Hearts of Iron IV Modding and the Twilight of the Culture War

Decending a circle deeper into grand strategy gaming hell and finding the first real projects of the young right along the way.

Last week, I opened my article about the history of Paradox Interactive with a confession: that I am a Paradox gamer myself. This week, I will open with another one: that I didn’t really give you all the full picture of my relationship with Paradox’s blockbuster World War II-themed strategy game, Hearts of Iron IV. Those of you who read the full piece may remember that when I got to the title during my overview of the company’s mid-2010s breakout, I described it in far different terms than the other titles I had gone over beforehand. Up to that point, I had covered Paradox’s library quite positively, lauding their best games as genre-reshaping innovations while defending even obviously dumbed-down releases as still extremely replayable and mechanically deep. But when I got to Hearts of Iron IV—the most popular grand strategy game ever released by a country mile—I described it as such:

• “A game for morons that has seemingly been designed by morons.”

• “Outright lobotomized…[repelling] at a visceral level.”

• “An insult to the very idea of using computers to represent historical and social dynamics.”

• “Easily the least detailed, least interactive, and least intricate strategy game produced by a major studio in modern times.”

I am not here to walk any of these descriptions back. To the extent that I have any regrets about how I talked about Hearts of Iron IV in this article, it is that I neglected to mention that the game’s second-most-recent DLC comes close to being outright Nazi propaganda. Instead, I am here to address a presumption that some of you might have come to: that my holding of these beliefs mean that I do not play Hearts of Iron IV. This, unfortunately, is not true. For all of the disdain that I have for the base game—a feeling represented by the fact that, to this day, Hearts of Iron IV is the sole Paradox title on my Steam account where I have exactly zero achievements—I have played the game a lot.

The raw numbers tell the story here. As of today, approximately 12 years into the history of my personal Steam account, Hearts of Iron IV is my third most played game of all time. The reason for this is that when I play Hearts of Iron IV, I am not really playing Hearts of Iron IV, at least as long as it is defined by the actual game that the developers put out for you to purchase. Instead, I am playing versions of the game made by other people—complete overhauls that change almost everything about the base game, from its setting to its focus to even the basics of its gameplay.

I am playing mods, and most of the hardcore fans we talked about in the last article are, too.

This brings us to the other side of how Paradox’s all-time most popular has influenced young American radicals—a side that no overview of the company and its practices, however thorough, will ever be able to account for. Crucial to the popularity of Hearts of Iron IV—and even more crucial to its political influence—is the fact that the fanbase itself produces a substantial proportion of the most important content in the game. As unpaid volunteers in teams that, in some cases, have amounted to hundreds of programmers, writers and artists, they have elevated the game to levels that the professional developers in Stockholm haven’t even come even close to. What they do is just as central to the impact that Paradox games have had as all of the decisions made by the actual developers.

So, what is there to say about these amateur developers and their audiences? The first and most important thing is that they are nearly all political extremists. Their radical beliefs are what motivate them to spend so much time creating such massive projects for no pay, and they are what make their content—their art—so informative to the rest of us trying to get a handle on how they tick. This is especially the case with radical modders on the right, whose work on and around the Hearts of Iron franchise represents possibly the first-ever example of a collective effort among Groypers in history. In their yearslong wars against what they saw as a woke modding elite, we can see how they learned to organize amongst themselves. And with their recent effort to create a major mod of their own, we can get our first peak of what it looks like for them to actually be in charge of something: what their creative ambitions are, how they understand the world, and how capable they are at both propagandizing to and entertaining a mass audience.

But before we begin, I’m going to give you a bit of a spoiler: this won’t be a pessimistic article. While it would certainly be easy to wax poetic about the awful neo-Nazis and how oh-so-scary they are, that’s just not the upshot of how I feel about them. In fact, I feel the exact opposite way. When all is said and done, there is very little that has made me as optimistic about the future of American politics as the attempts we have seen by Groypers to create their own high end gameplay. I have walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and I have seen shit gameplay, self-indulgent LARPing, extremely poor quality content, and a complete lack of project management skills. So, without further ado, here is your first-ever image of the end stage of America’s culture wars, or; what it looks like when Groypers are actually in charge of something.