Frostpunk, making cold choices (Patreon)

Frostpunk is a game set in an alternate history version of 1886 where a catastrophic event has frozen the whole planet - wait, does this mean there’s no coca cola? Why even go on living?

Frostpunk is a game set in an unliveable hellworld version of 1886 England. In the main game, your mission as the leader of a small group of survivors is to ensure as many people survive and stay healthy and fed as long as possible, keeping Hope high and Discontent low. Once you have your basic setup made you create a beacon and then a search party, allowing you to try to scroll back in and look at the city but the game freezes and won’t go again and it fucking serves you right for pirating a game to play when you should be focusing on making your business work because why are you playing a game about surviving a harsh winter with a scarcity economy when you’re on benefits just trying to survive the actual winter. You have £3 in your bank account why are you writing this script at 1 am.

Okay that’s not… so, Frostpunk:

Frostpunk is about authoritarian governance as the only viable method in a life or death survival situation. The laws that you can set out in Frostpunk to help your town to function at first seem to be choices between pragmatism and gestures to show your people that you care about their quality of life. However, after the arrival of the Man from Winterhome, a refugee from a similar settlement which succumbed to the cold, your hope plummets and discontent skyrockets, and the game informs you that your people need purpose to live. Now you have to choose between a secondary book of laws built around Faith or one built around Order. 

Either of them will give you various options to increase hope or lower discontent through increasingly authoritarian measures. At the top of the trees though, the last points on the available sequence of laws, both versions give you an option which allows you to become some sort of fucking fascist. Within the mechanics of the game, this means replacing your “hope” bar with either a “devotion” bar or an “obedience” bar which is automatically full. It’s um… discouraging…

Once you’ve decided not to engage with how happy your people are, you’ll only have to stop them getting too angry and keep them… y’know, alive. You can try again and again and again, and mostly you’ll just fucking die, but maybe you’ll make more progress, and eventually, trapped in this hellworld Groundhog Day of freezing, starving, freezing, being mutinied, freezing and freezing you’ll come to the grim conclusion that happiness is too much to ask for. Hope isn’t something you can concern yourself with. Fascism is the only way under these circumstances.

But look: Frostpunk is set up this way.

The game, as it were, wants you to draw this conclusion. This is the obvious reading, the one that the game is created around. 

Robert Purchese of Eurogamer opens his review by saying:
“How did it come to this? Public executions are being made in the name of a divine ruler. Propaganda hangs from buildings. None of us in our right minds would implement these regimes, and yet in Frostpunk I did. What drove me there? I didn't suddenly lose my mind; I did it because it was better than the alternative. I did it to survive.”
He starts the review by defending his actions. Video Games are a unique medium in exactly this way, because you make choices, drive the story forward, make the story happen, so you feel responsibility for what happens. The author is invisibly, imperceptibly sitting behind you, pulling your strings, and you never understand why or how or basically what is happening.

So with this world designed around you that informs your actions while remaining hidden, it’s only natural that you think the decisions you’re making are your own, and when you make decisions that you don’t agree with, you feel defensive, unsatisfied - you have to explain to yourself and others why you did that, and the easiest way is to say “well if it was real I’d do it that way too”.

Eurogamer Bobby however, doesn’t conclude this way. At the end of his review he writes: “I hoped at some point my conscience would be presented with a bill: "You made all these reckless decisions and now you will answer for them." But nothing beyond the grumbles of my populace ever came, and I had complete control over them. It was as though the game was missing an outside voice, a disapproving onlooker. I passed my judgement on others but none did the same to me. I answered to no one but myself and Frostpunk's decisions felt thin, like a facade, as a result.”

Rob doesn’t think that the game is doing enough by driving players to this conclusion, it should validate his pre-existing beliefs. But the fact of the matter is, it just does what it does. It does drive the player to that conclusion. The world is designed and built that way. Anyone playing is going to come to the conclusion that if not in real life, at least in the hypothetical snowpocalypse, fascism is the only way to survive in the long run.

