Demographically, these gamers are not far from the stereotype: predominantly young, male, and politically confused. In these places, developers and players share memes, teasers, and ‘developer diaries’, a trend picked up from the publisher where creators will share specific areas or subjects of the mod in progress. They congregate in dedicated subreddits or Discord servers, and in recent months many of them have bonded together into the so-called ‘Paradox Modding Cooperative’. There is a distinct subculture to the people who produce and peruse these total conversion mods. What distinguishes the Alternate History mods for HOI4 from the game’s broader community, or from the genre in general? To me, the difference is found in the degree of dedication and internal coherence. It may seem odd to single out a fan community in such a niche way. It is this phenomenon that I want to focus on. Mods of the latter variety are called ‘total conversion mods’, and many of them alter the setting to an alternate history scenario, where some divergence in the past has caused an entirely different setup for total war. Highly varied in content, mods can do anything from simply changing world leader portraits ( like giving Stalin a bigger moustache) to shifting aspects of setting and gameplay completely. These mods are distributed through various means, but many if not most of them are found on the Steam Workshop, a platform provided by the digital distribution service known as Steam. Besides the sharing of memes and discussion posts, this community uses tools provided by the publisher to develop fan-made modifications, or mods for short. Like many other games developed by Paradox, HOI4 has a lively fan community, active on various social media platforms such as Reddit, Facebook and Paradox’ own forums.

While the victory conditions are mostly set by the players themselves, the game’s mechanics set up the rise of a global conflict akin to the historical WW2, and it can thus be called a war game first and foremost. It is called Hearts of Iron 4, or HOI4, and allows players to take control of any nation in the world from 1936 onwards. In 2016, a Swedish game publisher called Paradox Interactive published the latest entry in their line of World War 2 grand strategy games. Content warning for: warfare, genocide, antisemitism, and gamers Introduction

Hoi4 war of the worlds