing faux outrage is the new black. If you can be just a little bit more of a martyr to your own sense of white guilt than the progressive next to you, you win and get to be condescending in a smug, passive-aggressive way.
The mindless white idiots who parrot the conventional wisdom being vomited out at campuses and in the media have been conditioned to feel an almost pathological need to feel morally superior over other whites they deem to be less progressive.
It's pathetic. Oh well, I'm sure the vapid twat who wrote that drivel can squirm her thighs together in delight as she reads the comments on her "review" and nail herself a little more firmly to her cross.
This is what I wanted to convey but you have done it much more artfully
Thankyou
You can colonize areas without killing the native population. Usually its the natives attacking your colonies that decimates them. In game it actually behooves you to assimilate the natives into your colonies and not kill them.
Quote from: undercovergeek on September 08, 2014, 07:59:13 AM
Quote from: mikeck on September 08, 2014, 07:51:07 AM
These people kill me. It's all about feeling guilty. If they feel guilty enough, they think everything is ok.
Look, world History is full of people taking land from other people and killing them. News flash! Native tribes in the Americas routinely attacked and slaughtered neighboring tribes....Europeans were just better at it in the 16th century.
I hate these people...these people that think I should feel guilty because I live in land taken by my ancestors from someone else. Well who doesn't live in land that didn't t belong to someone else at some point.
eskimos?
Inuit tribes maybe....only because no one else wants it. I don't feel the slightest guilt about living on land that my ancestors took from someone else...no more guilty than an Anglo-Saxon on the UK should feel over the loss of Romano-Britain control.
It's a silly review whose 'moralistic' premise is so faulty as to be comical. It's classic trolling -- it's meant to provoke. Why take the bait? She clearly wants to receive all sorts of enraged "you're an idiot!" responses, if only so she can feel that much more self-righteous about her moral superiority vis-a-vis the depraved, unenlightened class of gamers who might actually derive guilt-free enjoyment out of EUIV and similar games. Why give her the satisfaction?
Don't feed the smug, self-righteous troll.
Good points. I just hope it doesn't become the norm to piss over a great series of games.
I also found it ironic she felt more more secure about uniting the principalities and states of the Holy Roman Empire.
How she plans to do that in the game without the Reformation, Counterreformation, forced conversions or 'heretics', the 30 Years war, etc, etc, (well, you get the picture - either way, it won't be pretty, but her conscience is eased).
SDR for President(e)!
Quote from: endfire79 on September 08, 2014, 10:14:48 AM
Good points. I just hope it doesn't become the norm to piss over a great series of games.
No worries there -- it won't.
I look forward to her next review of why she can no longer play chess because it reflects a feudal society fundamentally predicated on the violent repression of disenfranchised peasant laborers. How could any right-thinking individual enjoy a game based on such horrors?
It reminds me of the great scene in Godfather II, when young Vito Corleone (Robert DeNiro) is stalking the mobster Don Fanucci during the parade. Fanucci pauses in front of a punch-and-judy puppet show and then waves it off -- "Too violent for me!" :)
Quote from: endfire79 on September 08, 2014, 10:14:48 AM
Good points. I just hope it doesn't become the norm to piss over a great series of games.
I also found it ironic she felt more more secure about uniting the principalities and states of the Holy Roman Empire.
How she plans to do that in the game without the Reformation, Counterreformation, forced conversions or 'heretics', the 30 Years war, etc, etc, (well, you get the picture - either way, it won't be pretty, but her conscience is eased).
Just goes to show these self-proclaimed "Progressives" have little to no concept of history, other than how selective bits of it compare to their own little modern fantasy reality.
Rainbows and Unicorn farts in abundance.
Silent Disapproval:
Well put. Artful, yes. Tasteful, just. Deliciously accurate.
I don't read reviews anymore these days with the exception of some of the ones that are written for this site of games I'm interested in playing. Otherwise I generally just browse through the game forums and read about the overall reaction of people who play the games and especially the AARs.
SDR- Nicely put. I could sit here for an hour thinking of a reply and not come close to that.
