In fact, Paradox carefully limits the possibility space of their grand-strategy games. 2 Compared to the Civilization series that uses the same mechanics for the Stone Age and the Space Age, as historian Greg Koabel notes, Paradox games represent those eras differently: “Rather than progressive stages, which share common universal laws of historical change, Paradox developers envision a series of epochs with ‘engines of change’ so distinct as to be impossible to model in a single game code.” 3 As a result, Paradox’s Europa Universalis IV ( EUIV) has an intricate economic system to explain the expansion of European nation-states and colonialism, while Crusader Kings III sees a world ruled by feudal lords, their personal quirks, and their relationships to one another. My experience reflected how the grand strategy games of developer Paradox formulate a historical argument about the periodization of human history: how to break down time into distinct periods, ages, or eras. That’s an odd lesson to learn from Hausa society. If nothing else, I had a new, specific understanding of how European feudalism worked.
But as the hours ticked by, I wondered: What exactly was I learning about history through play? My knowledge of geography was improved, but surely that wasn’t all. Through play-that is, of the computer game Crusader Kings III, or CKIII-a fiction turned into solid cartography. On my first try, I formed a matriarchal Hausa empire in the central Sahel region of Africa, neatly throwing out hundreds of years of history.
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