Crusader Kings 3 doesn’t have boss fights or puzzles like many other kinds of video games. But I am convinced that it does have one kind of enemy: its user interface.

And yet, it’s one of the rare games that I have stayed up all night playing, even knowing I work the next day. When it gets its hooks into me, they dig in deep. Crusader Kings 3 is a strategy game where you play as a landowner during the Latin holy wars. It’s open-ended, and the goals are driven by the player, but most people play with the intention of creating an empire that’s larger than any other on the map through subterfuge, war, diplomacy, or just buying everyone out. 

If that sounds exciting, then I’m here to tell you that most of the game asks players to look at a very intricate map — a highly detailed and factually accurate one of the area in either 867 or 1066. Once you hit play, then inevitably, history warps, both by your actions and by the game’s simulation making decisions for all the other landowners on the board.

The great fun of Crusader Kings 3 is watching history change in unpredictable ways. I’ve destroyed the Catholic church, launched a European invasion from India, and, with some effort, given Judaism a foothold in Sweden. It’s possible to send things in fascinating directions — once you’re able to wrangle the overwhelming amounts of information that the game is trying to show to you at all times.

Crusader Kings is a series that I want to share with my friends, but most take one look at the user interface and bounce right off it. There’s simply a lot of stuff on the screen: menus that beget more menus, several lists of currencies that you’ll need to pay attention to, plus all the data about how characters feel about you, your own personality traits that affect gameplay — the list goes on and on, and you need to know all of it. 

Because this information is so plentiful, sometimes it’s portrayed in a kind of shorthand, using icons to denote that this character has one eye (an eye patch) or that character has an STD (a bee pollinating a flower). Understanding how to ensure your lineage can stay landowners and maybe even amass power means understanding your relationships to your vassals, your liege, and your military strength. You’ll also have to get familiar with clicking around on the map itself to learn about your neighboring rulers and their vassals, and all of this will also change over time. It feels like you’re surrounded by dozens of ticking clocks, all counting down to a potential disaster. 

Part of the reason I can’t put it down is because it’s hard to ever feel like your many resources are all in good shape; there is no good stopping point because you’re always just on the edge of another disaster. My ability to persevere is dependent upon knowing what all my options are. Perpetual crisis, it turns out, is a perfect gameplay loop.

Developers at Paradox Interactive, the developer of Crusader Kings 3, are aware of the conundrum: that the level of complexity in their games can sometimes make them less accessible to players, even though that level of complexity is what players like about their games. Though developers at Paradox say that some players do long for the older, more complex user interface, Crusader Kings 3 was a deliberate attempt to streamline the game’s UI.

“I think one struggle in games with a lot of characters or countries is ‘Wait, who is this guy?’” Jonas Wickerström, UX designer on Crusader Kings 3, told me. “It can be hard to tell characters apart or try to remember your history with them.” 

Petter Lundh, 2D lead artist at Paradox Interactive, worries that the friction of the game’s menus will frustrate players and lead them to give up on the game entirely. “We want the player’s imagination and problem-solving abilities to stay focused on the game world rather than being wasted on usability issues,” he said.

Crusader Kings 3 is the kind of game a lot of players love to hear stories about — the subreddit Shit Crusader Kings Says is full of posts asking for help on how to marry your sister — but can sometimes be intimidating to actually play. It’s embarrassing to admit when a game has simply flummoxed you and you aren’t even sure what to click on or what to pay attention to. Even as a veteran player, playing in a new culture or religion can sometimes leave me lost in terms of where to go next. My friend Emily Lipstein, social media manager for Motherboard, told me that at first, she found the game incredibly daunting.

“I am not kidding when I say that I feel like I had to obtain a master’s degree for playing this game on my own,” she said. 

She told me that only after watching around 90 hours of a YouTuber playing the game did she feel comfortable enough to buy it and try it herself.

Paradox’s goal is not to intimidate the player. In fact, its solution for analysis paralysis is to try and give players better ways to answer their questions within the game itself, which, of course, starts with the map.

“Players spend a lot of time looking at it, so it must both be functional and look good. In previous titles, you often had to toggle between two or even three different map modes to see what you wanted,” Wickerström said. For Crusader Kings 3, they decided to have the amount of information that the game shows you change depending on how zoomed in or zoomed out from the map you are.  

“Getting the right balance of information as you zoom in and out is very hard,” Wickerström said. “That being said, doing it this way means you can spend most of your time in a single map mode and interact with anything using just your left mouse button.”

Emily told me she plays Crusader Kings 3 as a “medieval dating simulator,” roleplaying each new heir in accordance to the stats that each heir has. Some players might look at a ruler who is shy, for instance, and see it as a hindrance to their goals. To someone like Emily, it’s a chance to explore all the options the game has to offer, some of which she has stumbled on by mistake.

“I especially remember this one playthrough where the guy I was playing became a witch, randomly,” she said. “Then suddenly I was like, How does the witch mechanic even work? Because that is something that is baked into the game, clearly, and has this whole infrastructure that you could spend hundreds of hours playing and not even explore.”

