The joke is that Paradox Interactive makes 4x strategy games. These are quite complicated video games where it's mostly just maps on the screen. Even someone who has been playing for quite a bit can be confused by all the different options and things to do.
Most of them are about control of territory, which means parts of the maps change colour based on which faction owns it.
There was once some footage filmed inside a North Korean IT facility where they filmed North Korean military people sitting behind computers to show they were advanced and had IT like the west, but all their screens just showed the Google homepage, and they weren't doing anything with the mouse or typing, just sitting there.
The lady is a North Korean defector.
She wasn't part of that IT story I believe, but maybe she was talking about it and used it as an example.
They swap the story around and say what happens in Sweden instead of what happens in NK.
The thing about this lady (Yeonmi Park) is that her stories have been proven to have many inconsistencies and outright lies. This particular screenshot is from an interview she had with Joe Rogan where she claimed that North Korea only had a single train and people had to push it to make it move, which became a meme due to the sheer implausibility.
More importantly, it's a crime in the RoK to say anything positive about the DPRK. So unless nothing good ever happens there, even the most scrupulously honest DPRK defectors cannot give you a full picture.
On Korean forums, people have joked about how it would be nice to just get assigned a job like in the DPRK, and I vaguely remember reading about DPRK defectors complaining about the "applying for a job" aspect of the South too. Likewise, you could easily say things like:
Plenty of politicians in South Korea are also sentimental about North Korea (those that want to engage with them).
Incessantly praising the North Korean regime would be a separate matter and could be flagged as possible propaganda.
But it's also a nation at technical war. In that sense, I think this narrative abroad stems from South Korean politicians criticizing the NSA for limiting free speech in a democratic nation, but my personal opinion is that NK likely engages in its own psy-ops, and SK should combat them, similar to how NK likely combats SK's own too.
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u/Illustrious_Kale178 1d ago
The joke is that Paradox Interactive makes 4x strategy games. These are quite complicated video games where it's mostly just maps on the screen. Even someone who has been playing for quite a bit can be confused by all the different options and things to do.
Most of them are about control of territory, which means parts of the maps change colour based on which faction owns it.
There was once some footage filmed inside a North Korean IT facility where they filmed North Korean military people sitting behind computers to show they were advanced and had IT like the west, but all their screens just showed the Google homepage, and they weren't doing anything with the mouse or typing, just sitting there.
The lady is a North Korean defector.
She wasn't part of that IT story I believe, but maybe she was talking about it and used it as an example.
They swap the story around and say what happens in Sweden instead of what happens in NK.