David Ogborn (dktr0)
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Frostpunk

This page collects my notes-in-progress on the game Frostpunk, initiated by my speaking notes from a conference presentation at the Canadian Game Studies Association (June 2025).

Frostpunk: Fascism, forced choices, and the limits of the steampunk past conditional

positioning myself in this research

  • full professor in McMaster's Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts; coordinating the Networked Imagination Laboratory
  • long-standing research and practice in computational sonic arts and improvisation, i.e. live coding
  • computer games had a deep connection to this (I started programming when young in a somewhat quixotic effort to make the games that were only liminally available otherwise), but only gradually have I been developing this more explicitly; first through the Game Design course, now through a set of game studies projects
  • Not Waiting For Godot; Total Annihilation; snowboarding games
  • fascism and anti-fascism in games as a(nother) long-term commitment I can make

overview of frostpunk

  • survival city-building game, set in an alternative late 19th century timeline - a steampunk timeline - stricken by a kind of environmental catastrophe that has lead to the collapse of civilization via extreme cold
  • the main campaign involves a group of refugees from London, England and their attempt to survive by building a city around a powerful generator (a coal-powered heat source) somewhere far to the north
  • it's a deep and difficult game in which player choices operate in many different directions: what to build and where to build it (with an eye towards a key mechanic involving the radiation of vitally necessary heat), what order to research and access new technologies, how much and where to explore beyond the city, what laws to pass (from the player's position of "benevolent" dictator), and (later in the game) whether to accept further waves of climate refugees into the city
  • it's also a game in which storytelling and a story arc have been integrated in strong ways, essentially through a series of discrete stages in which the mechanics of the game become progressively more complex in tandem with the pathos and drama of the story intensifying. I'm not sure I've seen this integration of story pulled off as compellingly by any other strategy game.
  • I played this at length during Summer 2024 on PS5, and knew immediately it was a good place to start my longer games and fascism/anti-fascism quest. In my abstract, I proposed a reading that would pay "particular attention to the way in which it allows and demands that players confront questions of fascism, forced choices (Jackson 2014), and more generally, questions about the nature and shape of individual and collective responses to environmental collapse (Chang 2019) and political catastrophe." And I noted how the game's "past conditional catastrophe functions as notional justification for the series of forced choices that follow as the game unfolds, starting with “small” choices (how many clinics to build? put the children to work or not?) and escalating to larger “choices” (establish a theocracy “or” a police state? ask volunteers to die in the mines or freeze in the storm?)." As I've gotten into this work, I think I have arrived at intensified sense that the game represents a fascist fantasy, quite specifically, and not only a more generic biopolitics. To what end, or with what effect, it represents such a fantasy is a more difficult question I'll come back to in today's conclusions.

