The Gamergator rhetoric of historical accuracy has come back to bite Kingdom Come on the arse

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is billed as a faithful recreation of 15th century Bohemia, with an open world setting derived from primary sources and historical consultancy that seeks to “challenge misconceptions”, but I’m enjoying it partly for the inconsistencies. As I amble into a random village, my eye is caught by what feel like carefully observed period flourishes: a particular arrangement of crops in a sloping field, a woman praying at a shrine by the gate. Some of these sights and sounds unlock codex entries, layering up the pedagogic texture.

I also, however, sense the gamier elements, the electric wire within the illuminated tapestry. Identical horse troughs where I can wash off the trail dust and make myself more palatable to the locals. Crafting facilities, such as drying racks and alchemy tables, that are strangely free for any passer-by to use, in a settlement where barging into a house will get you arrested. Considerately placed roadside campsites with usefully unclaimed beds, for early-game or plain unlucky players who can’t afford the inn. All of this forming a dense pottage of icons on a papery map screen that, for all its ornamental specificity, could have been lifted from any open world game.

I don’t mean any of this as scorn. As with many such fictions, I like trying to decipher Warhorse’s efforts to achieve “historical accuracy” through the fusty stage machinery of a first-person RPG we can still approximately summarise as dragonless Skyrim. Sometimes the more generic design props appear to complement the social, cultural and architectural objects and practices itemised in the codex, and often, they don’t: either way, I’m engrossed in guessing at the competing artistic priorities. Rather than a static recreation, this is history in the making, as history generally is – a fleeting and partial assemblage of values and details that projects backward from “the present” as much as it seeks to restore “the past”. It’s an alternately delicate and clunky, consummate and compromised, ceremonial and irresolute act of interpretation. That’s what makes it “fun”.

This isn’t really how Warhorse have been promoting Deliverance 2, which is partly why Warhorse and especially, co-founder Daniel Vávra are currently getting it in the neck from a bunch of returning Kingdom Come players for whom “authenticity” is an excuse to own the libs. Released in 2018, the first Kingdom Come was promoted as a more “mature” piece of historical realism in a universe of fantasy medieval sims that let you hurl fireballs at ogres. That true-to-life, empirically grounded ethic has always been integral to how Kingdom Come positions itself against the work of competitors like Bethesda and CD Projekt. As Vávra told Red Bull in 2016: “No one has tried to create a historically accurate and realistic RPG, yet. That’s our edge.”

The theme of authenticity became more forceful, however, when Warhorse met with suggestions that the game’s portrayal of Bohemia seemed a teeny bit slanted, based on the Kickstarter descriptions – omitting non-white people from the setting despite evidence of their presence, while also adhering to the stereotype of medieval women as passive and subordinate and peripheral. I’m not sure I’ve discovered patient zero for this discussion, but it could be this post from MedievalPOC, a Tumblr account that curates representations of people of colour in pre-Enlightenment Europe to counteract “retroactive whitewashing” of history.

The accuracy of Deliverance’s “historical accuracy” soon became a talking point in specialist press coverage. Vávra responded by asserting that the game’s depictions of ethnicity and gender are true to accounts of the period, while decrying western journalists at large as a bunch of would-be censors and hypocrites, calling not-unfair attention to the fact that a lot of video games media publications have a surplus of white cishet men. In the process, and rather less sympathetically, he threw his weight behind Gamergate – a febrile harassment campaign, originally sparked by somebody’s clownishly toxic grudge against their ex, who sometimes advertise themselves as being about “ethics in games journalism”, but are better understood as a hate group pushing back against progressive representation in video games and the games industry.

I’ve never met Vávra, whose past projects include the original Mafia, and can’t say how much of Gamergate’s shtick he really agreed or agrees with. He’s said that many of his comments about bullying journalists reflect the experience of growing up in the oppressive environment of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, a facet of his thinking no English-language interviewer has ever managed to unpack. But Vávra has been happy to echo Gamergate rhetoric and join the fight against many of Gamergate’s celebrity targets – comparing the feminist YouTuber Anita Sarkeesian to the Nazis, dismissing the well-evidenced reality of structural sexism and misogyny in the games industry based on anecdotal experience, regularly inveighing against social justice warriors (remember them?), and peddling conspiracy theories about games media blacklists. At minimum, he has cheerfully granted legitimacy to a subset of bleating internet arseholes, while minimising or professing not to know about their shitty behaviour. Now, all those chickens have come home to roost.

As reported by Tessa Kaur over at The Gamer, the bigoted elements of the Kingdom Come playerbase are currently at war with the developers over the discovery that the new game allows players to have a same-sex fling. Others are outraged that it includes a Black character – a travelling Malian noble, Musa, who has arrived in the lively city of Kuttenberg as part of an invading army.

