Two Games About History (And Why You Should Care)

[@KayAndSkittles]

To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/KayAndSkittles/ . The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.

[@dmgroberts5471]

Interesting video, cute ferret. 👍

[@someesingh2827]

Hey man, keep up the good work! Btw, can u send link of that declining life expectancy thing? It's important for me.

[@ashemountain]

I learned two things from a friend with a history degree: the Victorians soured a LOT of our views on history through revisionist bullshit and ancient humans were just as smart as modern humans, they just didn't have any giants' shoulders to stand on.

[@marcusosborne6123]

Im sorry for being dense, but when you say, “they just didn’t have any giants’ shoulders to stand on,” what do you mean?

[@opjm8664]

​@@marcusosborne6123"Giants" is a metaphor for the people who came before us that did a lot of the work that we build upon. It's not that people of the past were worse than us. It's that we started from the end of their progress.

[@marcusosborne6123]

@@opjm8664 thank you, that makes sense 🫡

[@sheepewe4505]

The more you learn about history, the more you want to reach back through the years and personally strangle every single "great Victorian" (but they would probably enjoy it, those sexually repressed mfs)

[@Nai-qk4vp]

@@opjm8664 They did have "giants shoulders to stand on" however. Just not the ones we think of. Giants of their own societies snd previous ones before them. Much of education is passing on the accumulated knowledge of humanity. See Herodotus here about Greek Gods being borrowed from Egyptian deities.

[@L0LWTF1337]

The main issue with the online skeptic movement (aside from the sexism) is that they will value a civilization higher that can build highly advanced murder weapons than a peaceful agrarian society. "Advanced" is only technological, not ideological.

[@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl]

Most of the people you would claim are 'idealogicaly' more advanced than Europeans were no better than them

[@dragonfell5078]

​@@MohamedRamadan-qi4hlOP made no mention of Europeans in their comment. They simply pointed out that the online skeptic movement has a tendency to measure "advancement" only on a technological measure; particularly when it comes to tools of destruction.

[@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl]

@@dragonfell5078 he almost certainly was talking about Europeana. Because it was the Europeans that had 'highly advanced murder weapons' for the last three or four century

[@CaptFoxtail]

Especially when there are other advancements to look at technology wise to do more for the society overall. Inventions of better equipment for tending crops, better management of land so as to allow the land to recouperate between harvests. Or medical advancements to better care for and comfort patients

[@dragonfell5078]

@@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl I don't think that concept applies solely to Europeans. While Europe broadly had more advanced weaponry around that time frame, the playing field was much more even for most of history. You'll find plenty of people praising the Mongol Empire, for example, for their battle prowess, while paying less heed to the more mundane aspects of said Empire which allowed it to grow so exponentially (their communication network, for example, is a topic I haven't seen discussed as much). In any case, I don't think OP's point was that any one civilisation was ideologically "better" than any others. I think OP was merely stating that people broadly seem to ignore or gloss over the more mundane aspects of history, and focus more on war and technology. We shouldn't place values upon societies and civilisations, because doing so implies one is better than the other. In reality, civilisations, like history, is built on the foundations of those who came before. Be it through subtle ways or overt, history has a way of affecting the future.

[@solfell_]

I accidentally majored in history in uni, and while I'm not involved in any career regarding history, the lessons I learned changed how I view the world, and inform the questions I ask when being fed specific narratives. One of my favorite classes was all about historical gaps--what events we remember, how we remember them, and what is suppressed and forgotten. To anyone interested in history, especially the unspoken parts, I would highly recommend Michel-Rolph Trouillot's book Silencing the Past.

[@andrewschneiderman3669]

I've been going through a mild existential crisis as I approach 3,000 hours logged in Civ 6, combined with the slow realization of just how ahistorical it is. That's depressing for someone who got into the series explicitly because of a love of history. So, thanks for this. It was exactly what I needed.

[@marinary1326]

Wait, you mean the game where Teddy Roosevelt can fight Cleopatra with nukes is ahistorical?! /jk I do understand that you probably mean how, for the sake of gameplay fun and balance, the game cherry picks bits of historical narratives and leaves a great deal out, and sort of by necessity forces you into a Great Man style of history since you control a single immortal ruler for 6000 years. Kind of the same deal with basically any game with a historical setting, from Paradox to Total War and beyond. But at the very least, it was Civ 3 that got me aware of history, taught me a few names that I likely would never have heard of for many more years if ever.

[@ІлляВетров-й2д]

Literally me but with EU4 and CK2.

[@diddles3383]

The sheer joy I feel whenever you upload and show Skittles is immense

[@NubileReptile]

If you get a chance, you should look up a blog called A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, run by a professional historian of ancient history named Bret Devereaux. A lot of good stuff, but I especially enjoyed his lengthy dissection of the pop culture myth of Sparta, and how it was less the society of manly badass warriors with rockhard abs Hollywood envisions and more a poorly-managed dystopian hell-state. In that series, he hammers home one of the points made in this video: people in the ancient world understood less than us on some subjects, but that doesn't mean they were stupid. And that includes the slaves and peasants who usually get glossed over in history, who deserve to be remembered and studied just as much as Leonidas and the spartiates, even if ancient historians had zero interest in them.