So it’s about forcing the player to be a fascist. That’s obvious right? It’s just an obvious reading. Man, this is going to be a really quick video. Okay, let’s just get that said and be done with it:

Section 1: Introduction

Frostpunk scenario 1: A New Home brings you slowly but surely towards the conclusion that authoritarian governance is your only hope of survival. What a shit game, right?

I’d say there’s something to be said for the fact that no matter what you do in the game everything you do is by default state socialism. Healthcare is provided, as is food, education, shelter… there isn’t any form of currency as far as the game makes out. The game shows in that absence that capitalist economics couldn’t even be considered in a life or death situation like that. That’s fairly obvious here, but when Elon Musk and his fans got really hyped for the idea of a SpaceX Mars colony, they were discussing what the currency would be called. Maybe if more people can think about it this way they’ll understand that capitalism doesn’t belong in space.

I know that’s a weird silver lining to point out but I’m a socialist, and I… maybe… sometimes read my own politics into… things. Somewhat. A bit. Sometimes. Maybe being extremely poor and constantly arguing with belligerent libertaria - sorry what’s the word they use? “ephebophiles” - on twitter means that when I come to look at a piece of media I have my own concerns that I project somewhat. I’m worried about the people in the snow town having enough food and being treated right, and it bothers me that when there’s a dissident group who want to leave, the game doesn’t offer you the opportunity to talk things out with them, reasonably, democratically.

I guess in that way I feel the same as Robert Purchese. Except, I feel that this game provides a compelling case for why hierarchy is doomed to fail in this situation. I’m already very ready to hear anarchist arguments out, and playing this through the feeling I felt most of all was that I wish I wasn’t the one in charge here, I wish that the whole group could decide things collectively. I henceforth rename this town Chomskygrad and dissolve my position as Captain. We’re an organic farming co-op now.

I guess on some level I need to know though, whether the game really is meant to set up the user for fascism as a political message, or whether it’s just meant as a gritty reimagining of the city-planning game genre. If it’s really meant to make us understand authoritarian reasoning, then it does a good job or whatever, but if it’s really just meant to be a city planner with tough decisions it says something really interesting about the unconscious political biases of the creator.

So wait, there’s more to say here? Okay, maybe… yeah? Oh god, it’s about Death of the Author again isn’t it. Fine. Fine, we’ll talk about Death of the Author.

Section 2: Death of the Au-- no I don’t want to say it any more… Section 2: La Mort De L’Auteur

There is a school of thought that no author should get to say more about a text once it’s out in the world - the text just has to stand on its own and speak for itself. Sometimes the author is unavoidably relevant. Sometimes you just have to know who they are, what they think, where they’ve been, what their greatest fear is.

My greatest fear, incidentally, is that I’m already too old to go trick-or-treating for the first time.

I just mean that the author informs the almost hidden rules of the text in a certain way. Take Frostpunk: if they didn’t mean for it to have a political message it’s pretty interesting that they wound up structuring the rules of the world the way they did. In video games you have so much more choice that you almost become a new author. Your decisions are the thing you are creating, and as the worldview of the author may have informed the rules of the text, the rules of the text act in concert with your own ideas, your own principles to shape your decisions.

Christ I’ve written myself into a dead end. I really don’t know what my point even was here...

To be honest guys, I did a poll on twitter about what script I should make and… I wasn’t all that happy with the results, but I believe in the will of the people (even with only 20 votes) so that's why this essay is about Frostpunk…  but wait, what’s this…???

Greg Dean… You’ve done it! you've saved the video! You're the hero of the essay!

So now let’s talk about Harry Potter. I’m not a Harry Potter fan I’m just British. British kids don’t get to get away from Harry Potter. It’s like being a fan of milk. Milk is… there? It’s good. I guess? There are alternatives…

Let’s talk about Snape. Snape is a horrid incel. He’s peak incel. He got rejected by one girl, one time, and he defines his entire life around it. He’s described as greasy, pale, cruel, creepy… he gets radicalised after high school and becomes a neo-nazi, or at least the magical equivalent. Sure, he converts back and plays the double agent, but in his last moments it’s revealed that his Patronus is the same as Lily’s was, which… come the fuck on dude. Move on.