Back in college days (degree in history) I took a class about the fur trade and you can't throw a stone in academic literature without hitting some author playing the Native American innocent victimization card. You would think that academics would have a greater sense of history and would be able to examine people within the context of their times (without resorting to modern western ethics), but you would be mistaken on a great many occasions.
The reviewer predictably sounds like a moron as she tries to combine her liberal victimization ideology with her poor knowledge of history. You just can't be more tone deaf. I can't get too worked up, my BS meter is broken almost beyond repair after Furgeson.
Life today was built on the corpses of those that lost to the winners. The empires of today were likewise built because they won their wars.
Goodness! I hope I didn't just offend some trite, idiotic Guilty Anglo Saxon Protestant (GASP).
The past is the past. These idiots need to get over that shiite and get on with their lives instead of crying rivers over sh*t that's already happened and is done with.
I avoid game reviews like the plague, and instead read the forums here. Most of my interest lies with boardgames anyway, and BGG is a good resource to use when I can't get my info here.
By the way, War On Terror is a brilliant game. Take that, society.
As unfair and wrongheaded as some of her observations and critiques were, I don't think it would ever be right to sexually insult her. >:(
"There is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into 'coteries' where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other groups can say."
--CS Lewis
Those of you worried that this sort of reviewer will take over the gaming space needn't be worried, for the same reason that PETA supporters will never take over the hunting lodge review world...
Nice Socratic Club quote! O:-)
Quote from: undercovergeek on September 08, 2014, 07:23:45 AM
"I knew going in that I'd playing a game about a topic that, in real life, is horrifying to my (white, privileged) progressive sensibilities. I thought I was prepared for it."
really?
I'm part Indian, so we aren't all dead. Anyway, I haven't played the game in question, but I did have a blast playing various savage tribes in Medieval Total War 2.
I think its kinda nice that the game seemed real enough to make the reviewer a big queasy. I don't see why games that simulate history should not raise moral questions. What's the point in playing if it doesn't mean anything?
the separation of gaming and living?
i dont want something im doing in my relaxing time to ask me any moral questions, or put another way i dont want moral questions to be part of my relaxing time
Quote from: Nefaro on September 08, 2014, 11:50:33 AM
Quote from: endfire79 on September 08, 2014, 10:14:48 AM
Good points. I just hope it doesn't become the norm to piss over a great series of games.
I also found it ironic she felt more more secure about uniting the principalities and states of the Holy Roman Empire.
How she plans to do that in the game without the Reformation, Counterreformation, forced conversions or 'heretics', the 30 Years war, etc, etc, (well, you get the picture - either way, it won't be pretty, but her conscience is eased).
Just goes to show these self-proclaimed "Progressives" have little to no concept of history, other than how selective bits of it compare to their own little modern fantasy reality.
Rainbows and Unicorn farts in abundance.
Maybe the reviewer used a little irony there? I mean if you have any interest in the HRE, you can't be unaware of its various quirks.
You're probably quite right ;)
QuoteI think its kinda nice that the game seemed real enough to make the reviewer a big queasy. I don't see why games that simulate history should not raise moral questions. What's the point in playing if it doesn't mean anything?
I think I agree with you in that sense. I guess that's the beauty of this series. I love reading on the historical context almost as much as playing through it. I was flabbergasted to see EU when it hit the shelves, as I had never seen a title like that before. I enjoy playing through the 30 Years War, or the Age of Exploration, or through the many Ottoman/European conflicts as that was history and it has significance to me (although my wife thinks I'm wasting my time :). I do make choices about whether to pursue heretics, or to permit them, whether to align to whatever faction, whether to explore, conquer, trade, and 'assimilate' cultures, or be a real ass like some rulers were historically. Yes, I guess if that makes you think and get interested in the subjects, than the game has done a great job.
Quote from: endfire79 on September 10, 2014, 11:39:03 AM
You're probably quite right ;)
QuoteI think its kinda nice that the game seemed real enough to make the reviewer a big queasy. I don't see why games that simulate history should not raise moral questions. What's the point in playing if it doesn't mean anything?