[@elspethtirel]

I thoroughly enjoyed his takedown of Assassin's Creed Valhalla's colonialism apologia.

[@Srymak]

I thoroughly dislike his takes on modern issues, but his historical knowledge is good. My guy went to through so much effort to take down Sparta, but takes CNN on face value. For shame.

[@yy-hj4br]

Slaps Sparta "this baby can hold so many slaves and second class citizens!"

[@dmgroberts5471]

If Sparta was a person, it would totally be the guy who gets blackout drunk, decides he's Chuck Norris, tries to start a fight with the biggest guy in the bar, then passes out and shits himself.

[@Argacyan]

8:15 Graphics like these always remind me of how Assassin's Creed Origins was advertised as "ancient egypt" and ended up taking place at the end of the Ptolemaic period

[@blede8649]

To be fair, Egypt is so ancient that even that might reasonably count as ancient Egypt (not many places have more recorded history BC than AD). It's just not ancient ancient Egypt.

[@Argacyan]

@@blede8649 while that's mostly true, and was part of the video we're commenting under, the issue I had with it back then is they put it in a spot where it's already debatable & even within that period they put it at the end of that one too.

[@LordVader1094]

@@blede8649 Yeah but Ptolemaic Egypt under Cleopatra is literally the very end of Egypt as an independent state for a long time, it's not even ancient it's the classical period. Ancient Egypt is pre-Alexander.

[@kisuz9853]

18:00 I feel the golden rule also has a commentary on how historians and propagandists use perfection as a way to justify or chastise things to fit their narrative. As soon as a "sin" commited by certain people in a certain time is pointed out, then the condemnation and destruction of that civilization, country or w.e. is quick to follow. For example, spaniards or anyone that still defend the conquista as 'civilization brought to barbarians' are the first ones to scream to high heavens "human sacrifices!!" when in actuality there's a lot of nuance, exaggeration and over simplification over that practice. Like Parenti says, the way some people demand instant perfection the day after the revolution...

[@jacksonduruy4303]

Medieval history has become something of an interest of mine. There's a good series by Timeline about a group of people building a historically accurate castle in France, and they discuss a lot of aspects of Medieval living that are interesting. For example, castle building was a rather international affair, a castle in France could have Czech, Polish, Italian, and Scottish craftsmen working on it. Whole boom towns would be build to support these workers that would often evolve into just regular towns. This painted a much more cosmopolitan picture of the Medieval world for me, it wasn't stinky peasants living and dying in the same village their whole lives.

[@dmgroberts5471]

That's Guédelon Castle. I'm quite interested in that myself, it's a fascinating project. Most people know so little about history, they don't even know what to ask; it would never occur to them that skilled workers migrated to work on projects like that, and because people don't even consider it, they don't research it, so it isn't shown in movies, TV shows, and Games, and so more people grow up not even considering it. I'd very much like to see that change.

[@TriggerCrazedLunatic]

As someone studying history in college (as well as just being a general history enthusiast) that graph is one of the single most frustrating images i have ever seen lmao.

[@dmgroberts5471]

I mean, is it even possible to plot human advancement over time? By the time people discovered one thing, they'd forgotten another, different places discovered different things at different times, etc. For instance, the Greeks invented steam power, had no "practical" use for it, then it was forgotten for thousands of years. Really, that graph should look like a chronically mutated hedgehog; randomly twisting back on itself and covered in spikes!

[@nowhereman6019]

Lol, I only know that graph because of Finno-Korean Hyperwar memes.

[@KayAndSkittles]

The internet is a beautiful tapestry.

[@pedrosampaio7349]

​@@KayAndSkittlesTruly a Land of Contrasts

[@southern_archeologist]

As much as I enjoyed The Forgotten City, and as much as I definitely agree with your take about what the game says, I hated the twist ending, (esp. as an archeologist). Really leans into a particular trope that I think largely causes more damage than people realize. I feel to say, "Actually it was aliens the entire time," really takes the winds out of the sails of the narrative and greater discussion the game is trying to have.

[@aender13]

Assassin's Creed 2 had that twist, but first you got to beat a pope to death with your fists so that was ruled

[@ConnorRunda]

To be fair, it was originally a Skyrim Dwemer-related mod. Hard to effectively change the end plot outside that, but I do agree it was a bit trope-y.

[@LordVader1094]

@@aender13 Assassin's Creed making everything aliens the way they did was one of the worst decisions in the series. Really made the conspiracy stuff less interesting once they definitively did that and had all the aliens just "greek gods but not" instead of actually interesting aliens.

[@KayAndSkittles]

That's a fair critique but have you considered that aliens built the pyramids because it's impossible for humans to stack blocks? We've never stacked blocks before.