It’s apparent to everyone, looking at Snape’s life as a whole that he’s a creep, and his obsession with Lily is toxic and unhealthy. Anyone except…

JK Rowling apparently had the idea for the Harry Potter series while stuck on a train in 1990, and it became such a vibrant, full world to her over the next seven years that she felt like her characters were real people - loved or feared them with the emotions you would a real person. According to her account of writing the books, when she killed off prominent characters she would openly weep.

Snape, too then, is more to her than what she’s put in the books. She sees into his soul and she knows that he’s just misunderstood, and it upsets her when people read Snape as a sad creep who never got over his one crush. She insists Snape is a nice guy. A Nice Guy.

Seeing Snape as a whole real person that she knows intimately means Rowling kind of sees through his eyes. She understands his point of view and look: from the point of view of any creep, any obsessed person, they’re just in love. They’re a good person deep down. Rowling has talked about all her characters this way before; she sees them all as good people deep down who are misguided or hurt or whatever.

Let’s make a distinction here. Alan Rickman’s Snape is not that bad. Sure, he’s mean and he still ultimately has this obsession, but the way Rickman portrays Snape he’s more of a - how do I put this - an adult? Rickman’s Snape is, within the rules of the character, authored by Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman is like the person playing Frostpunk, their actions shaped by the rules shaped by the worldview of the author. 

Snape is a tricky issue, he’s a debatable character. You can bounce back and forth between what he does in the books, how he appears in the films and the version of Snape that Rowling says she knows deep down.

There are however places we can go to see problems that are more concrete. Places where JK Rowling has written characters in ways that reflect her world view, and where our analysis would be lacking if we did not look at who she is and what she thinks. No, I’m not getting into Gay Dumbledore. No, I’m not getting into trying to explain Native American folklore by incorporating it into your bougie wizard books. Maybe I am getting a bit into your super duper fucking anti-semitic banking goblins but I’m not doing it right now.
Right now I’m talking about Nagini the snake who Rowling recently revealed is actually a Indonesian woman with a hereditary curse that turned her into a snake. The curse only affects women. I’m not gonna touch the racial elements of oriental mysticism, I’m not gonna touch the nuanced misogyny of literal snake-women. I’m looking at the fact the curse only affects women and I’m saying “Joanne… what do you mean by that?”
If a hereditary disease only affected people with two X chromosomes then you’d say “this disease only affects people with two X chromosomes” and you shouldn’t say “it only affects women” because it would also affect trans men and anyone… you know… with two X chromosomes. If it only affected people who have wombs, same thing, right, it affects people who have a womb. When you say “it only affects women” you’re making a metaphysical distinction, claiming that there is something you’d say is noumenally a woman. This is the kind of thing that might go totally over your head, if you didn’t suspect, as many people do, that JK Rowling is a bit of a TERF.

JK Rowling has been spotted running amok on twitter liking TERFy stuff. For the unfamiliar: TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) refers to feminists who spend an awfully large amount of time being horrid transphobes and a suspiciously small amount of time… being feminists. It was a term invented by the TERF community that TERFs now swear blind is an anti-female slur thrown around by regressive trans-rights-activists. With Rowling’s history of TERF-adjacent behaviour, the writing of Nagini’s curse as affecting women suggests she thinks that there is an essential type of woman the excludes trans women, and an essential type of men that excludes trans men.

Back to Snape for a second: The problem is, Snape makes a case for sometimes invoking Death of the Author and sometimes looking at the text with the author in mind. I’d proffer that when you look at Snape it is much more interesting to consider that JK Rowling thinks he’s a good person, because lots of Harry Potter fans seem to think the original books are perfect and devoid of her fuckery, and that she only became this way after the main series, or that the studios and other contributors polluted her vision and that’s what’s wrong with the new films. Snape makes a compelling case, for me at least, that she always had these issues, even before the Cursed Child.

I’m sorry… can we talk about the Cursed Child?