Emily said that the most helpful thing the game provides for players who are confused by its user interface is the ability to mouse over a highlighted term and read the pop-up window called a “tooltip” that explains the term. Pausing the game to read a definition doesn’t sound like a thrill ride, but Crusader Kings 3 lets players nest tooltips within tooltips, meaning you can functionally teach yourself all the gameplay terminology you need without ever leaving the program.

“When playing [Paradox] games, you use tooltips a lot to get more detailed information. Sometimes, that information got complicated, and the tooltips got very big,” Wickerström said. 

“I think that is when people started thinking: ‘Why can’t I just move my mouse inside the tooltip?’”

(For Crusader Kings 2, I used to play the game with the fan wiki open in a browser window — it was too hard to memorize all of the mechanics. You can see why the sequel’s decision to explain itself without making the player exit would make the game more immersive.)

While the point of the game isn’t to nest tooltips within tooltips, it sometimes feels like a visualization of going down the rabbit hole that is Crusader Kings 3. It’s a game that will always have to ask its players to deal with a little bit of friction to understand it, but navigating that friction makes the payoff of finally knowing what everything means all the more satisfying. The deeper your understanding of how each element of the user interface works, the more powerful of a player you become. Still, smoothing out some of the rougher edges of the game’s user experience does broaden their audience and also helps the developers at Paradox keep this game as sophisticated as it’s always been.

“The more effort we put into art and UX, the more complicated mechanics we will be able to communicate successfully. In fact, there are often such significant gains to be made in presentation and UI flow alone that simplifying game mechanics is not needed,” Lundh said. “Just because a game appears simple and intuitive does not imply that it lacks complex gameplay interactions and vice versa.”

It’s true that my experience of Crusader Kings has deepened with the game’s new approach to its user interface. I’m no longer playing just to survive but to discover what I can do. In a game of imagined histories, there’s nothing more delicious than to make an absurd dream — like defeating the great Khan — come true. Crusader Kings 3 offers a lot of pathways to achieving that goal or any other you might come up with along the way. Sometimes the most satisfying UI isn’t one that gives you a clear instruction but, instead, a sense of direction.

Twitter is in a period of decline. The site still functions, people are still using it, but there’s a familiar stink that lingers on the website. It reminds me of the twilight days of two other social media platforms I’ve used: LiveJournal and Tumblr — onetime vibrant communities that grew in popularity until everyone seemed to be using them, which then began a long, slow death.

Pop onto LiveJournal and Tumblr today, and you’ll still see inscrutable blogs, endless GIFs, and earnest writing. But something is missing — although there’s still content and posters, the sites no longer feel like the communities they once were.

LiveJournal began as an online diary service in 1999, but by the time I signed up for the site in the early 2000s, it was the central hub for what is now known as fandom. Fans of popular media properties like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings flocked to the site to share their enthusiasm and creative endeavors. Some of these fans even garnered fans of their own; they were dubbed “big name fans,” and mini-fandoms formed around them. Creators like Cassandra Clare, now author of the young adult fiction series The Mortal Instruments, would post fanfiction and update their blogs with musings on their media of choice.

Things started to change in 2007 as LiveJournal’s then owner, Six Apart, started looking toward a sale. In May of that year, just months before the company would be sold to Russian company SUP, blogs across various fandom communities started to be suspended without warning, including the popular Harry Potter erotic fanfiction community Pornish_Pixies. LiveJournal said that the reasoning behind this was to “protect minors,” but community members weren’t buying what appeared to be a much broader cleanup of anything that looked remotely edgy. One user wrote at the time that because they wrote fanfiction that dealt with difficult themes, they felt they were being unfairly grouped with pedophiles and predators.

“As a queer, feminist writer who explores the darker aspects of human nature, many of my stories deal with incest, rape, and child molestation,” they said. “As such, I belonged to and contributed to several of the communities which have been suspended and frankly I’m pretty offended. I don’t like being lumped in with rapists and pedophiles and other ‘monsters on the web.’”

From there, the site got worse and worse — more unstable, littered with ads — and users began to flee. Over time, it felt like a ghost town. After the sale, LiveJournal’s new owner, SUP, was not really interested in the fandom aspect of the site, didn’t invest in it, and certainly did not listen to those users. I had maintained a blog on LiveJournal from the beginning of high school to my freshman year of college, but my interest in the platform dwindled. It was no longer a vibrant space full of conversation anymore. It didn’t function as well without people on it. “Big name fans” like Clare had already moved on to the greener pastures of original fiction, and the endless debates on the new ownership made every conversation boring. Eventually, I migrated to Tumblr, where many of the fandom communities I was interested in had gone. And the cycle began again.

