Frostpunk is a 2018 city manager/survival game by Polish developers 11 bit studios of This War of Mine (2014) fame, which situates a group of survivors huddling around a massive generator at the heart of New London, in a world where the temperature won’t stop dropping for… Reasons. I think Frostpunk has gone further and done better than virtually any of its contemporaries when it comes to addressing ‘player morality in video games’ — clearly far better than the ‘fake’ morality of Bioshock, or the ‘nuking a city is as evil as stealing 200 forks’ of Fallout 3, or the ‘press triangle to praxis’ of Detroit: Being Human — producing an experience which forces us to reflect on our own attitudes in a manner which may not be comfortable.
The core mechanic of the game — and the source of the morality question — essentially revolves around the management of resources, including a ‘hope’ meter and (to a lesser extent) a ‘discontent’ meter. When you order workers to do something they don’t want to do, discontent rises; when bad news hits (such as workers dying from illness, overwork, or disaster), hope drops. If hope gets too low, it can lead to a lose state as the society rebels against its unpopular ruler.
The game gives you various methods of adapting to this — a tech tree called ‘adaptation’ allows the player to pass several laws, which can affect production, working hours, hope, discontent, and other general wellbeing. These range from emergency shifts to prosthetics for amputees; from pubs to child labour (or, in a different — mutually exclusive — branch, child apprenticeships in safe workplaces); one particularly useful policy allows for funerals to take place after the death of someone within the society, which mitigates the ‘hope’ fall somewhat.
A precipitous drop in hope in the middle of the game — caused by the news that a nearby settlement has been wiped out by the cold and ensuing chaos — forces the player to ‘choose a path’, to give meaning to the lives of the citizens of New London. These two paths can be seen as functionally the same; in practice, Order has some policies with minor side-benefits relating to production (because what kind of Soviet allegory would it be if it didn’t have production modifiers attached?), and Faith has benefits affecting healing and health. But the main point of the two tech trees is to improve hope and reduce discontent, with hope especially becoming less and less of a problem as you unlock more powerful policies further down the tree.
The progression of this ‘purpose’ tree can be considered quite sinister - what starts with neighbourhood watches (Order) and chapels (Faith) escalates to propaganda centres and ‘public penance’, and finally to ‘New Faith’ and ‘New Order’ — policies essentially coded to mean ‘fascism’, or some other totalitarian nightmare. Both of these policies result in arbitrary executions and repression, but also eliminate the hope bar entirely — presumably because the grasp of the player-character over New London is so tight that the obedience of its citizens can be guaranteed. Regardless of the reason for that obedience.
We can take a step back here. There are problems, of course, with the idea that totalitarianism leads to a society where the ‘hope’ of the population is ignorable; people didn’t start liking the Nazi regime (or even not-hating it) because it aimed to have a strong grip on private life. But ultimately I don’t have a problem with that design choice — I think the game makes it pretty clear that totalitarianism is bad, going so far as to judge you for picking the most totalitarian policies at the end (more on that soon).
We can also take issue with the idea that ‘hope’ — a rough analogy to population personal wellbeing — can be quantified in such a way. Obviously, it can’t in real life — people are not robots — but I don’t think the game is implying that it can, either. Rather, I think the game is implying that the leaders of a given society might be tempted to perceive ‘hope’ as a resource to be managed, and uses that mindset in order to ask us questions about ourselves. For example, if I force people to work an emergency 24hr shift, there is a chance that a worker will die from exhaustion (causing a loss of hope) — but perhaps the needed resources from the shift will make their loss ‘worthwhile’. In the real world, such a decision would (correctly) revolt anyone with a soul; in Frostpunk, it’s commonplace. Perhaps priorities shift when you’re facing -120C conditions.
The game culminates in a storm where temperatures reach as low as -150C (did you know that the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was -89.2C, in Antarctica, in 1983?), which you suffer through but ultimately survive — having stocked up on food and coal for the generator. The game will run a timelapse of the life of your society, spelling out the social policies which you enacted in order to keep it running.