She wrote a Harry Potter story where Harry’s son travels back in time and changes the future so that Hermione and Ron never got together because “Ron never experienced the jealousy fundamental to his relationship with Hermione” and instead Hermione becomes a crazy cat lady and he winds up with Padma Patil and they have a son called Panju Weasley. Is… is Panju the cursed child? Also, way to undermine a decade of writing a nerdy girl character that everyone loved by implying that if Ron fucking weasley of all people didn’t take pity on her then she’d become a lonely underachieving spinster. Thaaaaaaaaaaaanks.

The Cursed Child goes to amazing lengths to undermine so many of the franchises characters’ basic traits. Cedric Diggory, he’s a nice guy right? Well what if I told you that in one timeline he gets embarrassed at the tri-wizard tournament and as a result he becomes a death eater and fucking murders Neville. “Now that I’ve joined the dark side I can finally do the one thing I’ve always been held back from doing: time to die Longbottom!” How embarrassed can you be? Did they pants him in front of the entire school??? Harry Potter, head Auror, basically the head of all law in magical Britain, threatens Professor McGonagall that he’ll close down Hogwarts unless she keeps his son and Malfoy’s son from being friends. Harry Potter, that famously corrupt, famously Hogwarts disrespecting rogue HARRY POTTER.
(In all fairness McGonagall stays true to character and basically tells him to get bent, which is actually a scene I would watch)

I have not seen Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I will not see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I do however, derive endless pleasure from reading and re-reading the plot summary of it on harrypotter dot wikia dot com. I love this summary, and the one on regular wikipedia, because they were obviously written by Harry Potter fans. The unmistakable hallmarks of sounding exactly like fan-fiction, trying too hard to insert flowery prose, run-on sentences and throwing in crucial details at the last possible minute are all there. For example, the wikipedia summary ends by talking about Harry and his son visiting Cedric’s grave “with Harry apologizing for his role in Cedric's death. Albus has also witnessed the death of a fellow student, Craig Bowker Jr. (the only current timeline murder in the play), who tried to intervene when Delphi held Albus and Scorpius captive on the Quidditch pitch.”
Poor Craig. He only exists as a character to do sacrifice himself in a futile attempt to stop a plot which gets undone because time travel anyway, and the fans don’t even remember to mention him until a Potter is sad about it. Is… is Craig Bowker Jr. the cursed child? Don’t worry Craig Bowker Jr. - I will remember you.

Friends, family, we are gathered here today to remember Craig Bowker Jr. Craig was born “somewhere in the United Kingdom or Ireland in the mid-2000s”. He was certainly born on “31st August 2006, or earlier”. The existence of a Craig Bowker Jr. implies the existence of a Craig Bowker Sr. Craig was half-blood, or maybe pure-blood. What we know for sure about Craig is that he attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and died. Thank you for coming.

Somehow in writing a story where the Harry Potter characters go back in time to rewrite events and destroy Harry Potter, JK Rowling sort of.. Figuratively went back in time and destroyed Harry Potter. She makes Harry witness the deaths of his parents and he can’t intervene. Wow, what a necessary thing to do. Thank you Joanne for your artistic vision.

You can’t remove the author totally from every work. Maybe it’s fairer to say you shouldn’t? But that’s a value judgement. It’s just that with many works you can read the text without the author and what you’ll get is interesting, but you can never know how interesting it would have been to consider it with the author… Looking at how every text stands just on its own, you might be… missing something?

Section 3: La Mort De La Mort De L’Auteur

Death of the author isn’t a position, it isn’t a way to treat absolutely everything, it’s a way of recontextualising media to ignore the limited context of the authorial intent, if you want to - if it would be interesting. I’ve been using this term “aggressive readings” to try and get back to that, because I think some people have been misunderstanding how this dang thing works.

Vonnegut - yes we’re doing Vonnegut again, if you have something better to say you come teach the class...

Vonnegut uses the N word throughout Breakfast of Champions, while at the same time confronting racism, racialised classism, and the history of racist hierarchies in America. It’s possible to tell from the text that the use of the N word is facetious - that Vonnegut is not sincerely being like, a huge racist, but also, you might need to hear it from him, that what he intended was to shock his readers with the very genuine racism of middle America.