[@southern_archeologist]

@@KayAndSkittles ah you got me, I shall retire to live the rest of my days in shame in the wilderness

[@therealblueninja]

Michel de Certeau called history "the writing that conquers," which is, I think, the most succinct way of describing how powerful a tool of control that it is

[@schmi2897]

As someone who really enjoys studying about ww2 from actual historians I can say it is extremely frustrating how HOI and other pop media has poisoned the well on the popular perception of ww2.

[@antimaster6432]

how exactly has hoi4 poisoned the discourse? i mean you could say that i does historical revisionism through its mechanics somewhat but that's a bit of a stretch considering any such historical game will have at least some bit of abstraction which naturally stems from game-ifying said systems.

[@nowhereman6019]

Tell me about it. Of particular annoyance and danger is the narrativization of this time period, especially when it comes to HoI4 mods and how your average Redditor learns about history through them. Due to a combination of game mechanics and gameplay structure, this idea of certain inevitabilities in history begins to emerge. If you're at all a fan of alternate history, you might know what I'm referring to. Every alternate history timeline essentially mirrors real history, and when you're some teenager who's interested in history and finds this cool mod for a WW2 game where Germany won WW1, you begin to view all of history through this narrative structure, and of course this structure is heavily biased in favor of capitalism and liberalism. It's like a subtle form of self-brainwashing.

[@wulle8509]

The only true Hoi4 ist Equestria at War

[@sandyqbg]

I strongly disagree with this line of thought. There's a lot of misconceptions about historical events in the general public discourse and it's not only HoI or the like that people pick up the misconceptions from. I'd argue that games with historical settings actually pique people's interest in history and get them to delve deeper into it than without these games. Personally, my interest in history was sparked almost entirely by AoE 1. And I've come a really long way from there. We can't say that people should instantly get the correct historical perfectly on day 1. That's actually a little elitist and we'll never get anywhere with public education of history with that approach.

[@VocalBear213]

What do you think about TIKhistory KZbin channel?

[@ConnorRunda]

I remember first playing The Forgotten City Skyrim mod and I was blown away. When I heard they were making a game, I immediately got it. Was not disappointed, one of the best I've played.

[@stratospheric37]

I like History and I love Pentiment thanks for doing a video about them!

[@epimetrius7348]

I also feel like it is super important to consider that ideas like this are not just part of historical studies, but even in our speculation, our entertainment, we consider these things. Michael Moorcock wrote the Elric saga, a fantasy series about the cosmic balance, and the character of Elric is obstinate in enacting the "acceptable" punishment on his cousin, despite how often his cousin prover worthy of said punishment, when asked, Elric says: "We were both victims of a game played between the Lords of the Higher Worlds."

[@empatheticrambo4890]

“History as a practice?” Ok I’m hooked, tell me more!

[@djangofett3266]

I just finished Act 1 of Pentiment, and I ABSOLUTELY love this game! Thank you so much for recommending it to us all.

[@GrandArchPriestOfTheAlgorithm]

I learned so much history from games, like how important Cobra Cars was for history's conquerors.

[@shifty220]

😂😂😂 essential

[@thejordangrace]

Wanted to get a new game with the steam summer sale going on but nothing felt worth it, but because of this video I just went and bought pentiment. Thanks for the rec !

[@Tjthemedic]

Another good reason to care about understanding history is that we're still in it - history is still happening around us, and we exist within historical context.

[@dmgroberts5471]

And we're just as smart and capable as any people throughout history have ever been, and, without benefit of hindsight, just as fallible. We _are_ them, we just have access to facts they didn't.

[@marcusmalone]

'Universally recognisrd "science points"' is hilarious, and such a great encapsulation of these sorts of dumb pub-level arguments! ❤

[@onetomeplz5825]

I see this thing in most people where they think that everything before them just barbarians doing things without motive but now we have reason and logic

[@dmgroberts5471]

Indeed, we've always had reason and logic, the problem is the amount of data that has been acquired. Which makes you wonder what data we are still missing. Galileo too thought he was at the apex of human achievement when he discovered _we_ orbited the _Sun,_ but he could never have conceived of UV radiation. He'd have studied it if he'd known it was a thing, but the technology and knowledge didn't exist to even _theorize_ that it _could_ exist. Which is my long-winded way of saying, I too hate people who assume the ability to apply reason just *popped* into existence in recent history. They never flip that idea around and consider that we might also be "just barbarians."

[@PhilipPetrunak]

Your comment on how we shouldn't have a goldfish memory reminds me of the recent election we just had in Toronto. One of the candidates, the dude who placed in a distant 3rd what's a former Chief of Police. He also was infamous for letting a serial killer prey on the gay community in Toronto for years. Mostly because the people he preyed on were gay POC. Weirdly just never really came up during his election. Came up all the time and discussions online, but never in the media. Never use as a consistent, obvious, point of attack. Because as embarrassing as his failure was, and how ironic the claim of "I will protect you" it's coming from a man who let a serial killer run free, the media the people at the top would rather we forget about that. Cops aren't allowed in our city to march in the pride parade. Not in uniform. This is a direct response to their failure to protect the gay community. The people in the city, at least the day ones, haven't forgotten. And people in power wish they would. Nothing scares people in power more than seeing them pay the consequences for their actions. So they'd rather we forget. They'd rather we have a goldfish memory.

