I Understand? A historian's early thoughts on tutorials, numbers, and history in Victoria 3

I have a PhD in British Imperial History. I spend most of my free time playing video games. I have a podcast and video series dedicated to covering historical video games.

Despite all this, I’ve only played a few hours of Paradox’s Victoria franchise. Victoria, a historical game franchise focused on the era of New Imperialism. It makes no sense, I know, but there it is.

What’s stopped me? Well, the first game, Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun (2003), came out when I was an undergrad and I was too busy doing other things to play games. And the second game, Victoria II (2010), came out a week after my father died and I was too busy doing other things to play games.

Now we have the release of Victoria 3. I’m still too busy doing other things, BUT I decided I would make an effort with this game, come hell or high water (it’s flooding in my hometown, by the way). Thanks to a review code provided by Paradox, I’ve now spent about a dozen hours with this game, which is not nearly enough time to be an expert but is enough to share some early impressions.

Let’s get our bearings: Victoria 3 is a historical grand strategy game set between 1836 to 1936. It is a Paradox game, which means that it is very much in the Paradox mold of grand strategy. It emphasizes free play over a predictable progression, historical revisionism over historical rectitude, and, most of all, it prefers numbers to narrative. “Prefer” is too gentle of a term here. Victoria 3 LOVES numbers.

The moment-to-moment gameplay involves staring at numbers. Lots and lots of numbers. These numbers pertain to every facet of the game and its historical setting during the long 19th century. Victoria 3 has a beautiful art style, mixing elements of neo-gothic with art nouveau, but most of what this art is decorating, at its very base level, are spreadsheets.

These steampunky spreadsheets often relate information that you would expect to find in a spreadsheet: tax records, trade arrangements, troop deployments, and demographics. However, these spreadsheets are also the player’s primary point of interaction with game mechanics that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see in a spreadsheet: politics, class structure, diplomacy, and religion. How long will it take to see a percentage point increase in my diplomatic relationship with Prussia? This game has got a number for that.

Victoria 3’s menus can occasionally throw up a short, descriptive quote about a game element like cotton production or the Bessemer process. The game also includes occasional events, like the development of trade unions, that include text descriptions. But the vast majority of the player’s time with this game is spent reading, analyzing, and adjusting numbers.

To help you make sense of all these numbers, Victoria 3 includes a robust tutorial system that will walk you through most of the major number-related decisions within a few hours of play. In these tutorials, players are given two options to proceed. They can either click a button entitled “Tell Me Why,” which gives you a brief explanation as to why an activity is useful, or they can click a button entitled "Tell Me How,” which will lead the player through a set of steps on how to achieve a goal.

With whatever button the player pushes, both tutorial guides end with a final button that reads “I Understand.” For the most part, the tutorial text in Victoria 3 is encouraging, but this final button always reads more like a demand rather than a hopeful conclusion. It’s like the checkbox or signature line at the end of a particularly adversarial and threatening user agreement. “I Understand…on pain of death.”

The hard-edge finality of the game’s tutorials, along with its reliance on numbers, feels like something that goes hand in hand. It’s a statement about the seemingly unassailable nature of Victoria 3’s gameplay. With this game, you either UNDERSTAND THE NUMBERS or you find something else to do with your life.

I think this “my way or the highway” approach also extends to this game’s interpretation of history. Paradox tells us that Victoria 3 strives to provide a historically realistic simulation of life during the age of New Imperialism. What better, and more trustworthy, way to set up such a simulation than with statistics? Sure, player interaction can send this simulation in any number of directions, BUT the initial accuracy of the game’s simulation is without reproach because of Victoria 3’s well-research numbers.

Numbers have always been a big part of telling the story of the past, particularly the distant past, where numerical records (e.g. budgets, agricultural production figures, treasury deposits, etc.) may be the only surviving documents. Number-based history was arguably the most popular form of academic history throughout the twentieth century, when the discipline veered toward being a true social “science” inspired in large part by Marxist analysis.

Marxist historians, not unlike Victoria 3, were very interested in using historical numbers as the basis for simulation and predictive models, but instead of using these models for a game they attempted to use them to determine the future date of the collapse of capitalism and the advent of the proletariat revolution (we’re still waiting, obviously).

During the 1980s, however, academic histories began to shift to cultural analysis as the basis for research. Instead of studying production figures and taxation rates, they studied novels, newspapers, diaries, correspondence, art, illustrated propaganda, and, eventually, video games. This didn’t necessarily mean that numbers were no longer important, but it did mean that the traditional presentation of history was no longer dominated by charts and graphs, but instead by narrative. This is still largely the case to this day, where just about every professional historian, in one way or another, is a cultural historian, and the only time numbers appear in the text are for a date or to list footnotes.

So, for a modern cultural historian like myself, playing a game like Victoria 3 feels a bit like cosplaying as a 1950s Marxist or economic historian, trying to use numbers to understand the past and maybe even predict the future. There’s a comfort and assurance that comes with using numbers. Numbers don’t lie, as they say. But they also don’t tell the full story.

Part of the reason behind the cultural turn in academic history had to do with what numbers were missing. Quantitative histories tended to miss the stories of people not considered by numbers produced by those in power. They tended to only be concerned with stories that numbers usually tell, namely stories about money and production. And, as described by historian Theodore Porter in his book Trust in Numbers, quantitative histories tended to give the scholar and their readers a sense of absolute truth when none actually existed (because the quantitative models were wrong or biased). In other words, the numbers often lied.

So, as a historian, I have a bit of hang up with the quantitative basis for Victoria 3 because there’s a lot more to the story of this era than numbers. At the same time, there are a lot of interesting cultural stories to tell involving those numbers.

Consider the British Empire, for instance. Throughout most of its history, the British Empire lost money for the British state. Sure, individuals often made huge amounts of money from imperialism, and Britain, as a whole tended to benefit from such wealth, but on a nearly yearly basis the state lost money on colonial possessions.

Now, if you were caught in this position as a player in Victoria 3 you might very well cut your losses and relinquish your colonies. But, in history, Britain held on to their colonial possessions, in most cases until the bitter end. Why?

Numbers would tell you this decision makes no sense, but when you bring in culture – something which is often impossible to quantify – you learn that the British had all sorts of excuses for imperialism. It was useful for national defense, for national pride, for research, and for philanthropy (gross, obviously, but still a reality). Numbers feel authoritative, but if numbers dictated the story of the past, the British Empire would have ended in the 18th century. People trust numbers, but there are often all sorts of reasons why they ignore them.

Maybe these sorts of situations can emerge in Victoria 3. I’m looking forward to finding out. But in these first dozen hours of gameplay, I find a game that is reliant on numbers to a fault. To be fair, numbers undergird all games, particularly historical games. The oldest digital history games, including The Sumerian Game and The Oregon Trail are both resource management games that rely on historical statistics to determine the frequency of in-game random events. But successful historical games based on numbers also develop compelling narratives or, at the very least, encourage emergent narratives through easily understood numerical mechanics. That’s something I haven’t found in Victoria 3, even after clicking “I Understand.”