Hearts of Iron 4 modders decided to "troll" Turkish users by "censoring" Atatürk's portrait in the game

In global World War Two strategy games, players have been leading the most notorious regimes of the 20th century to victory for years without much controversy. Real drama tends to erupt in the places you'd least expect it. Case in point: a Discord profile picture rule sparking an actual censorship mod inside a video game.

A "joke" mod for Hearts of Iron 4 has landed on Steam Workshop, and it hides the portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who leads Turkey at the start of the 1936 campaign. The mod came out of a recent controversy: the game official Discord server bans real photos of real historical figures as profile pictures, Atatürk included, and that rule didn't sit well with some Turkish players.

The mod creator took the situation to its logical, absurd conclusion and masked the "controversial Kemalist leader" directly in the game. The reaction was easy to predict. In Turkey, Atatürk's image is protected by Law No. 5816 from 1951, which makes insulting the memory of the republic's founder a criminal offense. For many Turks, Atatürk stopped being just a historical figure a long time ago, which means a pixelated in-game portrait isn't just a pixelated in-game portrait either.

Commenters predictably dubbed the mod "beloved by Armenians, Kurds, and Greeks." But the actual split turned out messier than that. Secular Atatürk still irritates Turkish Islamists nostalgic for the Ottoman past, and even among nationalists his legacy is far from settled. Nihal Atsız, one of the ideologists of ethnic Turkish nationalism, openly disliked Atatürk, even though today's ultranationalists happily call themselves Kemalists. Atatürk own nationalism, meanwhile, was built on civic identity rather than ethnicity.

The mod itself didn't escape criticism either. For a joke project, it got a suspiciously serious cover, generated by AI on top of that. Someone suggested following the Crusader Kings 3 approach, where the Prophet Muhammad's face is never shown, and replacing Atatürk with a crudely cut-out silhouette instead. Others suggested Paradox lean fully into the trolling and just have Turkey balkanized right from the campaign start. One player summed up where this is all heading:

Another 1000 years of discourse

Players have been able to take control of the Third Reich in Hearts of Iron 4 since 2016, yet a Discord avatar featuring Atatürk turned out to be the tougher challenge.