Victoria 3 won't sugar-coat colonialism, but it'll give you the chance to resist it
There’s an inherent awkwardness in historical strategy games as entertainment, which is just how much of history is made up of stacked atrocities. Abstraction can do a lot to sidestep this, of course: many games feature real historical cultures, but pit them against each other in virtual petri dishes which might as well be fantasy worlds. Time, also, has a strange capacity to dilute grimness - whether rightly or wrongly, the more ancient a game’s setting, the more carefree we tend to be about burning farming settlements to the ground for the sake of expansion.
But if developers want to make games about real history, especially stuff which has happened within a generation or two of living memory, things become a lot more stark. Victoria 3, the next grand strategy project from Paradox, will see players take the reins of nations on the global stage of the 19th century. That means industrialisation, massive social upheaval, and a thousand other fascinations. But it also means rapacious national expansion, colonialism, and slavery - issues on which the public conversation has advanced a lot since Victoria 2 came out in 2010.
