Frostpunk 2: Hopeless Madness

I woke up thinking about Frostpunk 2 and the trend of developers wanting to mirror the world in their games versus creating newer or more hopeful ones. From FFXIV to IXION and many others … I’m seeing this focus on depressive, disheartening, destructive, and unhinged politics and agendas being pushed. I don’t mean things like This War Of Mine or Papers Please created to teach people about the real ramifications of war … I am talking about games that are fantasy.

While I know there are people who do game for the same reasons I do … to learn, to challenge themselves, and to have Media Therapy experiences … I would say those are maybe a handful and most everyone else engages with media as “displacement, transference, and rehabilitation”. In this regard, people are looking for escapism … a way out of the things that are running them into the ground every single day. They are looking for a freedom of sorts.

The anti-Black, anti-woke, anti-women, anti-everything not cis-het male and white people hate EVERYTHING about games that celebrate diversity or use pronouns. People who disagree say this to them:

If you don’t like the game, don’t play it. If the subject matter isn’t for you, then don’t play it. If the developers messaging doesn’t align with your world view, don’t play it.

I believe this also which is why I will simply refund games that drag me down instead of evolving me in some way or try to push an agenda or groom me into some terrible way of seeing the world.

I’m not big on plots in games, movies, books that don’t make sense or characters that do completely irrational things that endanger the lives of others.

I’m not interested in content about despicable, evil, negative, unwell, broken people and where that behavior is glorified … especially when we’re living in a world where non-fictional people are unhinged, dangerous bullies who delight in harming, killing, and making laws against people not like them.

I think the only people who like and enjoy such grimdark and negative content are people who live very privileged lives and who can sit back and engage because it doesn’t effect them or they are simply sociopaths. A lot of content pretends to be fictional or pretends to be fantasy when in fact the goal is to mirror the current state of the world (or perceived state of the world), push specific agendas, and “wake people up” to whatever the creator wants to sell especially in an artistic sense. It’s about what that person wants to project in the art that they make.

There is a huge uptick in the negative tone of Frostpunk in the sense that the first game was more about “hope”. It was about making decisions to save a group of people from the end of the world … to help them survive and thrive. Every decision you made, every way you built your city, every moment to moment decision was the difference between people dying and your city surviving the great storm. It was possible to achieve a 100% success ending with no deaths if you put the work into it …

Later DLC for Frostpunk showed that the idea of hope and survival was not very popular. I could tell from the DLC that the point was to push for a more negative and hopeLESS state where it was about “saving as many as you could by making brutal but necessary sacrifices along the way” and that was apparently more popular in some way. The first game was about how good of a leader, planner, manager, and thinker you could be, now everything is about politics dooming everyone and “necessary deaths”.

11Bit studios is primarily white men from Poland and this is the same studio responsible for This War Of Mine which was a very specific kind of game for a very specific reason. It’s interesting to me to see the change of the world … and how the change of the world has effected how gaming collectives create games and how those games reflect the world. It’s VERY OBVIOUS to me that the state of the world having moved into HOPELESSNESS is now being reflected in worldbuilding.

Frostpunk 2 exists in a place of “We survived the end of the world … and now we’ve really gone crazy. Why not? We have nothing better to do and merely surviving is boring AF. Let’s fuck some shit up and kill some snowflakes.” and it comes down to the fact that people want to ultimately choose power over survival … and here is where I tune out.

This makes no sense logically, emotionally, or psychologically … especially when so many people have already died. Perhaps that is 11Bit’s point about the entire state of the world right now.

“We will stop feeding the generator that keeps us all alive unless you agree to our selfish demands” is nonsense and while it reflects the reality of the world we live in, I don’t see how that helps change the world or helps elevate people who game to a better frame of mind in the midst of real world madness and death.

I’m not saying it has to either … I’m simply asking.

Then again the purpose of art is to release your own pain into the world for other people to feel or learn from is it not?

Winning isn’t realistic.
Winning is a fantasy.

There is no winning in the real world. There are only various degrees of losing.
How badly do you lose. How much do you lose. Was it worth what you lost.

Miserable, angry, terrified, damaged, traumatized people make miserable, angry, terrified, damaged, traumatized art. They make art that reflects how they feel OR how they WANT to feel …

Art inspires or conspires … it depends on if the artist wants people to suffer because they do or whether they want to see a better and brighter path forward.

I don’t want to delve too deeply into this but I will say that I have noticed that primarily minority filled development studios (more marginalized people, more women etc) make games that are more … hopeful … and more inspiring and more celebratory of life.

