Oct 25, 2026 · 1 hr 21 min · 10 segments
Bret Devereaux, historian and author of the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, explains why we're all still obsessed with World War 2, why Hearts of Iron IV is a gateway to (mis)understanding…
Bret DevereauxGuest
Samantha Hancox-LiHostI think there's an element to the simulation aspects of these games that make them... interesting teaching tools in a way that other media isn't necessarily to take an example right i read a book about the pacific theater uh covers guadalcanal and it
it's accurate about this battle and this ambush and this firefight that happens and the difficulties that the marines face on guadalcanal and the long you know What did they call it? The washing machine from hell or whatever.
There was some Japanese plane that would show up at night that was just rigged to be really loud.
Why on earth did the United States win the Battle of Guadalcanal? And you wouldn't be able to answer that question.
because it has this level of detail and accuracy and verisimilitude but it isn't giving you a larger picture of the war and it's not giving you a picture of the war that you can play with right and if you're playing hearts of iron and you fight and you lose the war you can be like those are mistakes Right.
Here's how I can go back and like play Germany again and I can win this time.
And that will give you Not just a series of events, but a feel for the causal levers in the game
You might not end up fighting the naval battle of Guadalcanal at Guadalcanal.
But you'll probably run up with the realization that, hey, with the American industry behind me, I can risk my ships aggressively and attritionally against the Imperial Japanese Navy and confident that six months from now i'm gonna have a whole different set of ships to play with and they won't and then suddenly the decisions at guadalcanal uh you know an over iron bottom sound as it came to be known makes sense that you're just like we're just gonna keep doing this and you know the person who runs out of cruisers first loses
and and that was the ijn um And so no, it absolutely has this persuasive power of simulation behind it.
Europa Universalis is one of the best interstate anarchy political realism simulators i have seen and the player just gets to experience the pressures that those sorts of systems create and the and therefore is moved in the direction of the behaviors they create uh you can you know compress a whole week's worth of lecture into a few hours of realizing the intense problems that the duke of burgundy faces simply because where he is physically and the behaviors that that pushes him towards um But that same simulationist approach is very persuasive and yet also captive to its assumptions.
The rules of the simulation, after all, are not derived from deep mathematical historical laws.
I think there's an element to the simulation aspects of these games that make them... interesting teaching tools in a way that other media isn't necessarily to take an example right i read a book about the pacific theater uh covers guadalcanal and it
it's accurate about this battle and this ambush and this firefight that happens and the difficulties that the marines face on guadalcanal and the long you know What did they call it? The washing machine from hell or whatever.
There was some Japanese plane that would show up at night that was just rigged to be really loud.
Why on earth did the United States win the Battle of Guadalcanal? And you wouldn't be able to answer that question.
because it has this level of detail and accuracy and verisimilitude but it isn't giving you a larger picture of the war and it's not giving you a picture of the war that you can play with right and if you're playing hearts of iron and you fight and you lose the war you can be like those are mistakes Right.
Here's how I can go back and like play Germany again and I can win this time.
And that will give you Not just a series of events, but a feel for the causal levers in the game
You might not end up fighting the naval battle of Guadalcanal at Guadalcanal.
But you'll probably run up with the realization that, hey, with the American industry behind me, I can risk my ships aggressively and attritionally against the Imperial Japanese Navy and confident that six months from now i'm gonna have a whole different set of ships to play with and they won't and then suddenly the decisions at guadalcanal uh you know an over iron bottom sound as it came to be known makes sense that you're just like we're just gonna keep doing this and you know the person who runs out of cruisers first loses
and and that was the ijn um And so no, it absolutely has this persuasive power of simulation behind it.
Europa Universalis is one of the best interstate anarchy political realism simulators i have seen and the player just gets to experience the pressures that those sorts of systems create and the and therefore is moved in the direction of the behaviors they create uh you can you know compress a whole week's worth of lecture into a few hours of realizing the intense problems that the duke of burgundy faces simply because where he is physically and the behaviors that that pushes him towards um But that same simulationist approach is very persuasive and yet also captive to its assumptions.
The rules of the simulation, after all, are not derived from deep mathematical historical laws.
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