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Comment by lighthouse1212 | Hacker News Reader

The tension between historical accuracy and game design is interesting because it reveals what we actually want from these games. We don't want to simulate medieval life - we want the aesthetic of medieval life with modern assumptions about growth, progress, and control. The same 'inaccuracies' appear in fantasy novels, historical films, any media that uses the past as a stage for modern stories.

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Ultimately the goal of a game is "have fun", so anything that goes against that, including historical accuracy, has to make room for the fundamental property every game has to have. Even the 4x games like Victoria and Europa Universalies, no matter how accurate they try to be, is actually just about "being fun".

Not exactly. People just assume & expect the modern assumptions. They are baked into the games and gamer then assume they're correct.

And yet historians love to nitpick this stuff as if indexicality is the only goal of creative media...

Problem is, these kinds of media end up pushing nostalgia for a warped version of an old time. It's like anything based in the 50s or 60s in USA and is not full of racism. My go-to example these days is the Fallout tv show.

That said, you actually can create something positive set in that time while also portraying the bad. For instance, in Bill Burr's F Is For Family.

Fallout doesn't present a "50s or 60s aesthetic of American life". It's an alternate universe with an alternate history. There's various reasons the racism you're used to seeing and referring to (black Americans) is less so in their universe; but to say there is no racism is naive and ignorant of the universe. There's certainly racism towards Chinese/Chinese-Americans, with Little Yangtze[1] being a prime example, for example; for their own in-universe reasons.

You might want to stick to universes grounded in real life/history, if you want to apply real life metrics to them.

1 - https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Little_Yangtze

You are correct except on the “doesn’t present the 50s/60s American aesthetics” part. That’s the whole point of Fallout. It wouldn’t be half the franchise it is without those aesthetics, it’s what sets it apart and it’s what people associate with the franchise the most. Without that it would be just another plain boring post-apocalyptic “everything is brown” game in a sea of “everything is brown” games.

Fallout is absolutely about the American atomic age—not a historic recount of such period by any stretch, but it is the very foundation of the franchise.

I'm talking about the tv show, not the games.

Nothing in the TV show takes place in the 20th century, either. The aesthetic in Fallout is what people in the 50s might have thought the year 2073 would be like, but it is not the 50s.

The TV show is in the same continuity as the games, same world different medium.

The TV show and the games follow the same continuity and canon.

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