[@theodoreroosevelt3143]

I'm very passionate about history. Truth even if unpleasant and how complex it all is. All i can say is thank you for this video, i deeply hope that it will make few people gain new perspective. I appreciate your work

[@UncleKeith567]

Thanks Skittles! And I guess Kay kinda helped (let history be the judge on that). This is beautiful work and I really hope it goes far and wide. ☮

[@YUGOPNIK]

Brilliant video dude

[@bengallup9321]

I always get very excited when a new K+S video drops.

[@8lec_R]

We need more petty historians like you on the internet. Enjoyed the video

[@thomasgray4188]

This video has reminded me of a recent trip to the town next to the one i live in i was looking for books on railway history and i found that almall the books i found were in the period from the 1850s to the 1940s and almost exclusively focusing on steam railways despite the fact that railway history predates the invention of the locomotive and much of the issues we face today are most influenced by the history of British Rail. Just something that it reminds me of

[@petrfedor1851]

Meanwile targeted adds droping book about Czechoslovakian AC locos in front of my eyes. I wanna buy it but am not in the best financial situation right now. It even has Laminátka on cover!

[@GaasubaMeskhenet]

You can make a lenseless monocle by poking a needle hole to look through. Business cards are a good thickness for it. Any prescription

[@nowhereman6019]

Thank you for this nugget of information, fellow traveler.

[@Pazliacci]

currently doing a BA in history, and currently on summer vacation before I have to write my BA-thesis but the exam project I just finished was on seidr magic in Viking Age Scandinavia, and how it overlaps with queer gender identity in Viking Age Scandinavia, and a majority of that exam paper was just deconstructing the Viking myth, first and foremost how the Viking as we imagine them was first quite literally constructed as recently as the 19th century, and that prior to then the Viking had just been an abstract "shameful" barbarian pagan past, but then they became the very model of great warriors of the nation's glorious past! hence why the nazis then loved to appropriate that image, and so I had to do a lot of work simply to just tear down that part... then the rest of it was trying to deconstruct modern binarist notions of gender and how they are just accepted as default when vieweing things historically, when really what I came to in regards to the Viking Age is that gender was a whole lot more performative and complex... and that is ontop of just the fact that any discussion of the Viking Age has to begin with the statement "oh by the way we barely know anything as there is an almost complete lack of first hand primary sources" instead a majority of our source material are sources written down around 200 years after the end of the viking age.

[@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl]

Vikings had similar concepts of sexuality as was common at the time. A man was manly in a gay relationship as long he was the top. The top gained manliness and the bottom lost it Nothing complicated it's fairly common

[@Pazliacci]

@@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl mhm, that is at least the surface layer of it, but what I argue in my paper (with good reason and building on others who have argued similar) that that this "loss and gain" of manliness is quite literally a loss and gain of gender, in that men in Viking Age Scandinavia, quite literally had to repeatedly reaffirm their gender identity through "male actions", and that in being a bottom, they lost their gender through that action, and in some way had to then prove their gender identity, else they were part of the non-man gender category, being that there was just a MALE gender category, and then the non-men which included women, children, the elderly, effeminate men, bottoms, and other people who didn't fit into the gender binary, but anyone could enter into the male gender by a strong enough act of proof. Or in some cases in the lack of a male inheritor, a daughter could become a son, and take on all the social and legal ramifications of that.

[@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl]

@@Pazliacci you only said a unnecessarily complicated version of what I said. Can you please explain what naunce I supposedly missed?

[@andro_king]

woo! New Kay & Skittles video. Also congrats on getting a sponsor

[@opjm8664]

I love examining history also for how it's used as a rhetorical tool.

[@christianlove2473]

Another game I really like that examines the practice of Doing History is Heaven's Vault. The central mechanic of the game - trying to translate the ancient language that composes the primary sources - is portrayed as an act explicitly in motion, one you are constantly rethinking and re-evaluating in light of new contexts as you continue your research.

[@danielhadad4911]

Another great video! And I'm glad to see you're being sponsored.

[@deathdoor]

Super Bunnyhop released another LONG video about Pentiment. So good.

[@michimatsch5862]

No idea why I immediately recognized the Forgotten City when the video started. I only ever watched one critique and that's it.

[@petrfedor1851]

Was that Jacob Geller video?

[@michimatsch5862]

@@petrfedor1851 it was!

[@Amantducafe]

Good to see you are still making videos, i consider your Thatcherism video to be an amazing take on the destruction of social programs and public institutions (Neoliberalism) within the UK, i just wanted to say that you do a great job despite how underrated some of your videos are.