I think I agree with you in that sense. I guess that's the beauty of this series. I love reading on the historical context almost as much as playing through it. I was flabbergasted to see EU when it hit the shelves, as I had never seen a title like that before. I enjoy playing through the 30 Years War, or the Age of Exploration, or through the many Ottoman/European conflicts as that was history and it has significance to me (although my wife thinks I'm wasting my time :). I do make choices about whether to pursue heretics, or to permit them, whether to align to whatever faction, whether to explore, conquer, trade, and 'assimilate' cultures, or be a real ass like some rulers were historically. Yes, I guess if that makes you think and get interested in the subjects, than the game has done a great job.
I think by "big queasy" I meant "bit queasy"...but one of the reasons I play war games is to get an idea of sorts of what events might have been like. However I also like the raw, infantile fun of arming a savage tribe with muskets (like you could in MTW2) and seeing what might happen. I haven't been able to get into giant simulators like EUIV since I seem to prefer very specific and detailed violent events such as you can see in FPS games and Flight simulators.
I am a bit puzzled as to how anyone could be queasy about destroying the power of the Mexica (Aztec is a later invention of a little-known wave of mythologizing in the early 19th century). Nearly everyone within 200 miles of Tenotitlan would have some reason to be glad to see them destroyed. However, I have my doubts about whether any game is yet up to going into the complexities of how Mesoamerian power really worked. I settled for getting some muskets to the Chichimecs and letting that reduce the complexity pretty fast.
It would be great to get a game centered on the rise and fall of the Mexica or any of their various adversaries or predecessors or successors, but it seems unlikely in the near future.
Is the author unaware of exactly what those Mesoamerican cultures did to each other, long before any Europeans showed up?
Quote from: undercovergeek on September 10, 2014, 11:27:42 AM
the separation of gaming and living?
i dont want something im doing in my relaxing time to ask me any moral questions, or put another way i dont want moral questions to be part of my relaxing time
Why build a simulation of some part of history if the historical part is supposed to be read as pure fantasy? I like war games because they put some kick into the imagination. You can read (as I often do) about the Stalingrad Campaign, but it seems like the best games about the Stalingrad campaigns would be the ones realistic enough to make one see the world from the point of view of somebody involved in that warfare. To see the world from a point of view that is not your own is something that is both relaxing (in that you leave your cares behind) and stimulating in that it brings up questions and many of those may be moral questions.
Quote from: Banzai_Cat on September 10, 2014, 12:12:22 PM
Is the author unaware of exactly what those Mesoamerican cultures did to each other, long before any Europeans showed up?
Well, if you look at the detail of the reviewers complaints, some of them amount to a compliant that I always have over representing Indians in the New World: there is no real detail at all. Whatever the Indians may have been doing to each other -- it doesn't show up in the game.
I agree the "genocide" thing is a bit silly -- in a lot of fighting the Indians did okay and it was mostly disease that killed them off and for the most part with no help from the Europeans.
I thought this had been modded at one point (detailed Amerindian, cultures), but I may be mistaken. MengJiao, definitely a worthy suggestion for Paradox to add in the next EU release.
Part of the problem is that the reviewer overtly blames the designers for something the designers didn't have much control over. Minor factions get represented as minor factions wherever they are in the game, and historically most of the American factions would count as minor by EU4's time standards. The designers can put in lots of bling details for events and whatever, even for minor factions in Europe and the Mediterraneans, because we have written histories to work from in that area of the world; not so much in the Americas. The reason North America looks so desolate when European explorers and colonists arrive in-game, is because historically there was some kind of catastrophe that wiped out 90% of the relevant population groups only a few years before the colonists began to arrive (the obvious guess being a series of pandemics, though we have to make educated guesses because no written records could be left behind.)
