Red Flood - Where Art is Politics

I hear the soft strains of an organ blending with the wistful, melancholic Russian lyrics being sung, staring at surreal collages of modernist art, historical figures, and flyers promoting fictional regimes, as the small loading bar inches across the screen. I’m playing Hearts of Iron 4, a WWII strategy game, and I feel myself become slightly deranged, tearing my hair out over the terrible loading times on my PC as I listen to the eerie Russian song for the millionth time. But my madness seems fitting, as I am playing the mod Red Flood, a total conversion mod that seems to have taken Percy Shelley’s words that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and replaced “unacknowledged legislators” with “authoritarian leaders.”

 

Entering the ersatz world of Red Flood, we can observe a few commonalities with other alternate history worlds – Russia and Spain are competing to see who can have the most confusing and destructive civil war, Africa is in that awkward stage of puberty between colonized and decolonized, and Japan is still at war with China. Ah, some things never change. But if we take a look around, we can see a major difference – the introduction of the political alignment of Accelerationism! This one fits a little oddly among the other traditional ideologies like socialism, reactionary, or right-wing despotism, and is one of the first signs that this mod is not like its fellows. In this world, Accelerationism is an ideology based on the artistic movement of Futurism, which obsesses over dynamism, speed, and violence, and is led by a variety of different artists, writers, philosophers, historians, and generally odd figures across the world.

 

For instance, let us take Accelerationist France as an example. Its leader, Antonin Artaud, is a schizophrenic and surrealist theater director, writer, and poet. Some of his famous quotes are:

 

“All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.”

 

“Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.”

 

“We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.”

 

 Not exactly “we shall fight on the beaches” type of stuff, is it?

 

Artaud certainly isn’t the run-of-the-mill leader, and his focus tree matches that. In HOI4, focus trees are almost like choose-your-own-adventure stories, where you choose your country’s destiny. Playing France, you have three major choices: do you want to turn France into an unchained hedonistic paradise, burn down the cities and start an anarchist Celtic luddite nation, or proclaim the Unreal State and ban reality itself? If you’re taken aback by these options, don’t worry – I felt the same way the first time I played the mod. But from this surprise came the wide-eyed excitement that I have never felt about a HOI4 mod before. Other mods like Kaiserreich and The New Order, while ahistorical, never shed the burden of realism. Red Flood looks at realism, shrugs, then absolutely yeets it out the window. Yet this isn’t a fantasy mod – the developers are simply looking at history through different lenses. Futurism might seem like a ridiculous ideology, until one realizes that Fascism was directly influenced by, and perhaps even grew out of Italian Futurism. And Boris Groys claims that, under Stalin, the Soviet Union itself was an avant-garde gesamtkunstwerk, a total, all-encompassing work of art. This way of thinking digs deep into the fascinating connection between art and politics, society, and philosophy. Red Flood’s world is where the pen is the sword.

 

Let’s have a few more examples of this design perspective in action. The Kavkaz Society is a small nation occupying what is today Georgia, after the in-universe implosion of the Russian Empire. Despite its small size, Kavkaz is the new home of some of the greatest literary minds in recent Russian history, and you get to choose between three of them in a poetry duel!  Alexei Tolstoy is the science fiction writer and author of Aelita, focusing on the power of prose, and pushes for Russification. Vladimir Mayakovsky is the Futurist poet, advocating dynamism above all. Finally, Velimir Khlebnikov is the experimental genius who invented an indecipherable language and is obsessed with time. Focusing on Khlebnikov, his route has you proclaiming zaum, his invented language, as the lingua franca, and establishing Kavkaz as a state “in time” rather than “in space.” As a person who studied Eastern European literature, seeing all these people and their ideas being brought to life (albeit in a simulation) gave me a visceral understanding the impact their art had on the world. The developers drew back the curtains on these “unacknowledged legislators” and had them remake the world in their image – a crazy, strange, and ultimately awe-inspiring world.

 

Unfortunately, it is when the developers return to the traditional alt-history fare that the mod falters. Playing as Persia in the new update, I felt like the focus trees and narratives lacked the charm other countries like France and Kavkaz had. The focuses were generally boring, mostly focusing on either spreading socialism or regaining the old “rightful” Persian lands. The most interesting path of turning into an oil-fueled mercenary state was hobbled by bad implementation. Similarly, Israel’s focus tree felt ordinary and generic compared to the older ones. They could have done more radical things such as having the Futurists “play” with the concepts and ideas from the Old Testament. Instead, all we have is an “Israel conquers the Middle East” roleplay fantasy.

 

From a game design perspective, there are a few lessons to take away from Red Flood. Although the developers did not add new mechanics, they were able to present and fresh gameplay with a simple reorientation of perspective. All the other alternative history mods were asking themselves, “what would happen if x country won/lost/imploded/didn’t do anything,” while Red Flood questions that reality itself. It is when that vision fails or is obscured that the mod is at its nadir, showing us how important it is that the creative vision must be kept in mind every step of the way, as to make sure the product never loses what makes it unique. At the same time, I know how dedicated the devs are to this unique vision of theirs, and I cannot wait to see what they come up for their next update. I wait with bated breath for the Futurist-Sarmatist Poland focus tree!

 

 

(All mods mentioned can be download from the Steam Workshop for Hearts of Iron 4)