White male led development teams tend to lean more towards negativity, less diversity, more death, more competition, more negative behaviors like addictive aspects, gambling aspects, and more hopelessness.

Make of that what you will.

The Evolvers faction in Frostpunk 2 cites REASON as how they view the world with “clear minds and cold hearts” … they also believe in harvesting the dead for parts and turning everyone into machines that don’t need to fear the cold …

And no faction believes in giving anyone any kind of healthcare …

It’s truly a hopeless and mad world no matter what kind of leader you want to be. What can one do against absolute madness? If you live in our current world you know the answer is nothing.

I fought tooth and nail for over a year trying to achieve the perfect ending in the first Frostpunk and I managed all those achievements because that’s just how I play games like Frostpunk.

No one has to die especially if I know what I’m doing. I want no deaths. I want to succeed and if the game is setup to ALLOW THAT then I will because that’s who I am. No death is necessary or acceptable. In IXION there were “required deaths” even if you did everything correctly which is why I quit that game. It was unfair and unnecessary. When games PUNISH YOU for wanting to be a good person, for walking the good path, for believing in hope, they don’t get my money and they probably don’t want it anyway because I’m not their audience.

That is my character. I’m nice to NPCs in games. I don’t choose the evil path in roleplaying. I’m not content to “win” a game if that means 2000 people in my city froze to death. That’s not who I am in life and that’s not who I am in gaming. I’m always me. I don’t roleplay being some lunatic or killing NPCs or doing things I would never do in real life.

Frostpunk sold over 5 million copies in six years …

The fact that on Steam only 11% of all players of Frostpunk achieved The Savior achievement is very telling though … isn’t it?

And I don’t think I’d be off in suggesting that the only reason it’s 11% is because they are gamers who play SOLELY to get all the achievements so they can brag on their profiles … NOT because they genuinely care about being a good leader that doesn’t let their citizens freeze to death.

Contrary to what you might think, I’m not mad that Frostpunk 2 is a more realistic, more hopeless, less “winnable” game because it’s clearly the game that 11Bit wanted to make. They wanted to make something that they clearly had more passion for and preferred as far as reflecting their collective worldview. It’s art … and they are artists … and in the end art is the will of the creator and nothing else. It doesn’t matter what the outside world wants or thinks … this is their passion project. Either accept it or don’t. It’s their world … they can do what they want and for people who don’t like it or are triggered by it … don’t buy it, don’t play it, stay far away from it.

If you prefer realism, politics, madness and loss, it’s the game for you.

11Bit doesn’t want you to “win” … and if you do win they want you to sacrifice parts of your morality to make deals with the devil in order to achieve your ends … they want to give you a dose of their version of morality and difficulty and politics. In the real world people don’t survive the end of the world. Frostpunk was just a fantasy. In the real world people die constantly due to greed, prejudice, and power hungry politicians who don’t care for their people.

No more fun and games … welcome to the real world.

Predictably, when it comes to the division regarding Frostpunk 2 … it seems to come from what I would consider an obvious place. The people that legitimately CARED about their city, the people in their city, and the story that revolved around you managing that city and making sure each and every inhabitant and refugee survived versus the people that love Frostpunk 2 who are firmly in the camp that just want to play a game, probably didn’t save many people, and just want a new heartless challenge. They seem to like the less “hands on” feeling and the less micro managing and the less caring about each individual person.

Because there are thousands of people as opposed to hundreds and you’re further away from the action, you’re just an overseer; a God who just has to keep pleasing all the wrong people. Who lives and dies has nothing to do with your ability to manage or govern according to the best interests of your city … it’s now about how many insane factions you can suck off.

It’s disheartening to be so removed from having any control over your city … removed from seeing people moving about going to work, going home, hanging out by the generator for warmth and conversation. It feels empty and soulless to just be plopping down districts that auto build themselves and automatically have heat and security. There is no aesthetic to the city … no beauty … no intimacy. Just build this, give this lunatic a blow job for votes, don’t piss anyone in power off, repeat.

The people who really cared about others lives … about being in charge of the city and building it up piece by piece, building by building, and doing everything to protect it … they seem the most vocal about Frostpunk 2 being so drastically different … the kind of gamers that everyone calls snowflakes and too sensitive and weak for not liking more hardcore, heartless elements that take all the positivity and light out of the world.

The lack of empathy and patience is very telling in the primarily male gamer community. It’s also unsurprising of course.

Caring about others … playing a game about hope, instilling hope, and working towards a goal of collective support, understanding, and mutual benefits?

No one else shares this idea.