The backlash to these revelations has led publisher Deep Silver to impose a new code of conduct on the game’s official forums, prompting further outcry about censorship. Vávra, meanwhile, has been fending off social media accusations of “forced diversity”, together with anti-Semitic abuse. In a longer thread, he both confirmed the above reports about Deliverance 2 and defended them, commenting that, firstly, having a gay romance is optional, because KCD2 is fundamentally an RPG in which players pick their paths, and secondly, that Musa’s presence in Kuttenberg is both a plausible historical event and a source of “interesting situations” arising from his racial difference.

If you’ve ever had to deal with a Gamergate dogpiling campaign, you are probably high as a kite on schadenfreude right now. You are probably knocking back a huge mug of crocodile tears. I’ve read some amusing reactions from homophobic players who reason that, if player character Henry can be gay in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, he was also potentially gay in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, that game they completed and liked back in 2019 – fellahs, does that make me gay as well? It’s also hard not to experience a rich, rancid glow of enveloping karmic justice when Vávra’s followers respond to his really rather lefty-sounding description of Musa by feeding him his own words from 2015 about there being “no black people in medieval Bohemia. Period.”

It should be noted that the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance was the work of several hundred people besides Vávra, some of whom have publicly despaired about his antics, and that while the game is capital-p Problematic, it is not outwardly hateful. I reviewed it back in the day and liked a lot of it, especially the bits where I got to be a monk brewing dreadful potions, which are a welcome reprieve from all the vengeance-questing and wench-bedding elsewhere. I stumbled, however, when it came to articulating the problems with the game’s portrayal of 15th century Bohemia and its ideas about “authenticity”. In a post for Unwinnable, Reid McCarter does a much better job of exploring how Deliverance’s core tale of “a virtuous Czech underdog” battling villainous Hungarians lends itself to a present-day fixation with cultural purity, placing this in the context of Czech politics at the time of release.

The obvious defence against McCarter’s argument is that, despite Vávra’s bluster and despite the top-line marketing, Kingdom Come has always been presented on some level as a “vision of history”, rather than some zealous and naive 1-1 facsimile. Speaking to RPS in 2017, Vávra described the game as “a story-based historical playground”, allowing the player to experiment between the poles of ‘major’ historical events, like the deaths of kings. Henry himself is an anachronism, a blacksmith’s boy who is fundamentally classless, able to make his way between the spheres of the peasantry and nobility and dabble in any profession, if he puts his mind to it. Far from a believable medieval protagonist, he is a modern-day renaissance man.

The sequel, similarly, is described on Warhorse’s website as “a careful combination of historical fact, indirect detective work and imaginative world-building”. And again, I am genuinely enjoying noticing and attempting to dissect that blur of creative agendas in-game, whatever I eventually conclude about the direction and values of the project as a whole.

Here’s another set of anecdotes: a lot of the conversations you have in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 are tacitly about playing a wandering scholar. An NPC shares a viewpoint on religion, dynastic feuding or life in the next village over, and you’re prompted to acquiesce or intervene – to reference scripture or get mad about somebody’s contempt for your liege lord or just pass on some tall story you’ve heard in the tavern. The ability to “fail” these conversational skill checks suggests a monolithic, “correct” account of the period, but these “failures” also reflect the knowledge, biases and varying cultural circumstances of the person you’re talking to, with local “reputation” changes based on your replies. I’ve yet to encounter Musa – and the relevant part of the game is, I think, under embargo till review – but you can see how that kind of writing methodology might lend itself to thoughtful chinwags with a visiting Malian noble. But all this nuance and possibility risks being stamped out and banished by the fixation with authenticity.

Appeals to historical accuracy are, I think, innately reactionary because they assume a singular, static incarnation of the past that needs to be reclaimed and restored, even when the past in question isn’t being held up fervently as a ‘golden age’ when women and ethnic minorities were either invisible or knew their place. The more superficial objection is that they are boring. In centring Kingdom Come as a historical reenactment, whose empirical findings must be defended against those weasel journalists, Vávra has not only lent Gamergate a degree of respectability, but actively denied himself, his studio and, arguably, the game’s players the ability to enjoy history as an interpretative practice – a difficult group project, produced by atrocity and denial but also by community and dialogue, where you enchant yourself chasing the gaps in the fabric and pondering their implications.

For all his gator-baiting and rants about SJWs, which nowadays extends to Trump endorsements, I do think this is how Vávra would like Kingdom Come to be experienced. He is trying to position it as a “playground” again in the Xitter thread above, a place for “interesting stories”, some of which might even feature people of colour. But the gators won’t let him. They think it’s their playground now.