Besides myself, i’ve seen two people finish this game — Shaun, and Day[9] (Sean Plott). By coincidence (?), we all took the same Purpose path — Order. We all filled out the tree up to and including ‘Pledge of Loyalty’ (not as far as full ‘New Order’ fascism, but heavily implied to include a secret police and the ‘ratting out’ of neighbours). We even made a point not to enact the ‘forceful persuasion’ torture policy — hence, our endings were near-identical. As we were treated to the construction timelapse, the game asked us:
‘The city survived. But was it worth it?’
I couldn’t give a truthful representation of how I felt when confronted with this; partly because I have a terrible memory (further corrupted by how I felt after a second playthrough), and partly because it was probably quite troubled. But assuming that i’m not that much different from anyone else, Shaun and Sean’s reactions were roughly the same — first some surprise, followed by anger and dismissal of the ending; both even went so far as to suggest that the ending took away from their total experience of having played the game. I hope it didn’t.
What I find interesting is that both used the same excuses — that the game had ‘forced’ them to take these policies, and that they had ‘no choice’.
Let’s talk about ‘being forced’ in games. Obviously neither Shaun nor Sean are suggesting that the game literally stapled their hands to their mice — they are saying that they felt that there was a pressure placed upon them to take action in a way which they felt uncomfortable with (even if they went along with it), and subsequently they felt patronised when the game essentially scolded them for enacting ‘penultimate fascism’, or ‘fascism-lite’ — after all, if they didn’t have a choice, how can this be a personal failing?
To an extent, I think this is a misreading which is convenient for them to believe. But other games have faced similar criticism.
Spec Ops: The Line is a well-regarded game with interesting takes on morality in the specific context of video games. One section of the game involves engaging enemy soldiers blocking the way forward from a distance using white phosphorus munitions — incendiary munitions which are used to burn people and start fires. An emotional climax of the game comes during the aftermath, as the player-character and his colleagues realise — to their horror — that the ‘soldiers’ they had bombed were not soldiers at all, but refugees escaping the conflict. This is layered on thick with gruesome aftermath shots of parents clutching their children.
The game — and this scene in particular — has been written about a lot, but fundamentally the entire morality revolves around ‘choice’, as atrocity after atrocity is caused by the player-character (with the game almost mocking you with loading tags like ‘This is all your fault.’) I can’t find the original quote for this, but several people have echoed the claim ostensibly put forward by the developers that it’s true; you didn’t have to use white phosphorus on the refugees, because you could have turned off the game and hence not ‘caused’ a war crime to happen.
I never felt that this was a particularly solid stance — I can respect it, and it certainly has generated a lot of discussion about player choice (or lack of). But ultimately, I think that even though the game does not berate you in the same way that Frostpunk does, it is even more ‘unfair’ — yes, I technically had a ‘choice’, but ultimately I wanted to continue to experience the content of the game itself. Maybe if I were put in a similarly tense situation to the protagonists I would also commit war crimes; maybe I wouldn’t (I would like to think that I wouldn’t). But by ‘forcing’ me to commit a war crime in order to continue experiencing the game, the developers are divorcing the two. I am not gaining any greater insight into my own morality because I do not fire white phosphorus munitions in order to experience ‘content’ in real life.
Frostpunk, on the other hand, is far more subtle. By forcing us to consider ‘hope’ as a resource — abstracted and alienated from the actual people who experience Hope, the emotion — the game forces us into moral quandaries which, I believe, cause us to confront uncomfortable truths.
I mentioned earlier that both Shaun and Sean complained that they ‘had no choice’, but the reality is that there was always a choice. There was a heavy pressure (as you might expect from -120C weather), yes, but the choice was still there. This can be exemplified by my second playthrough, when I managed to save even more souls than my first playthrough, keeping ‘hope’ at a maximum and ‘discontent’ at a minimum, while not installing anything more authoritarian than a prison. In the final cinematic sequence, the game congratulated me for not going ‘too far’. I felt pleased with myself for having saved (almost) everyone without resorting to what I might consider a severe violation of the rights of the individuals of the society.
