There’s a small, dark room in Waxhaw, North Carolina, where I’ve spent more than 2,000 hours playing Paradox Interactive’s newest game, Europa Universalis V. Count the hours I spent on its predecessor, and I’m over 7,000. Yes—that’s the better part of a year spent playing a single video game. While I can’t promise that I’ve ever seen sunlight, I can promise that there’s a special reason I’ve spent so much time playing Paradox games.
The gameplay of EU5 goes beyond being merely “immersive” or a form of escapism. The game has become such an in-depth, complicated historical simulation, rather than a grand-strategy arcade, that it allows for reflection on historical mechanisms that can only be explored and interacted with in a video game: complex ideas like state formation, the development of markets, and the rise of political ideologies. Its simulation style opens countless possibilities to think critically about history, in a medium that’s unconventional for most academics and scholars.
EU5 wasn’t the first Paradox game to be transformed into a simulation. The 2020s brought a breakthrough that revolutionized how historical grand-strategy games were made: more computing power for the average consumer and developments in coding allowed complex mechanics to emerge in Paradox games. Victoria 3, released in 2022, was one of the first “new-gen” historical simulators from Paradox Interactive. Its predecessor, Victoria 2, had already divided its population into “pops,” groups sorted by profession, culture, and religion, but much of the game still ran on simple, flat modifiers, like a “percentage-growth” bonus. Victoria 3 pushed the pop system much further. Each pop is tied to a specific state and workplace, carries its own consumer needs and political alignment, and counts dependents as well as workers, so that, as one of its developers told Wargamer, the game simulates the entire world’s population rather than just its workforce. (Imperator: Rome, released in 2019, had also experimented with pops on a smaller scale.) In Victoria 3, a pop’s satisfaction and livelihood influence a nation’s economy, which parties get elected, and how productive its workplaces are. Among the pantheon of Paradox games, this was a significant upgrade, and it became the baseline on which future games, like EU5, would be developed.
While Victoria 3 was a stellar game, and an upgrade from Paradox’s previous titles, which were mostly focused on military conquest and grand strategy, it lacked the depth that EU5 has.
That depth is precisely why I’ve fallen in love with EU5. The nuance of its mechanics and the immersion of the game have allowed me to understand the premodern world in a way that wasn’t possible with previous Paradox titles. That’s not to say that EU5 is a perfect simulation of the early modern period: it certainly isn’t. But playing EU5 offers great opportunities to interact with the historical mechanisms of the premodern past that are hard to understand from a modern perspective.
Control, for example, is new to the Paradox series in its EU5 form, and one of the most hotly contested mechanics in the game. Control is an attempt to simulate the concept of borderlands, and states’ inability to fully control their territory due to technological, geographical, and political limitations. This isn’t a concept exclusive to the early modern period, but EU5 simulates it more effectively than any Paradox game before it, let alone most video games. Control is the manifestation of what my older brother (also a history nerd) and I like to call the tendrils of the state: the physical presence of state institutions, such as infrastructure, which tie people directly to the state, thus bringing them under its control. We see these institutions today: schools, roads, water and power systems all bring us into the grasp of the government. In the early modern period, roads and government buildings served as the physical manifestation of the state, and their presence in rural communities bound people to political institutions that were, for most of history, nothing more than an abstract concept rather than a physical reality. It’s hard for us to imagine, especially since we live in an age of technological absolutism, where state surveillance, documentation, and bureaucracy make us intrinsically a part of, and obedient to, the state. But for most of history, this wasn’t the case. This mechanic, while pretty simply constructed, completely changes the way players are forced to play the game. You can rule over a vast territory full of unintegrated people, but if they’re not actually connected to the apparatus of the state, do you really exercise sovereignty over them? This was a real question faced by many empires, especially in Central Europe, and one that EU5 poses back to the player through this mechanic.
I could explain various other mechanics of the game, but ultimately, you’d have to play it for yourself. There are so many complex features, like control, that enhance the immersion and historical accuracy of the game—that’s what makes EU5 a powerful lens for analyzing the early modern world. When game developers put care, thought, and historical inquiry into their game, it allows us, the players, to reflect back and think critically about history. Instead of treating EU5 as an arcadey sandbox for LARPing and alternate-history roleplay (which certainly has its place in the historical gaming community, don’t get me wrong), Paradox Interactive created a simulation of the early modern world: a rustic yet effective simulation that allows players to experience the real constraints, dynamics, and institutions that everyday people in the past experienced.
As the player, you don’t feel like a deity; you feel immersed in the historical period, something that can feel lacking in other Paradox games. This immersion, I believe, is what allowed me not only to learn so much about the early modern period and become interested in studying it, but also convinced me to spend 2,000 hours of my life playing it. It was a pretty good investment. Besides, there’s nothing more fascinating than loading up a new game of EU5, selecting a nation, and exploring a world so carefully curated to embody history. That’s something you don’t get to see often, but something that the historical community can really benefit from.
I think I’ll be losing a lot more hours to this game in the future.
by Krish Ramesh