What’s remarkable about experiencing Tumblr’s decline was how similar it was to LiveJournal’s. Tumblr was a vibrant user-driven showcase of creativity, but the sale to Yahoo in 2013 started to change things. Like LiveJournal before it, adult content, much of it from fandom communities, was increasingly put under scrutiny by the site’s owners. Tumblr was an excellent platform for photos and illustration, and if you participated in fandom as a shipper — rooting for romantic couples within your fandom’s characters — then Tumblr was a great place for looking at and singing the praises of shippy and often erotic fan art. In 2018, a year after Yahoo was acquired by Verizon, all adult content and nudity would be banned from the platform. The terms of this ban made it difficult to make art that depicted romantic or sexual tension in the way that fans were used to — or even to draw things that had nudity but weren’t sexual at all. It didn’t just ban depictions of sex acts but all states of undress and nudity. If your content was flagged as explicit content, you ran the risk of having your entire blog flagged as well, rendering it invisible to anyone other than your followers. It was not worth the risk to toe the line.

The algorithm that Tumblr employed to find nudity on the platform was also extremely bad. Users found that it flagged images without any nudity as explicit and that it misidentified images of the cartoon Garfield as pornography. With fandom artists no longer able to grow their communities, Tumblr lost the ability to grow, too.

It’s hard not to see the parallels to the current state of Twitter. Almost immediately after Twitter was bought by Elon Musk, he started making unpopular changes to the platform — some of them so unpopular he had to immediately take them back, like banning links to other social media platforms, which Musk called “free advertising” for those competitors. Others, like the new feature that shows you how many times your tweet has been viewed or the ability to write 4,000-character tweets, fundamentally change the nature of the site and make it less usable.

In general, Twitter under Musk’s tenure feels less stable, with users reporting more downtime and errors than before. The proliferation of random ads reminds me of Tumblr just before I left it, when the ads on the site became almost Dada-esque. There’s a certain amount of muck on the site that I haven’t previously experienced as a user. The site takes forever to load, the mobile app chugs to load my timeline each time I open it. Privacy features like Twitter Circle, which allow you to tweet to a smaller audience, and locked accounts, which make your account totally private, keep breaking. The site can’t even stay afloat during huge pop culture moments like Rihanna’s halftime show at the Super Bowl. 

The one element that makes Twitter different from Tumblr and LiveJournal — besides not being a space mainly dominated with screamingly horny teenage girls — is the pervasiveness of its leader. While Tumblr users once idolized platform founder David Karp, and LiveJournal users were aware enough of who ran and owned the site, Musk looms much larger as Twitter’s owner. His presence on the site, up to and including picking fights with various individual users, makes him feel less like the CEO of a social media website and more like a tyrannical forum moderator. The tone of the site comes from the top, and it’s difficult to want to post on a site owned by someone who openly believes that “the media” is racist against white people.

The current situation on Twitter reminds me of the forums of the comedy website Something Awful. Something Awful is far more notorious than LiveJournal and Tumblr, and for good reason. Rather than a soft, friendly place to be a fan, it was a harsh and angry place to hate things. The intensity and often hyperbolic nature of the posters’ orneriness ironically also led to the kind of unfettered creativity you’d see in both the LiveJournal and Tumblr communities. Even if you haven’t heard of Something Awful before, it’s likely you’ve encountered an iconic piece of internet humor that originated from the site. “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” “You’re The Man Now Dog,” and “I Can Has Cheezburger” all originate from the site, and its many users have gone on to become humorists, game developers, and even journalists.

Like LiveJournal and Tumblr before it, the tone for the site came from the top. Because its founder, Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, cultivated a space where mockery was de rigueur, that was the kind of behavior you would expect if you fell out of line with Kyanka’s rules and mods. Women and trans people on the site reported being antagonized by Kyanka himself, who made his bigoted feelings on transgender people extremely clear. One of the most infamous subforums on the site, Fuck You And Die, was also shut down by Kyanka in 2020, who said it had become a “fucking racist shithole.” Kyanka’s toxicity became so pervasive that even disagreeing with him on another site became a bannable offense; in such a hostile environment, the forum users openly rebelled against him up until the point of his death. The news that he would sell the site was met with celebration; after his passing, forum users mostly felt sorry for his ex-wives and children.

What’s allowed Twitter to continue, even in its ramshackle state, is that there’s no obvious next home for the people on it to migrate to. The “big name fan” equivalents of Twitter — its power users who are often celebrities like Stephen King or other figures of real-world influence — can’t just pivot to journalism or find another platform where they will have similar influence. While Twitter alternatives like Mastodon have seen an influx of users as Twitter slowly winds down, there just isn’t the same level of centralization on that platform as there is on Twitter. On Mastodon, I can’t bully a US senator while I catch up on some celebrity gossip and then read breaking news straight from the journalist reporting it themselves.

In all of these cases — LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, and even Something Awful — it’s the users who ultimately decide if the sites are viable. We are all just following a horde of posters as they find new places to post, looking for the places where posting feels safest and most plentiful. Twitter is already beginning its sad half-life as advertisers leave the platform and people look for the thing that will replace it, a problem that threatened Musk so much that he briefly banned links to competing social media platforms before reversing course. He knows as well as I do that a site doesn’t have to go offline to be dead.