defining fascism

  • An attentive reviewer of this proposal wondered how I would define fascism for this study, and indeed that is a crucial and deep question both for the immediate focus and for my larger agenda. For anyone interested, here are my evolving reading notes about how fascism will be defined for the purposes of my research.
  • Prior to recent study, I really had two not-unrelated traditions for thinking about fascism in mind: (a) a Marxist tradition in which fascism is seen as a defining and inevitable mechanism or moment of capitalist crisis, one in which the normal machinery of liberal democracy is discarded by elite opinion as a no-longer-adequate safeguard of their interests; and (b) the way in which fascism is referenced in the work of Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Adorno, and Horkheimer in terms of a kind of permanent pyschic danger within all of us, as individuals and collectives.
  • Discovering the journal Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies (curiously and recently discontinued) has allowed me to expand this to a third set of perspectives, quite scholarly, not necessarily (or at all) Marxist, and with a strong emphasis on unearthing past histories of diverse fascisms that exceed a popular discourse about fascism that is all too exclusively anchored in the record of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. I think I will need to continue to read these multiple traditions into and against each other.
  • My present focus on FrostPunk has led me to latch on to the evolving definitions of fascism given by Roger Griffin within comparative fascist studies (Griffin 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2019, 2022). Griffin defines fascism as modernist project of palingenetic ultranationalism; fascism as, before all else, a radical project to rebirth the nation/race/whatever out of a state of decadence or crisis. This is exactly the consistent narrative of FrostPunk, even before a single act of biopolitical management has been carried out - the refugees are definitively from Victorian London, and the new city they struggle to survive in is called New London.
  • Biopolitical management comes next, but it is narratively predicated on this project of rebirth. Later in the game, the player can choose two paths of Laws to sequentially enact, one called Faith and the other Order. A DIGRA presentation by Imbierowicz (2023) relates these two paths the recent and contemporary history of Poland, where the game was created, with its long period of Stalinism followed by a capitalist restoration in which Catholicism plays a leading role). In general, the roles of these two paths and their impact tends to dominate critical discussion of the game. Proceeding along either path makes the game easier to win (easier to manage), changes the appearance of the city in various respects, and, regardless of which path is chosen, leads to an obviously totalitarian state and various unsavoury forced choices connected to that.
  • Nonetheless, my reading of Griffin's definitions of fascism suggests that FrostPunk is already a fascist fantasy prior to the (mostly) forced choice of the two paths and all of the smaller forced choices that come with them. Reichardt, also writing in Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, writes: "[In fascism] Culling, extermination, and violence presented themselves as complements to the racist intention to take the life of one’s “own” people in hand and improve it. Only by posing as the custodians of life and survival could the fascists formulate their claim to control, regulation and mass murder." (2012)
  • FrostPunk is a compelling simulation of a fascist project. This is narratively framed with something that at first glance looks like an allegory for climate change. Here I think it is important to consider how false, simple, and undeveloped this winking nod to climate change is, though. FrostPunk represents it's motivating environmental catastrophe in terms of something that didn't happen, that wasn't under human control (volcanoes, that is, unlike fossil fuels), and that makes the whole world get cold - and then continue to get even colder in a rather "unbelievable" and exaggerated way. Conversely, we all know (I hope we do, anyway), that real-world climate change involves relatively small changes in the The heft and detail of FrostPunk is a fascist project of rebirth, played out through a procedural rhetoric of biopolitical management. It's a good simulation of that, and a terrible simulation of climate change, and I think it is tight fit of comparative fascist studies' definitions of fascism that help me to realize this fundamental assymetry of the game's anchoring metaphors.

steampunk and BioShock

  • The game is undeniably anchored also in the genre of steampunk (here are my reading notes on steampunk and neo-Victorian things), and although I'd like to consider this further I haven't gotten even as far here yet.
  • The anchoring of the game in London (and New London) is a recognizable steampunk gesture. Danahay (2016) writes that: "Victorian London in steampunk is both a reference point and a historical space that can be reshaped at will through imagination, in a fictional parallel to the ‘creative destruction’of capital tearing down old buildings and erecting larger, more profitable structures in their place. In steampunk fiction’s urban environments“all that is solid melts in air” thanks to these flows of capital, and to the resulting reshaping of London." One notes that making and remaking buildings is the core mechanic of FrostPunk.
  • Both the steam-engine and clockwork are key machines of steampunk, both strongly present in the core mechanics and assets of FrostPunk. cf. "To demonstrate how steampunk’s cultural prominencereflects the continued impact of modernity, one can turn to steampunk’s dominant icon in popular culture: not the steam-engine, but clockwork. The gears and cogs that order the steampunk aesthetic arenot only a means of reimagining bygone histories, but also act as representations ofprocesses of mechanical standardisation that havecontinued well into the twenty-first century" (McAllister 2018). Above all I notice how the terrain of the city is arranged like a clock.
  • A key turn in Jagoda's 2010 article about the defining steampunk novel, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's The Difference Engine is the argument that The Difference Engine stages a progression from sovereign through disciplinary to control forms of power. By contrast, FrostPunk oscillates between sovereign and disciplinary forms. Perhaps it is characteristic of political imaginaries relating to fascism to do this (i.e. responding to crisis or presumed crisis in disciplinary control with a restoration of sovereign power)? Not sure about this beginning of a point.
  • The game's multi-layered relationship to steampunk invites further comparison and contrast with BioShock and Bioshock Infinite, as particularly well-known "arty" or "prestige" games (Parker) set in steampunk dystopias. Both of those games famously thematize player's agency and "moral" choice while ultimately presenting not much choice at all, particularly in the case of Infinite (Brey). By way of contrast, player choice in FrostPunk does have lasting consequences in that it influences the entire subsequent evolution of the simulation. When the game "ends" you are presented with a message that judges you (cf. Bioshock "glaring at you" cited in Parker article) as well as a replay of the entire evolution of the city, which has been "materially" impacted by the "moral" decisions you made. So there's more consequentiality than BioShock, but it's still a forced choice, and those forced choices are always "make it easier for yourself as player by doing rather evil things".
  • Like many steampunk representations of the 19th century, FrostPunk too largely erases or glosses over differences of class, gender, race (Goh 2017), and although I think I have much more to consider here, I think this can also be seen as one of the many ways in which the constituting crisis of the game is not real, is precisely a fantasy, and a fantasy which (like so many games, in so many ways) quietly closes off various directions of inquiry (like who the people of New London are and why they are so committed to rebirthing the capitalist colonianist cess-pit from whence they came).

