My Best Side is Genocide

A review from the American Psychological Association “confirms a link between playing violent video games and aggression.”

Okay, fair enough. But it seems like they’re talking about those shoot-em-up military games. I was really hoping the report would address my own video game addiction — becoming a mad Spanish bastard in Europa Universalis IV and engaging in a 500-year-long genocidal mission to exterminate every native in the New World and every Muslim in Africa.

So far, I’ve only managed to cleanse the New World. I’ll wipe out native civilizations, convert them to my culture, and sit back as I think of their cities burning to the ground and vanishing into the wilderness. In northern Africa, the Muslims are a touch more difficult to exterminate. Its a slow slog murdering my way through tens of millions of civilians from Morocco to the Balkans where I can finally link up with my insipid and ineffectual allies in Eastern Europe. Those allies should be counting their lucky stars because, by the time I start knocking heads with the Ottomans, I really do start to think that my Balkan and Slavic allies might just be a filthy mongrel race themselves, deserving of equally brutal extermination, absorption, and conversion.

You’d think they’d be watching while, over in Central America, my troops gleefully set fire to orphanages. You’d think they’d have some respect and, maybe, push the bloody Turks out of Europe for me. Or at least distract the fuckers. Maybe if they’d just show an ounce of ability and secured the Balkan region entirely, I’d be content when I finally do reach them.

Meanwhile, to the north, the fucking French never want to throw me a bone. They’re claiming shitty little provinces in the Pyrenees and rattling their stupid sabers all the fucking time so I have to dedicate resources to an army that just sits there at the border watching those cheese-eating fuckers. In the New World, the French are always trying to get into the colonial game and, again, I have to take time out from gang raping native babies with multiple armies to go and clean up their pathetic little incursions.

And do not — do not! — get me started on the Pope, that two-timing fucker’s world barely extends past Naples. I’m trying to conquer the world and he can’t even keep his backyard in order, and then he starts calling me a fucking monster. Sometimes, in between horrific acts of atrocity, I invade Rome just for the hell of it. Bring the Pope to his knees and then cheerfully ask for nothing when I sue for peace. just wanted to say hello, you filthy liar!