![]() These include 24 hour shifts, child labour, corpse disposal strategies and, more drastically, whether to welcome refugees or refuse them entry.įrostpunk is a city-survival game in a world where ‘heat means life’. The player must choose between a number of difficult policies and options to ensure the survival of the population. The game’s primary scenario consists of surviving the winter – which gets incrementally colder as time progresses – in “New London”: a settlement of survivors clustered around a large coal-powered generator. Frostpunk is set in a dystopian alternate reality in which a volcanic event has triggered a colossal global ice age. In contrast to this incidentally optimistic outlook, there is an interesting Polish video game by the name of Frostpunk. Frostpunk, and surviving the ‘volcanic winter’ The developers could have chosen to make the effects of climate change and access to mitigating technologies more random (although we do not know how difficult that would be to implement in practice nor its effects on gameplay). Rather we wish to illustrate how different depictions of the future can restrict or encourage certain courses of action. We are not suggesting that the developers are necessarily liable or even responsible for promoting these views. One of the consequences is that the game essentially eliminates the very uncertainty which is inherent to the “current science” on climate change and conveys a sense of technological optimism whereby innovations alone can sustain human prosperity. That is only possible because those technologies are known in advance and players are given virtually perfect information on the different stages of climate change and its effects. In the case of Gathering Storm, for example, in most scenarios a player could probably continue to be a “free rider” and rely solely on technological solutions. One example would be chopping down forests to accelerate production or convert land for other uses which, in the long run, renders a city more vulnerable to flooding and reduces the carbon sink capacity of your civilisation. From early on, this new expansion compels players to think about some of the potential long-term consequences of actions that may offer short-term benefits. ![]() The game even progresses into a “future era”, where players are offered options like carbon capture and storage technologies or “ seasteads” to house segments of the population. In turn, these can have potentially devastating effects on your cities and units, pushing the player to think about different adaptation strategies such as flood barriers for coastal cities. Indeed, Gathering Storm is based on a simple model of global warming wherein CO₂ emissions from energy sources induce sea level rise, as well as more frequent and intense extreme weather events such as droughts and storms. ![]() As the game and the ages progress, your energy choices become increasingly important. The game involves developing a civilisation from its humble beginnings in the Stone Age to nowadays and beyond, while choosing from a vast array of technologies and cultural policies. ![]() The expansion – called Gathering Storm – adds new features to the game, most notably anthropogenic climate change and natural disasters. A new expansion has added environmental challenges to Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, the latest in a popular series of strategy video games that has been running since the 1990s.
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