Vonnegut writes himself into Breakfast of Champions as a character. He’s there at points, observing the events. He says that he was suffering from serious mental illness - mental illness being a central theme of the book - and that he really saw himself there with the characters, watching it all happen. He knew he was the author, but he said his control over the actions of the characters were as if he were tied to them with “stale rubber bands” - he couldn’t quite make them do the things he wanted precisely, he just had to wait and watch the situation unfold.

While this positions him as very strongly related to the text, it doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t apply Death of the Author here, right? Even if he saw these events as real and they therefore happened to him, he is still a character within the story.

Maybe a better example to look at would be Timequake. Timequake was a short story written by Vonnegut about the universe going through a “crisis of confidence” and rewinding by 10 years. Everyone in the world has to relive 10 years of their lives with no free will, enacting all the same things they did for the last 10 years. Some characters have lived through joyous times and have to experience them again, caring less, seeing it as just part of the ride. Others have to experience for a second time moments in their lives when they hurt people they care about, and can do nothing to stop themselves from doing it. When the world catches back up with itself many people are so used to just being along for the ride that they find it hard to live life making actual decisions and doing things for themselves. The book, Timequake, however is not only interspersed but saturated with autobiographical sections about Vonnegut’s life. He talks at length about his relationship with his sister and about her and her husband both dying, and how he adopted her four children when that happened. He even discusses, within the text, how his real life events affected the things that he has chosen to write in the short story. So not only is the story about people reliving their lives unable to change them a tragic and powerful metaphor for himself remembering his life, but his autobiography is an inseparable part of the text. He has poured himself into this book so much that he can’t be taken out of it. It’s like a fragment of his soul is a part of the book.

When his own commentary on the story is itself a part of the text it is self defeating to say that the author doesn’t get to lay out their intentions outside of the text. His intentions outside of the text are inside the text. His life itself is in conversation with the book.

Section 4: Conclusion

What am I forgetting? No, there’s too much to get into there: it’s a rabbit hole. There’s loads to look at about creator/fan relationships and cultivated iden-- Sorry, you go on. I know, but that’s not where I’m going with this. I have something I’m trying to say about the author and the audience. They need to understand.

So what is Frostpunk? Is it a regular degular city planner with a scarcity twist to make it more exciting, or does it have a political agenda? Is it trying to say socialist policies will lead to fascism? Harsh survival situations require authoritarianism?
The answer is: I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I’m gonna use it to talk about whatever I want. The text you are consuming right now isn’t Frostpunk; it’s this video. The author that matters in this instance is me. Too often analysers or critics of media are taken as impartial or objective, and guys, fuck that. Everyone has biases. Every framework and system and medium and society has biases. I’m the person you need to understand, because I’m the one whose worldview informs what gets said here.

So here are some but nowhere near all of the things about me that inform my point of view:
I’m a socialist, I grew up a liberal, I went through a very edgy phase in my teens that followed me into adulthood where I nearly became a full-fledged capitalist libertarian. I went to a very high-ranked university and dropped out because of mental health issues and not being able to pay rent in London. One of my parents was very sick when I was growing up and I had to take care of them. My family is from the north and before than from Scotland and Ireland. I’m a bit gay - well I’m all the way gay I’m just also (the other one)... which is to say, I’m bisexual.
Hi. That’s me. Nice to meet you.

So let’s try again, and not ask what Frostpunk is about, but instead, what do I feel when I play it?

To me, Frostpunk is about trying to carve a little niche in a world that doesn’t care about you, and would happily kill you in a second. It’s about home, and the real, practical struggle of creating a home, and the idea that we have of home as some place that we can or maybe can’t return to. The faction of dissidents who break off from your group want to go back to London because they’re sure it’ll still be surviving. 

The politics of the game are in some ways the perfect demonstration of practical politics - you don’t get to be an idealogue, you have to make the decisions you have to make to survive. You end up justifying to yourself why you made them or wishing someone would hold you accountable for your bad decisions.

You have to set down hard rules for yourself, for your people, and you have to decide what kind of place you want your city to become. You need to keep up hope and keep down discontent.
To me, Frostpunk is about leaving behind everything you ever had, and at the same time taking it with you, finding out who you are in the things that you do and the decisions that you make.