And the fact of the matter is that some cultures didn't get around to developing socio-cultural disciplines to foster and spread widescale technological advances. So no, without some modding the Amerindians aren't going to advance as fast as European cultures did. That isn't racism, that's realism. (Nor is showing how a typical warrior looked when he fought racism, any more than showing a typical warrior from any other culture.)
just another reason women should stay in the kitchen and leave gaming to men. O0
Quote from: JasonPratt on September 10, 2014, 12:47:31 PM
Part of the problem is that the reviewer overtly blames the designers for something the designers didn't have much control over. Minor factions get represented as minor factions wherever they are in the game, and historically most of the American factions would count as minor by EU4's time standards. The designers can put in lots of bling details for events and whatever, even for minor factions in Europe and the Mediterraneans, because we have written histories to work from in that area of the world; not so much in the Americas. The reason North America looks so desolate when European explorers and colonists arrive in-game, is because historically there was some kind of catastrophe that wiped out 90% of the relevant population groups only a few years before the colonists began to arrive (the obvious guess being a series of pandemics, though we have to make educated guesses because no written records could be left behind.)
And the fact of the matter is that some cultures didn't get around to developing socio-cultural disciplines to foster and spread widescale technological advances. So no, without some modding the Amerindians aren't going to advance as fast as European cultures did. That isn't racism, that's realism. (Nor is showing how a typical warrior looked when he fought racism, any more than showing a typical warrior from any other culture.)
I know this 90% pop drop thing has recently gotten embedded in accounts of what happened to the Indians and at some points it has some truth...though often for later encounters. There are far more exceptions to this model than there are events that conform to it.
For example, the Mexica didn't have any recorded disease losses until after Tenotitlan was besieged. They and their enemies and allies could field really big armies and on a good day, they could come close to wiping out the Conquestadors and their allies. So (as so often happened), it wasn't disease that overwhelmed the Indians, it was the first few years of 500 years of geopolitical moves and of course, the Indians did not always loose.
In the case of the MesoAmerica, it was after the destruction of the Mexica that the population drop occurred, so the drop explains a lot but not the most notorious initial conquest and it doesn't explain all that much about other events in MesoAmerica -- for example that the last Mayan Kingdom fell in 1697, long, long after the initial encounter. And the New Mexican Indians completely threw out the Spanish in 1680, in the midst of a population drop, but obviously not a crippling one.
As for technical and social adaptation, the Indians were actually extremely good at that. In fact, you could argue that any Indian group that put up any sustained fight or adopted any trading relations with Europeans was doing a lot of socialization of technical work very fast. The problem for simulations is that it takes some level of detail to bring these things out.
Quote from: MengJiao on September 10, 2014, 11:30:57 AM
Quote from: Nefaro on September 08, 2014, 11:50:33 AM
Quote from: endfire79 on September 08, 2014, 10:14:48 AM
Good points. I just hope it doesn't become the norm to piss over a great series of games.
I also found it ironic she felt more more secure about uniting the principalities and states of the Holy Roman Empire.
How she plans to do that in the game without the Reformation, Counterreformation, forced conversions or 'heretics', the 30 Years war, etc, etc, (well, you get the picture - either way, it won't be pretty, but her conscience is eased).
Just goes to show these self-proclaimed "Progressives" have little to no concept of history, other than how selective bits of it compare to their own little modern fantasy reality.
Rainbows and Unicorn farts in abundance.
Maybe the reviewer used a little irony there? I mean if you have any interest in the HRE, you can't be unaware of its various quirks.
I noticed nothing extra that would indicate an intended jab at such people. Therefore it was taken at face value. Perhaps it was a fecetious jab.. I don't know. Not too difficult to believe with just such narrow pre-programmed thoughts and opinions being the norm with youngsters these days.
Edit:
This quote from the article just reiterates:
QuoteAnd it's here where things started to get a bit...fucked up. I was still having loads of fun, but suddenly I couldn't get into playing a jovial dictator relentlessly pushing her borders back and using the bones of dead peasants as the mortar in her new palace. Somewhere, deep in my chest, a little voice was whispering this is really fucking sick.
Let's be clear about one thing: in real life, the colonization of North America by European settlers was only possible because of the accompanying slow-motion genocide of the people who were already living here. The First Nations of the Americas did not have castles, or royal dynasties, or a continent-spanning church like the Europeans, but they did have a civilization.
Sounds serious to me. Plenty more "genocide" references and such in the article, too.