Concluding Thoughts and Further Work

  • Having said all of this, I think it is worth re-anchoring myself in the basic fact that none of this is real, and certainly not a suggestion that there is anything immoral, impure, about playing this game, which in so many ways is a tour de force for what appears to be possible with games in this still early moment of the 21st century. The game may be a fascist fantasy, and yet is so clearly marked as fantasy, and that still leaves very open the question of what we make of it as players, and how we choose to interpret both it and our response to it. In my CGSA paper about Total Annihilation two years ago, I anchored a move towards the possibility of diverse player interpretation of the game in Stuart Hall's (1973) well-known work on different registers of encoding and decoding in television production and reception, and I continue to think the possibility of diverse- or counter-interpretation is an important thread to follow and expand.
  • If player response to this kind of thing is still opaque to me, I did want to at least briefly respond to two existing treatments of FrostPunk in published game studies work:
    1. Dolkemeyer (2020) reads the game in terms of Donna Haraway's ideas of response-ability, and living-with and dying-with, emphasizing the compelling ways in which the game's visual, sonic, and haptic affordances place the player in a position to empathize with the members of the community they are biopolitically imagining. I think that is a perceptive and interesting point about how the game functions, but I think it leaves too unaddressed the questions of who that community of members is, and why we and they are engaging in a project of rebirthing London (or rebirthing a certain fantasy about the Victorian late 19th century) rather than the many other forms that living in the ruins (to also cite Haraway ) could possibly take.
    1. Condis and Alfonis (2024) read the game as something that allows players to explore the possibility of "resisting" a "temptation" to respond to climate crisis by instituting fascism. I'm not particularly convinced by this because of my aforementioned observation that the game is in no way a model of climate crisis (so what instead is making fascism so "tempting"?), but I'm certainly prepared to allow that the difference between my context/positioning and that of the authors might make a so-called "ecofascism" a more realistic thing (mindful of Galloway's (2004) early methodological observations about the relativism of realism). Even so, I would ask, does FrostPunk's "ethical gameplay" really prepare "us" to respond to "authoritarian impulses" and actual fascist movements? For me, that would require a close attention to our actual, contemporary political circumstances, and not at all playful fantasies about a non-existing 19th century timeline with super-fantastical upside-down over-simplified climate change meachnics.
  • I need to play and think about FrostPunk 2 and probably also the FrostPunk board game
  • I need to play and think about Bioshock Infinite in order to better engage with the game studies literature about BioShock, which tends to treat the game as a series (and it sounds like BioShock Infinite has even more direct engagements with the idea of fascist fantasies, also)
  • And I'm looking forward to questions, discussion, and the rest of CGSA 2025!

