Our discourse is still blighted by what scholars call “environmental determinism” – the idea that the physical environment determines the nature and course of human societies. Such thinking has been used repeatedly to construct, justify, and naturalise racial hierarchies (Livingstone 2012). It has also been used to licence interventionist policies in both traditional and newer forms of colonialism, as colonial powers have attempted to remould lands and peoples that they have seen as backward (Naylor and Shaw 2022). Work such as Jared Diamond’s 1997 work Guns, Germs & Steel has proven popular, which lifts human agency out of the story of European conquest and oppression (Diamond 1998).
There are echoes of such thinking in the way that climate change is posited as the primary cause of various complex disasters around the world. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon attracted criticism in 2007 when he attributed the Dafur conflict to climate change-induced food insecurity (Butler 2007). More recently, in 2015, Barack Obama controversially used the Syrian civil war as an example to frame climate change as a security problem: ‘It’s now believed that drought and crop failures and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East. So, increasingly, our military and our combatant commands, our services […] will need to factor climate change into plans and operations.’ (Office of the Press Secretary 2015). In 2021 the World Food Programme website claimed that families ‘are stuck in a cycle of conflict, climate shocks and rising levels of hunger’ in relation to the famine in South Sudan (Berlanga 2021). In these examples, the responsibility of disaster is partially lifted off the machinations of society and placed on the much broader shoulders of climate, meaning a single reading of carbon dioxide emissions on a graph becomes the culprit, and blame is dispersed from the local political actors and wider economic systems that often bear much of the responsibility.
Since the 1970s, scholars have been complicating the neat narrative of singular climate causation for worldwide disaster. Meteorologist Rolando Garcia’s 1981 work Nature Pleads Not Guilty disputed a widespread climate attribution thesis of food insecurity in the 1970s (Garcia 1981; Naylor 2021). Philip Slavin has presented a complex picture of the British famine of 1314-17, where agriculturalists had to face unrelenting taxes and forced food sales alongside an inclement climate (Slavin 2019). More recent work by Jan Selby, Omar Dahi, Christiane Fröhlich, and Mike Hulme has interrogated the climate attribution thesis of the Syrian conflict, arguing that policymakers should exercise greater caution when drawing such links (Selby et al. 2017). Myanna Lahsen and Jesse Ribot argued that ‘climate-centric disaster framing can erase from view—and, thus, from policy agendas—the very socio-economic and political factors that most centrally cause vulnerability and suffering in weather extremes and disasters.’ (Lahsen and Ribot 2022). The truth is that although climatic shifts are a factor in disasters, how societies are structured and how such structures respond to climate events holds a much more decisive sway over who suffers and why.
But it is extremely difficult to transmit these attacks on environmental determinism into the popular sphere. People are always looking for a neat narrative, and are not so interested in the traditional academic answer of “it’s complicated”. That’s where a videogame like Frostpunk comes in handy, combining a subtle anti-determinist message with addictive gameplay.
Frostpunk is a single-player game set in an alternative steampunk future where the world is rocked by climatic changes that lead to a sudden drop in temperatures. The player leads a group of survivors attempting to eke out a living in the desolate ice-wastes as ever-colder weather strikes. The game begins with the player needing to send work-teams to scavenge for resources like wood, coal, steel, required to power furnaces and build shelter. So far, so simple.
As challenges begin to mount, the player soon feels tempted to use the most powerful weapon in their arsenal: The Book of Laws. Early-game examples of laws at the player’s disposal include the imposition of emergency shifts, the licencing of child labour, and the addition of sawdust to the soup. Changing the law can have unseen consequences. Licencing child labour is a good idea for increasing the size of the labour pool, but the player has to deal with the consequences when a child becomes injured. Does the player release the child from work, which will cause parents of other children to get agitated, or does the player force the child to keep working, which can possibly lead to them perishing?
What becomes ever clearer as the game progresses is that the main antagonist in Frostpunk is not necessarily the changing climate, but can easily become the player themselves, and that the citizens of the new city have to deal with a changing society as much as adverse weather. Crucially, the player has control of how this society develops, and can choose whether to genuinely improve the lives of their people, or use the levers of power and to create an oppressive police state. They can take refugees into their city, or they can leave them to whither and die on the ice. They can send children down the mines, or give them double rations. Who lives and dies becomes as dependent upon the type of society and economy that emerges as much as the brutal storms and plunging temperatures.
The message of Frostpunk is assisted by its beautiful graphics and magisterial sound design. The player can watch as their workers dig through the snow to build new streets, or as protesters march through those same streets demanding the player’s head. As the temperature drops, the music buffets the player like a howling gale. Even the menus of the game are exquisitely designed, never straying from the theme of cold and oppression.
Since its release, Frostpunk has proven to be popular, selling over five million copies (11 Bit Studios 2024). This has led to several expansions and even a boardgame version. In addition, a sequel, Frostpunk 2, which moves from the world of steam to the world of oil, was released in September 2024. Even fan-created Frostpunk-inspired music has millions of views on YouTube (Dan Bull 2019; The Stupendium 2022). Academics who critique environmental determinist narratives should take note of the popularity of Frostpunk, which outsold popular environmental determinist books such as Guns, Germs, and Steel. If our mission is to place society in the hotseat when it comes to disasters, then well-crafted videogames can become a powerful tool.
References
11 Bit Studios. 2024. “Frostpunk Is Now 6 Years Old ❄.” Steam News. April 24, 2024. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/323190/view/4201371495599825358.
Berlanga, Eulalia. 2021. “Conflict, Climate Change and Hunger: A Triangle of Despair in South Sudan | World Food Programme.” September 20, 2021. https://www.wfp.org/stories/conflict-climate-change-and-hunger-triangle-despair-south-sudan.
Butler, Declan. 2007. “Darfur’s Climate Roots Challenged.” Nature 447 (7148): 1038–1038. https://doi.org/10.1038/4471038b.
Dan Bull, dir. 2019. FROSTPUNK RAP BATTLE – Faith vs Order | Dan Bull vs The Stupendium. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADwUlpdR_PA.
Diamond, Jared. 1998. Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years. New Ed edition. London: Vintage.
Garcia, Rolando V. 1981. Nature Pleads Not Guilty: The 1972 Case History. 1st ed. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Lahsen, Myanna, and Jesse Ribot. 2022. “Politics of Attributing Extreme Events and Disasters to Climate Change.” WIREs Climate Change 13 (1): e750. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.750.
Livingstone, David N. 2012. “Changing Climate, Human Evolution, and the Revival of Environmental Determinism.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86 (4): 564–95.
Naylor, Robert Luke. 2021. “Reid Bryson: The Crisis Climatologist.” WIREs Climate Change, e744. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.744.
Naylor, Robert Luke, and Eleanor Shaw. 2022. “The 200-Year Cycle: An Early Climate-Based Reaction to the Crisis in the Sahel and Its Uptake in 1973.” History of Meteorology 11 (1): 1–17.
Office of the Press Secretary. 2015. “Remarks by the President at the United States Coast Guard Academy Commencement.” Whitehouse.Gov. May 20, 2015. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/05/20/remarks-president-united-states-coast-guard-academy-commencement.
Selby, Jan, Omar S. Dahi, Christiane Fröhlich, and Mike Hulme. 2017. “Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War Revisited.” Political Geography 60 (September): 232–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.05.007.
Slavin, Philip. 2019. Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain: 4. Bilingual edition. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols N.V.
The Stupendium, dir. 2022. SHELTER FROM THE STORM | 2022 REMASTER | Frostpunk Rap! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfPFECZFBQg.