[@RedSntDK]

Josh Sawyer, who's behind "Pentiment", worked with bethesda on New Vegas. Forgotten City was originally a mod in bethesda's Skyrim. Coincidence? 👽

[@RedSntDK]

PS: A good example of knowledge that's been revisioned is the theory of alpha and beta males in wolf packs. And yet that theory is still applied to masculinity today. Albeit usually the toxic kind.

[@Anonymous-gw1vd]

I think that the saying “there’s nothing new under the sun” rings true today.

[@angrynerdgirl]

This video finally got me to play Pentiment, which has been languishing for months in my Steam library. Thank you. I adored it and am now on my second playthrough.

[@richardvlasek2445]

you quoted the weird meme prevalent on socdem twitter and certain media publications that pre-industrial agrarians had to "work less" when the only reason they "worked less" was because they had to do tedious menial labour tasks like sowing and harvesting their own field, repairing clothes, feeding animals, carrying water, cleaning, cooking, etc. and therefore their overlords could only task them relatively little pre-industrial hand-tooled subsistence farming is legitimately awful and it's one of the reasons why a large chunk of the european population started moving into cities to work at factories even with the horrible 18th/19th century conditions this is not a dig at the video or yourself by the way, just trying to set the record straight because it does get a bit grating when intelligent socialists start claiming that feudal or ancient imperial subsistence farmers that worked absurdly hard their entire lives for centuries somehow had it good or even tolerable and thank you for telling STEMcels to jog on

[@SomeGuy1117]

I'm pretty sure the main reason people went to cities was things like the enclosure acts making the old way of life impossible. Many of those tasks needed to be done by workers in cities anyway such as cooking, cleaning, and repairing clothes. They also had to carry water in cities for quite a while before indoor plumbing became mainstream. Instead of going to a river they went to a pump or well though. Really though, after sowing all the labor needed is maintenance and animal care which isn't that bad. Then there is another period of high work during harvest. These in between periods though were largely lax in terms of work. The only other thing a peasant would need to do is perhaps Corvee labor but these were rarely particularly long. This is why pilgrimage and the like was so common back then. People had time to travel. Although they couldn't go as far as today due to technical restrictions they could travel the countryside or to a major site such as an important cathedral fairly regularly. Ofcourse it wasn't some ideal charmed life, but the government needed to force the peasantry into cities to get them in the factories, it wasn't a choice. This isn't to say the industrial revolution was a bad thing or anything like that. Like most things there are positive and negative aspects.

[@herramirtsaaja9032]

The farmers did have it tolerable, their lives werent endless misery, in scandinavia in middle ages the amount of people being able to write and read was high, speculated to even have been 90% because we have texts written in pubs, bars and such to other random people, from those writings and from the writings being just jokes and punchlines its fair to say writing used to be more common before industrial revolution when people no longer had as much time for learning and doing what you like People are also able to work extremely rough and physically demanding jobs every single day with low pay Mining for example is demanding when done by hand and that is how it still works in many third world countries And also just like the comment above me said, the peasants didnt move to cities out of their free will, they were forced through economic actions The pre industrial life was better for the people than immiedeate industrial conditions That is reflected in poverty, height and quality of life Hakim made a great video about it I think the title was 'this poverty graph is lying to you' The video has a source for further reading which I cant give in this comment because of youtube being youtube The video debunks the idea of there being less poverty and that agenda is pushed through graphs which use gdp as the determining factor for poverty We do nowadays in the first and second world live in better conditions than before, but the same cant be said for everybody, the poorest people in the third world are poorer than their ancestors.the poorest still work even 16hour days very physically demanding labor The medieval landlords knew that they had to keep the peasants happy enough so they would stay in line The modern capitalist only keeps a portion of the world happy so some of them join the military and will keep the rest in line through force

[@h3nder]

IIRC basically they'd on average work less but during harvest/sowing season they'd work way more.

[@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl]

@@SomeGuy1117 you don't seem to understand what farming looks like. If any of you office workers were told to go do any farming work they would Cry. The only reason it seems like you work less is that you can't work all year round as a farmer but the the time when you do work they work far harder and for far longer you have no idea what it looks like to feel physical pain from how hard your labor is And people leave the country side for the city for their economic opportunities all the time. Take my country egypt as a example during times of Gamal Abdel Nasser there was massive land reforms that gave every farmer his own land Egyptian cities still exploded during his time

[@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl]

@@h3nder and far harder

[@lovepiecozitsawesome]

Great video, as always, and thanks for bringing these two games to my attention!

[@Ledabot]

I love how the finno korean hyper war addition to the chart was ment to parody it. Sadly I think some people missed the point

[@grinffi]

Holy shit two of my favourite games. I guess I'm watching this instead of sleepimg

[@DrDanWeaver]

"we hardly make any drones"! Quality.