Works Cited

  • Brey, Betsy (2017). "" A Choice is Better than None, Mr. DeWitt. No Matter What the Outcome": Remix and Genre Play in BioShock Infinite." Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 7: 2/3, pp. 104-112.
  • Chang, Alenda Y. (2019). Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Condis, Megan, and Ben Alfonsin (2024). "Frostpunk, the Apocalypse, and the “Enduring Temptation” of Ecofascism." in End-Game: Apocalyptic Video Games, Contemporary Society, and Digital Media Culture. Berlin: De Bruyter Brill. pp. 29-48.
  • Danahay, Martin (2016). " Steampunk as a Postindustrial Aesthetic: “All that is solid melts in air”". Neo-Victorian Studies 8:2. https://neovictorianstudies.com/article/view/106 Dolkemeyer, Lars (2020). “Autocracy for the People. Modes of response-able Action and the Management of Demise in Frostpunk.” gamevironments 13. pp. 64-102.
  • Galloway, Alexander (2004). "Social Realism in Gaming." Game Studies 4:1. https://gamestudies.org/0401/galloway/
  • Goh, Sook Yi (2017). Shades of Sepia: Examining Eurocentrism and Whiteness in Relation to Multiculturalism in Steampunk Iconography, Fandom, and Culture Industry. Dissertation in the PhD program in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside.
  • Griffin, Roger (2012). "Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus to New Wave?" Fascism 1:1, pp. 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1163/221162512X623601
  • Griffin, Roger (2013). "What fascism is not and is. Thoughts on the re-inflation of a concept." Fascism 2:2, pp. 259-261. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-00202008
  • Griffin, Roger (2015). "Decentering Comparative Fascist Studies". Fascism 4:2, pp. 103-118. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-00402003
  • Griffin, Roger (2016). "Fascism’s Modernist Revolution: A New Paradigm for the Study of Right-wing Dictatorships." Fascism 5:2, pp. 105-129. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-00502002
  • Griffin, Roger (2019). "Mussolini Predicted a Fascist Century: How Wrong Was He?: Third Lecture on Fascism – Amsterdam – 22 March 2019." Fascism 8:1, pp. 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-00801001
  • Griffin, R. (2022). Ghostbusting Fascism?: The Spectral Aspects of the Era of Fascism and Its Shape-Shifting Relationship to the Radical Right. Fascism 11:1, pp. 59-86. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10041
  • Hall, Stuart (1973). "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse." In Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Selected Working Papers, vol. 2. ed. Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson, and Helen Wood. London: Routledge. Reprinted in Stuart Hall (2019). Essential Essays: Vol. 1. ed. David Morley. pp. 257-76.
  • Haraway, Donna J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Imbierowicz, Eleonora (2023). "Frostpunk: Lessons from Contemporary Polish History." Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2023 Conference: Limits and Margins of Games. https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/2025/2024
  • Jackson, Robert (2014). Bioshock: Decision, Forced Choice and Propaganda. Alresford, UK: Zero Books.
  • Jagoda, Patrick (2010). “Clacking Control Societies: Steampunk, History, and the Difference Engine of Escape.” Neo-Victorian Studies 3:1.
  • Kallis, Aristotle. (2015). "When Fascism Became Mainstream: The Challenge of Extremism in Times of Crisis: Second Lecture on Fascism – Amsterdam – April 9 2015." Fascism 4:1, pp. 1-24.
  • McAllister, Robbie (2018). "Reengineering Modernity:Cinematic Detritus and the Steampunk Blockbuster." Neo-Victorian Studies 11:1 https://neovictorianstudies.com/article/view/33
  • Parker, Felan (2015). "Canonizing Bioshock: Cultural Value and the Prestige Game." Games and Culture, 12:7-8, pp. 739-763. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015598669
  • Reichardt, Sven (2012). "Violence and Consensus in Fascism." Fascism 1:1, pp. 59-60.