Democracy Dies Playfully: (Anti-)Democratic Ideas in and Around Video Games

Lars Dolkemeyer's analysis of Frostpunk (2018) examines how construction simulations shape the political subjectivity of players, using the game as a case study for the tension between autocratic management and shared responsibility. The central argument is that while genre predecessors such as Tropico use informational interfaces to abstract territory, economy, and population into objects of absolute, deterritorialized power, Frostpunk reconfigures this autocratic logic through aesthetics of coldness, a temporal structure that never resolves into outright victory or defeat, and a community that emerges as a collective agent. Drawing on Donna Haraway's concepts of response-ability and sympoiesis, and on Alexander Galloway's account of video games as action-based media, the analysis contends that the player becomes simultaneously autocrat and ruled, and that the game's logic is better understood as a "management of demise" than as adaptation or conquest.

The study's most distinctive claim is that Frostpunk makes its survivors' hardships tangible through interface design that visually encodes temperature, discontent, and hope. Morally fraught decisions, such as the introduction of child labour, are presented as choices whose consequences players feel accountable for. The work concludes that survival alone is insufficient within the game's framework, since how the community endures shapes its values and, in turn, the meaning of the player's rule. This yields the author's phrase "autocracy through the people" rather than autocracy by a single ruler.

The analysis is theoretical and interpretive rather than empirical. It offers no quantitative data, and its conclusions rest on close reading and the author's extended play, supported by comparisons with Tropico and with survival construction simulations discussed by Caldwell-Gervais (2018). The scope is focused on a single title and a small set of genre examples, with theoretical engagement drawn chiefly from Haraway and Galloway, whose endnoted differences in conceptions of selfhood the work observes but does not resolve.