[@SPDYellow]

It is a long-standing pet peeve of mine, when people act like people of the past were completely rock-stupid. People of the past were just as innately curious and intelligent as modern humans. Yeah, they may have had some crazy beliefs, but said beliefs made perfect sense within the confines of their culture; we probably have beliefs that future civilizations will scorn us for. Though regarding the Dark Ages meme, well, once you release that most of the witch burnings took place not in the Middle Ages, but in the Renaissance (aka the era where we're supposed to be losing our medieval superstitions and becoming more enlightened), it becomes a lot harder to take any myths about that era seriously. After all, intelligence is in the eye of the beholder. By the standards of a medieval peasant, there are many areas that they might find a modern citizen lacking in, when it comes to intelligence. If you were to have a modern-day worker switch places with your average medieval peasant and live the other's life for a month, well, in a month, the medieval peasant probably could do a passable job at living in the modern era; won't be an expert but can more or less take care of themselves. Whereas at the end of their month, the modern-day worker would still be seen as utterly hopeless, incapable of doing many of the tasks that most of their fellow peasants had been doing since they could stand up. With that in mind, who would be seen as the intelligent/unintelligent one?

[@ChalkyMuffin969]

Holy shit a new ket and skittles vid after only a month? must be christmas

[@patataeve]

Thank you for another enlightening video, I have missed these! For some reason YT forgot to show me all your videos from the past months! D:

[@rileyb041]

This was awesome! Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how games like Civilisation treat historical time periods. Obviously there’s going to be some abstraction in a video game, but drawing a line through the tech tree with the Middle Ages on one side and the Renaissance on the other is pretty misleading. They’re approximate time periods which are useful to categorise when discussing political and social trends over history. They’re not some set in stone thing where you research gunpowder, and the rest of the world gets notified: “China has entered the Renaissance”. On a completely different note, it’s hard to describe the feeling I had when playing Pentiment. It’s a very niche game, but it’s very specifically *my* niche 😅 It was a wonderful experience, and I hope we get more games that just do their own, highly specific thing like that.

[@dmgroberts5471]

It's more like "China has invented gunpowder," and the rest of the world's reactions vary from "What's China?" to "Such news! Quickly, we must convene a council to...discuss if men with the heads of dogs possess souls." China invents gunpowder...and everyone else is like, "great, get back to me if that affects my life in any way."

[@ProneOyster]

Fantastic video. Skittles is such a great writer

[@powerpill]

damn I finished Pentiment a few daysa ago and I kind of want to play again to test the other options

[@steampunkerella]

great video. as an amateur historian myself i agree 1000%

[@channelentertainment6710]

Hardly imagening the daily historians work, but thanks to Hegel it's far more meaningful to me anyways. "What is rational is real and what is real is rational."

[@user-86291]

Oh this is simply scrumptious to see in my feed. Delightful. What a treat.

[@extrasmallrobin1804]

YES FORGOTTEN CITY MENTIONED!!!! HORATIUS BEST BOY (he's a moron and i love him)

[@renaigh]

the forgotten city is about that time the whole class had to stay back because one of the students did something wrong.

[@MrsGabby_]

3:27 is so dope

[@monstermoo4191]

I literally just finished Forbidden City last weekend. The timing is crazy. Love your videos!

[@tyronechillifoot5573]

Civ games taught me more about African history than any school

[@renaigh]

the first achievement I got from Pentiment was convincing Illuminata to give me the French book.

[@justinegan5021]

Two of my favorite games in the recent years

[@hanibal212]

Most people think history is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of history, and I can tell you: they are wrong. History is an ocean in a storm.😁

[@BeautifulEarthJa]

I don't have a good memory...that's why I relly only consume 'news' like Democracy Now and Some More News that gives me depth and context, including historical context.

[@ThatDangDad]

Great video!

[@patrickholt2270]

The way I always heard it, it was the Roman empire which retarded scientific and technological development because of the Roman elite's militarist grunt ethos and the reliance of the imperial economy on slaves - high profits through intense exploitation at low productivity with no incentive to improve productivity through technological innovation or investment. Then it was precisely the collapse of the western empire amid the dying off of the slave economy, and the land and tax reform effected by barbarian conquests which incentivised technological innovation by free farmers, artisans, and in due course Christian monks.

[@renaigh]

the Goldfish memory being short is another myth we've come to simply accept.

[@thekage100]

Uhhhh if people want more content from this chad, then he was just in The Deprogram podcast ep!!!!

[@nowhereman6019]

Oooooh, new episode for this week? Hype.

[@AmyCherryLMAO]

Wait, this man's even more leftist than I thought?

[@thekage100]

@@AmyCherryLMAO yes sir!!

[@AmyCherryLMAO]

@@thekage100 based

[@DarkPrject]

One of my favorite channels on KZbin for a reason.

[@mandolinsam7901]

Like, they played Sid Meier's Civilization and assumed it was history class. "If Babylon had kept going they'd have had airplanes too! I did that last week!"

