Randomly stumbled across the proceedings of last year's Unaustralia Conference in Canberra, which is the Cultural Studies Association of Australia's annual conference, since you ask - and there's one particular submitted paper of interest to GSW readers and video game geeks - weird ones - alike.

That would be 'Virtual Unaustralia: Videogames and Australia’s Colonial History' [.PDF link] by Thomas H. Apperley (University of Melbourne), and it explores "...how two games – Europa Universalis II (Paradox Interactive, 2001) and Victoria: Empire Under the Sun (Paradox Interactive, 2002) – represent a specific moment: the colonization of Australia." The author explores the setup, historical, background, and many possible outcomes of the games, including making Australia a Brazilian colony (!) in one of his playthroughs.

The most interesting parts of the paper point out how the virtual geography in the nation-building game coincides with real-life feelings: "For example, one fan forum, Vojska.net, based in Croatia, has advocated serious changes to the map of the Balkans in Europa Universalis II, to have provinces boundaries drawn in a historically authentic manner. In this case the community also produced their own map, which they distributed as a ‘mod’ for the game, allowing other players to play in what they considered a more historically realistic geography of the region."

Putting real-life locations in fictional games can be fraught with real-life politics, of course - and Paradox Interactive has run into this in the past, with the Chinese government banning strategy game Hearts Of Iron "...for 'distorting historical facts' in describing Manchuria, West Xinjiang, and Tibet as independent sovereign countries within the game."

But 'changing history' by using real countries is half the entertainment of these games - and I'd hate to see restrictive regimes put a kibosh on good ol' Risk-style fun. So long may the fictional colonization of Australia (Unaustralia?) continue! God save the Queen!