What separates a more casual setting from a semi-academic one is what happens next historical figures and world events that played a role in and around the time of your setting need to be fitted in in such a way that their presence makes sense, then a narrative needs to be developed that the player can follow along with. This establishes your point of divergence and forms the basis of the world you intend to create. This can in theory be anything you want, such as “ what if Germany won ” but will typically be more difficult to justify the further back in history you go. The first step in making any alternative history scenario is asking a “what-if” question. To better understand the theoretical uses of alternative history, it first has to be established how they are made. Houghton touches on many of the same points as this article does so the VOD of this lecture is linked below. In November of 2020 Robert Houghton held a digital lecture for VALUE on why Paradox games deviate from history and how the developers deal with a lack of data in the historical periods they want to depict. Modders, who are most often young non-academics with an interest in history, dive much deeper into the intricacies of the worlds they create and challenge the dominant discourse by allowing for the representation of the disempowered of our history. The game then simply rolls with what it is given from there. Paradox games like Victoria 2 and Hearts of Iron IV already are historical sandbox simulations in and of themselves you start off in a historically accurate time period and the actions of the player have the potential to change the course of history. The best place to find these types of games, in my opinion, is the Paradox Interactive modding community. Instead of hand-waving away criticism as irrelevant to the player’s enjoyment of the alternative world, the developers of these games engage with primary source material as well as their often academically interested audience to create a consensus on what could happen if world history had taken a different turn than it did in real life. In these games the alternative history scenario functions like an argument about how certain historical processes could have developed based on real-world history similar to it.
While a number of alternative history settings in mainstream video games such as Wolfenstein or the Bioshock series typically make little or no attempt to justify the plausibility of their scenario, there is a subset of games that are willing to effectively place themselves in a semi-academic debate.
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