I Owe My Soul to the Hot Steam Core -- Frostpunk

Frostpunk is a resource management sim set in an alternate-universe Victorian era where radical climate change has lead to a new ice age. As civilization collapses into chaos amid hunger and mass death, parties of colonists have been sent out to the rich coal fields of the Arctic to build makeshift settlements huddled around massive steam-heat generators in a desperate bid to ensure the survival of the human race. (We'll just gloss over the utility of sending your last hope to the coldest place in the world when the climate is getting colder; games, as we well know here, operate according to their own internal logic.) As "Captain" of one of these settlements, you must provide your citizens with food, shelter, and most of all warmth, gather resources and build out a functioning city, research new technologies and decree new laws to adapt to the frozen hellscape, explore the wilderness to try and make contact with other cities, and make hard decisions in a situation where one wrong move can spell disaster.

As befits the timeline of the setting, Frostpunk is a decidedly industrial-revolution dystopia, and that doesn't just extend to the coal-powered steam cores and disturbingly gangly automatons. In most games like this, when you build some installation to provide you with a resource, it just keeps autonomously operating on its own recognizance; it is assumed that there are workers in there beavering away, but you don't really get to know them except perhaps as abstract and interchangeable citizens. In a way, this is a very feudalistic view of production. The peasant is attached to their workplace, and lives their entire life and dies doing the same job. But labour in Frostpunk is granular to a degree that I haven't encountered in any other game. Each worker in your settlement has a name, a face, a family, and their own wants and concerns. You must actively determine the staffing levels of almost every workplace, and many of the decisions you will make revolve around how to best employ your limited workforce and pool of skilled labour to fulfill your immediate needs while also making progress on your long-term goals. The Last City functions according to the rhythms of the factory time clock; workers work set shifts, and must be given time off for sleep, meals, and relaxation, making it paramount that you plan ahead to ensure you have enough coal on hand to feed the generator through the long, cold night.

It would be tempting to label this mechanical identity as distinctly capitalist. After all, the Victorian era was the height of unrestrained capitalism. But capitalism is tricky to portray in a video game, and the dogma that it creates the most productive civilization is far from Frostpunk's mind. There are no free markets or private property in capital in this world. Rather, it is the Captain who must decide who works where and when, how to most efficiently employ resources, what laws to decree and how to enforce them. The Last City is a planned economy from top to bottom. It could best be described as a communist state of the kind that existed under Stalin or Mao. Each works according to their ability, and each receives food, shelter, and medical care according to their needs.

However, your rule as proletarian dictator of this tiny worker's paradise is not ironclad or absolute. As in every real society, authority does not rule if the people do not consent to be ruled. Your settlement is hardly a democracy, but you must actively manage your population's hope and discontent. And again, these things are made more than just abstract bars that go up or down. Individual citizens will make their opinions about your policies known with pop-up comments that you would do well not to ignore, as they are a valuable measure of the temperature of the population. If the people's needs are not met, they will make demands, and if those demands are not met, you will be made to viscerally feel their displeasure. You can often ignore these problems with no immediate cost, but if you do so, they will begin to fester, and the impact will just be greater down the line. As the situation grows more and more dire, resistance to your regime will mount, and if you let hope die or discontent grow to uncontrollable levels, you will be overthrown and exiled, with the implication that without effective leadership, the Last City is doomed.

Now, "Frostpunk is Stalinist" is a bit of an unfair leap. But it does evince a certain philosophy about how it is necessary as a society to meet extreme challenges. Every choice in Frostpunk is a hard choice, a tradeoff where something must be sacrificed, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the game's Laws system. Laws are branching paths, and while every new law you decree brings benefits, many are problematic choices where the "morally good" option is not necessarily the best decision, if there even is a good option. Do we bury our dead in proper cemeteries, thus giving up a potentially valuable resource, or just throw them in a snow pile to freeze and preserve them for later use, making the people unhappy? Do we embrace the mechanisms of authoritarian social control to keep public order, or do we weaponize faith, the opiate of the masses, to keep the population in line and foster hope for the future? Is it appropriate to build a fighting pit for the people's entertainment? Not only do choices have consequences in the short run, but the new possibilities provided by each branch are obscured so that you don't always understand the long-term implications of your decisions. The extremely high stakes of the harsh setting combined with the realities of the historical context can lead you, even encourage you, to implement policies that would never be tolerated in the developed world in the 21st century, from child labour to 24-hour emergency shifts to using dead bodies as mulch for your hothouse. And Frostpunk seems to be telling you every step of the way that such sacrifices are justified because civilization itself is on the line.

Is that the conclusion we are supposed to draw from this? Do extreme challenges require us to become hard, to embrace authoritarianism and amorality? Are freedom, human rights, and democracy weaknesses, luxuries we can't afford when the going really gets tough? No, I don't think that's the intended message. After all, those "good" options are still there, and presumably one can still win while embracing them. Taking the high ground can give your community its own kind of strength. And the people are ultimately still sovereign in the Last City. True, they have given up their autonomy because that seems to be what is necessary for survival, but if the regime does not allow them to thrive, they will take that power back. I think the real point that Frostpunk is trying to make is that someone, whether it's a unitary leader, a command structure, or an entire populace, has to take responsibility. When things break down, the Captain is the one who ultimately takes the hit. When the hard decisions are let slide too long, there will inevitably be a reckoning.