[@dmgroberts5471]

Medieval serfs had a lot of perks you wouldn't think of. I mean, they essentially had free food, free housing, guaranteed job security, and the local court was biased in their favour against outsiders. In a lot of ways they had it better than Yeomen or Burghers.

[@RedYellowBird6889]

Just found your channel from the deprogram and i must say you've got yourself a new subscriber.

[@comedy_goblin6378]

I stopped watching the vid partway through cause I realized I needed to get Pentiment like, right now. Thx for bringing a really cool looking game to my attention, I’ll come back to the vid when I finish it lol

[@alternativebassist]

As my professor of medieval history used to say “say the phrase dark ages to a historian of this generation, they’ll laugh at you. Say it to the previous generation and they’ll probably attack you.” The amount of time and frustration that’s gone into challenging the Dark Age myth that they just go into kill mode the moment they hear it now. On the flip side, some of the poorest historical performances I’ve witnessed have come from alleged historians/academics who weee so impressed by their own credentials they couldn’t fathom their ignorance on any topic. Best one I’ve seen was a supposed PHD candidate in history who assumed his expertise extended to Ancient Egypt, despite never studying Egyptology, and concluded that his own ignorance on the Ancient Egyptian military meant that we knew nothing about it. A very quick google search proved him wrong but he was so entrenched in his own academic superiority that he rejected anything that contradicted his assumptions if it did not come from a source he considered to his expertise despite his actual expertise on this topic being 0.

[@NoverMaC]

incredible video. I always get annoyed when people talk about history in such a stupidly simplified way even as a maths student

[@jordanthompson5696]

Thanks for the video! I think youd get as much of a kick out of the book Dawn of Everything as I did! I highly recommend looking into it 😊

[@ІлляВетров-й2д]

One of the best videos of Yours. Thank you.

[@Golan_Vivaldi]

I played Pentiment on accounts of your recommendation, it was amazing, thank you for your recommendation!

[@ZhangLee.]

if we denied history we will doom ourself to repeat it again and the internet just make it worse

[@poisin224]

Hello comrade. I just discovered your channel today thanks to your appearance on the Deprogram podcast. I enjoyed this video a lot, though I haven't watched the end yet because I definitely want to try The Forgotten City (and Pentiment, for that matter) for myself. Looking forward to diving through your backlog this week!

[@christian2i]

Skittles at it again, thanks!

[@T_Dot94]

This is a really important video.

[@Gamingpandacat]

Ahh I need to play the forgotten city I have it and its just sitting there ugghhh

[@user-zc1zg1yp3i]

always so engaging and enlightening, thank you for doing what you do

[@andr0oS]

Woah, woah, woah, are you trying to tell us that... war never changes? But for real, great video

[@pageturner242]

I LOVE TO SEE THE SPREAD OF THE PENTIMENT AGENDA

[@edward9674]

I have seen several times that this anecdote that peasants had less work back in the days than modern workers. What are the sources on that?

[@chcknpie04]

Another fantastic video as usual!

[@siralexandersequeira3rdcou12]

I just love history before the 1870s... pentiment is so historically accurate

[@aquitainedugascon4726]

Thanks for taking a stand with historians! The sheer amounts of misinformation and vastly outdated (Im talking decades if not centuries, things such as the Dark Ages, Marian Reforms, Greece and/or Rome birthplace of modern civilization, the color of ancient statues, and the ethnic diversity in the ancient world) that historians get ridiculed and outright verbally attacked for correcting is astounding. Especially when it comes from people who have never studied history properly. History is a science, and some sub or adjacent fields are hard, cutting edge science ontop of that. And yet its treated as mostly opinions. This has already led to the enormous cuts to historical studies in the developed world, with entire departments being cut while others are just there to fund STEM studies while the quality rapidly decreases. Sadly, we're now seeing that other fields are getting that treatment as well. Climate scientists, sociologists, and some other fields already had been since the 80s or earlier, but doctors, engineers, physicists - anyone apparently is wrong these days according to people who have never studied that field but look at the facts a lot - on Twitter, Facebook, and KZbin, the heartlands of modern academia). Its starting to reach dangerous levels of anti-intellectualism not seen in a long while in the developed world, and I worry for whats to come. On people saying ancient Egypt ending when Alexander conquers it: That point just reeks of Hellenocentrism so much. Greek Egypt was a continuation of Persian Egypt, in itself a continuation of Kushite Egypt, which was a continuation of Assyrian Egypt, which in turn continued ancient Egypt. To say ancient Egypt ends when the Greeks take over (who very much assimilated into Egyptian society to many degrees, but also brought their own elements to enrich it), is just showing one's ignorance or bias. A much better arguement to the end of ancient Egypt is the Christianization and the vast changes that brought to society. Though of course, here too there was continuation on from the Roman period, which continued the Greek period.