But I think this ‘retrospective playthrough’ — a playthrough with the gift of foresight — teaches us some sombre lessons; when Shaun and Sean insisted that they had ‘no choice’ but to implement horrible policies, in reality they had a choice all along. When I explicitly mentioned to Shaun that he did have a choice (citing my own second playthrough), his response was denial — that the game had ‘forced’ him to act in such a way, and that it would have been better if these choices could have been given in the absence of a negative pressure (i.e falling ‘hope’), or if there were an alternative, ‘good’ route to take.
I feel that both of these suggestions miss the point of the morality of the game. First, having these options without the negative pressures which make people feel like they are being ‘forced’ would, in itself, be meaningless. There are never situations where people support wannabe-dictators or fascists because things are going well; totalitarianism is always coded as ‘things are bad, and bad times require these sacrifices and drastic measures’ (with certain marginalised groups virtually always bearing the brunt of these measures). The game forces the difficult situation of trying to maintain the survival of an entire society onto you in order to probe ‘how far you’ll go’ — which it explicitly alludes to with the different endings.
Secondly — and more importantly — I would suggest that a ‘good route’ as such would not only be terrible game design (remembering games such as Bioshock, with their ‘obviously Good’ and ‘obviously Bad’ binary moral choice systems), but totally superfluous. The beauty of the morality of Frostpunk is that the player is the ultimate arbitrator of when ‘too far’ is ‘too far’. Having survived the storm (and having implemented the secret police), the game asks whether you have gone ‘too far’. Granted, it will then positively say ‘you didn’t go too far’ if you only implement policies up to and including prisons, but considering that prisons exist in our current societies, I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that this is unreasonable (but yes, again, we can have that conversation about prison reform).
Ultimately the game has put you, the player, in charge of the given society, and ordered you to think like a leader — a leader who cannot speak to every individual in that society (let alone understand their lived experience on such a personal level!), but must instead rely on abstractions of ‘hope’ and ‘discontent’ in order to make do. It asks you at what point the means are no longer justified by the ends, and it asks you to reflect on what you’ve done when the ‘end of history’ occurs, and whether it was worth it.
What defines the ‘good’ route is up to you, and depends on how far you go down either the Order or Faith path — I, for one, believe that neighbourhood watches and churches are actively good; I don’t think propaganda centres are particularly ethical, and I don’t think torture can ever, realistically, be justified. Maybe there are people who disagree with me and believe that neighbourhood watches are in themselves authoritarian (although this seems unlikely, considering that even anarchists generally approve of this decentralised community approach to ‘policing’). In this way, the game is not only asking you to consider ‘how far’ you would be willing to go, but it also demonstrates how easily it is to fall into authoritarianism. Shaun mentioned that without knowing what was going to come up next, he felt like he had no choice but to implement a secret police; but isn’t that the point?
Unless I missed something drastic happening, none of us have the power to predict the future. The allure of authoritarianism — of ‘if I just implement this terrible thing, and restrict this liberty, then we’ll be able to get through whatever happens in the future’ — clearly has an impact on everyone. We all clearly have our stop points (again, none of us picked the New Order policy) — and the game is demonstrating that, perhaps, we didn’t do well enough to resist the authoritarian urge.
The game is not only allowing you to set your own boundaries, it is also saying that ‘I had no choice’ is not an excuse, and ‘I can’t predict the future’ is not an original or useful claim. It allows us to pick the extent to which it’s ‘right’ to abuse the liberties of the citizens underneath us, and everything that entails; and it questions whether it was justified at the end, with the knowledge that an alternative was possible.
And if you’re anything like me, that experience was haunting.