The allegorical implications for our own era of rapidly accelerating climate change are starkly clear. We are facing hard, life-or-death, existential choices as a society, and part of the reason those decisions are not being met head-on is because they are in the hands of a passive and stupefied populace who allow themselves to be led by greedy and incompetent cronies of the pampered elite trying to preserve their own power and luxury at the possible expense of the existence of humanity as a species. The answer, I would hope, is not dictatorship; as Frostpunk makes clear, even that is not is an effectual solution if you can't give the people what they want and need. But what we're doing right now is not working, and if we don't find a way to change our course, catastrophe is on the way.

Come Drink in my Tavern, Said the Spider to the Fly -- Lords of Waterdeep

 Lords of Waterdeep is one of a host of board games set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for the popular tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, although I will be referencing the computer version for the purposes of this post. Players take on the personas of the eponymous Lords, the shadowy masked members of the ruling council of the premiere trading city of the Forgotten Realms, as they compete for prestige and control. It is a fairly basic worker placement game, considered appropriate for newcomers to the genre; players send their agents to various locations in the city to recruit adventurers and to the Cliffwatch Inn to claim quests which they then send these adventurers to complete for victory points and other rewards. They can also construct various buildings which provide more attractive options to all players at the cost of giving free resources to the player that owns them, and finally, may send agents to Waterdeep Harbour to play intrigue cards with a wide variety of game effects. Skilled play lies in predicting and playing around other players' strategies, managing continuously decreasing and expanding options, and building a foundation that will serve you well in the late game.

A mere hint of personality for my hidden scoring card - a strong, independent woman with the cunning to swim with the sharks and the learning to fly with the eagles.

As Lords of Waterdeep is not a particularly deep example of the Euro-style game, a lot of the appeal lies in the Dungeons and Dragons flavour and the evocation of the theme and world of the Forgotten Realms. Quests range from the relatively mundane -- lure dwarven craftsmen to the city, domesticate owlbears -- to standard fantasy-adventure fare -- raid an Orcish outpost, expose a hidden temple to the demon-goddess Lolth -- to underhanded political subterfuge -- destroy a rival criminal organization, infiltrate Waterdeep Harbour with a spy. Intrigue cards also evoke a variety of espionage tactics, from innocuous actions like calling in a favour or offering free drinks at your tavern to lure away opponents' adventurers to assassinations and other dark double-dealings. Thus, every game tells a story of who betrayed whom, who saved the city from the rampaging beholder, who was a glory hound, a craven blackguard, a wheeler-dealer on the make. And players literally construct the city of Waterdeep, making it their own with iconic locations that players versed in the lore of the world will readily recognize. The combination of theme and mechanics does an excellent job of evoking the idea of influential eminences grise manipulating events behind the scenes and pulling the strings of power to their own ultimate benefit.

A mid-game board state. Often you must make choices that are sub-optimal for your game plan and still come out ahead.

And this is kind of fascinating on a number of levels. In the typical Dungeons and Dragons campaign. the focus is on heroic adventurers on a quest for glory, striving to set wrongs right and save the world from destruction at the hands of dangerous tyrants (or alternatively, the focus is on murder hoboes, depending on the nature of your gaming group). Those at the behest of whom the player characters take on these mighty deeds, the humble merchants, village mayors, lords, kings, mighty wizards, and more exotic denizens, definitely play second fiddle, usually given the status of "quest givers", an entire person with their own hopes and dreams reduced a plot contrivance. In the hands of a good Dungeon Master, these characters can become much more fleshed-out and three-dimensional, and a really good one can evoke the background of power and influence which lie behind the feats of derring-do required by the plot. But ultimately, these people are necessarily secondary characters in someone else's story, accessories to the heroes' need for dragons to slay and princesses to rescue.

Lords of Waterdeep flips that script right onto its head. Adventurers here become mere wooden cubes, nameless and faceless pawns to be used in the plots and counter-plots of shadowy benefactors they might never even know the identity of. The glorious quests they undertake become moves in a game of power, radically recentered from those that undertake them to the much more interesting individuals that sponsor them. It is not even known if the adventurers live or die when confronting the foes of Waterdeep or engaging in skullduggery for their hidden masters. It brings to life the sub-rosa world that lies beneath the surface of the simple and straightforward heroes' journey in a way that is very difficult for a standard tabletop roleplaying campaign. And in so doing, it reveals some interesting things about the nature of political institutions in the setting it portrays.

The final score. My Lord has come out on top - this time. But there will always be another game.

Everyone is the hero of their own story, but all of us are caught up in the network of institutions and power relations that make up the social world. In Lords of Waterdeep, adventuring and questing itself seems to be an institution; adventurers are defined types with an infinite supply waiting around in taverns to be recruited in a standardized process of undertaking dangerous deeds. This is not an uncommon social structure to exist in role-playing games, but it is interesting in the way it subverts classic heroic fantasy tropes in which the characters are exceptional individuals destined to make their mark on history. And the game also says some very enlightening things about institutional power in Waterdeep. The very fact that such people as tavern keepers, real-estate speculators, and hidden doppelgangers must take up the reins of power and send their hired mercenaries to do what must be done to keep the city running is indicative of the nature of government in this unstable and constantly threatened city. It is a city-state of canonically weak central authority, more like a Renaissance Italian city than a classic medieval-fantasy kingdom, a continual power vacuum of constantly shifting factions and alliances, as is appropriate for a setting in which players may be challenged by webs of intrigue and deception. And although in this story the wealthy and powerful take centre stage, in such a setting even they are caught up in a web of competing interests, condemned to play an eternal power game in which the final scoring round is never truly reached.