[@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl]

Greeks by no means assimilated into egyptian culture. Celobatra was literally the only potelmy ruler to ever learn egyptian and that only because she knew 9 other languages. There was still a caste system that favored the Greeks legally and Alexanderia was a city that was considered 'by Egypt' and not 'of Egypt'

[@aquitainedugascon4726]

@@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl I know comprehensive reading is not a valued skill on the internet, but you could still have tried. Then you'd have noticed I said they were assimilated to many degrees, ergo not entirely. The Greeks were a far larger group then just the ruling Ptolemies, and even they continued adopting all kinds of religious and political practices, just like the Seleukids did further east - and which were clearly not of Greek origin even to Greeks living at that time. Divine rulership, Egyptian civil institutions and laws, religious elements including deities and symbols, and other customs such as dress. Just like other invading dynasties that stayed in Egypt before them. Assimilation of many elements of Egyptian culture was part of Ptolemaic rulership starting with Ptolemy himself, and increasing with each successive ruler. But yes, they did not adopt the language, until they did under Cleopatra. If you go down to the level of the common Greeks living in Egypt, some which had lived there for generations already in the Delta and were already more assimilated to life in Egypt, just like those other non-Egyptian peoples who also settled there. Nubians, Karians, Persians, Arabs, Libyans - these all brought some elements of their own while also assimilating to the local culture. And that means dress, practices, cuisine, language, naming conventions, intermarrying, religion, literature and many other cultural elements were steadily adopted by them - including the Greeks who were just the latest in a long line of foreigners coming to Egypt. Just like Greeks had done in many other parts of the world. Anatolian Ionian Greek culture had many eccentricities owing to them adopting native elements from the Karians and Lydians - and whatever was left of the Pamphylian Greeks was not even recognized as Hellenic by later authors because of their degree of assimilation. So yes, the Ptolemies did not adopt the language (until they did), but they sure as hell assimilated many, many other elements of Egyptian culture, as did their subjects.

[@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl]

@@aquitainedugascon4726 wow so much wrong. The language of the court during cleopatra time was still Greek. Cleopatra did know Egyptian but that only because she was a very educated woman that knew egyptian as part of other 9 languages. Also you are completely unaware of the fact that to the very end of the potelmy dynasty being Greek was legal privilege that entitled them to tax exemptions and legal privileges in the courts. There was no assimilation here. Just a colonial regime that selectively adopted some cultural traits of their colonized population

[@aquitainedugascon4726]

@@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl Look buddy, I'm fine with having a discussion in good faith but thats clearly not whats happening here. Have a good day.

[@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl]

@@aquitainedugascon4726 can you tell me what I said that wasn't in good faith?

[@redtexan7053]

Great video, but even you fall for a pretty common misconception about history in this video. Medieval peasants did not “work less” than their modern day counterparts. Sure, their official job of tending the local nobleman’s land only lasted a certain amount of time during the year. But it’s not like they were just sitting around enjoying themselves the rest of the time. And I would encourage anyone reading this who thinks they did to try their hand at spinning clothing, or churning butter, or milking cows, or chopping wood, or any one of the other hundreds of tasks these people had to do on a a daily basis just to keep themselves alive with pre-industrial means. These people were working *constantly.* It might not have been at their “job” but it was still work. The very little leisure they got consisted of picking through the lord and lady’s scraps on feast days, and getting blackout drunk the rest of the time. Which, I personally won’t judge them on, because over indulging on holidays and drinking myself to high Heaven are pretty much the only ways I can afford to get my rocks off too. I understand where the sentiment is coming from. Only “working” a few months out of the year probably strikes a lot of people as very romantic now that we’re 200 years into industrialized capitalism. But it’s painting a picture of something that just does not reflect reality.

[@KayAndSkittles]

I don't think Juliet Schor's work (which I cite in my handy little footnote at that point of the video) can be dismissed as a misconception. I found it extremely persuasive and well evidenced. That doesn't automatically mean she's right but if you haven't I would highly recommend checking it out, you might find it interesting and/or challenging in a fun way!

[@attackofthecopyrightbots]

"if things went differently we would have laser guns and flying cars" those people basically

[@katiemarshall4340]

Hi Kay and Skittles, that was a great video, good job 👍. How the hell did you get a bottle of Barr's Cream Soda? For yours and Skittles safety I'll be careful here, that one is the wrong Barr's fizzy drink. The correct one was Irn Bru until they nerfed it, the new correct one is Pineappleade or possibly Barr's Cola. You can thank those three great Comrades JT, Yugopnik and Hakim for me watching you. ✊

[@1GentleGiant1]

My dumbass thought the redditor graph was a symbolism of our knowledge of past mythos and how the bronze age collapse left gaps in our knowledge. But nope its just aetheist redditors.

[@minecraft1nerd]

wow watching a Skittles videos that isn't over 6 months old

[@mattphillips1251]

Very good video sir! you deserve more subs

[@EllinasParamythas]

This seems like an issue that required an other part on how history is actively manipulated focusing on the Assasign Creed series