This week on Portsmouth Point: Philosophy in Gaming: Frostpunk 2 and Utilitarianism

By Samuel VdB, Year 12

“Maybe you wanted everyone to get along? Maybe you tried your very best? Maybe you grew impatient with the bickering? Maybe you had to do it or the City would fall?

It does not matter.”

• Epilogue, Captain’s ending.

Mild spoilers for Frostpunk 2.

Imagine minus 30 degree cold as you walk, in fur coated layers, to a crowded hall. Delegates shout and holler in the parliament. In the distance a great engine roars with fire, pumping the lifeblood of warmth through the hallowed halls of one of the last great vestiges of civilization against an almighty storm. Your city is running out of food, and warmth, but hungry people, not your citizens, are at the gates, freezing to death. You can let them in, and jeopardise everyone in your city. You can leave them to die, and have their blood on your hands. Or you can select who to let in, allowing only the useful ones to benefit you, whilst the “Useless” suffer the fate deserving of the lesser. What would you choose?

Frostpunk 2 is a rare game, and a rare sequel, that both expands upon, revolutionises, and stays faithful to its predecessor all at once. It holds fervently to the moral dilemma, difficulty and inventiveness to the original frostpunk, whilst also expanding in scope and mechanics. Set 30 years after the first game, where a “great storm” has ravaged Britain and the world, leaving the survivors to huddle in small colonies draining the earth for fuel to burn. It invites you to lead a city, and to bear all the moral complexities that come with that. Under this game, I want to explore arguably the greatest and most popular ethical system. Utilitarianism.

Let us return to that dilemma, admittedly told through text events rather than cutscenes, but still pressing if one immerses themselves in the story. What should you do? This is not only an issue of morality, but of cold hard practicality. Sure, one may consider leaving people out to die to be morally repugnant but when faced with stewardship of a city, what other option is there? If this is your train of thought, then congratulations, you have boarded the Utilitarian trolley. In fact, the Utilitarian would argue that such a decision is moral in absolute, regardless of the deaths of the innocent. Utilitarian ethics revolves around a single principle. That ethics should maximise pleasure and minimise pain. Under this view, one should take any decision which minimises pain and maximises pleasure.

Another decision point in Frostpunk 2 can shed light on Utilitarianism further. You are running out of fuel, and an exploration team has desperately sent a message to you. They have found oil! But also a dozen bodies. They are wrapped in shrouds, and laid to float on the oil. It is clearly a burial ritual for some culture out in the frost. You can extract some oil and try to leave the bodies, or throw them out into the cold and take all the oil for yourself. For the utilitarian, this is a stupid question. What can dead bodies feel? The maths of pain vs pleasure here is obvious. Throw them out and save our city. For the utilitarian, the sacred and the innocent hold no value above the pleasure they provide.

If the Trolley problem is ringing any bells for you, and if you picked up on the trolley reference earlier, then congratulations. The famous thought experiment, though disappointingly absent from 11 Bit studio’s masterpiece, is also a hallmark of Utilitarian thought. Pulling the lever, and inserting yourself into a situation and killing a man to save 5 is the utilitarian answer, and for most people, the right one. Afterall, it's five lives for the price of one. But I want to change this, challenge it a bit. You are a doctor, and five of your patients need life saving organ transplants. They will most certainly die without these organs. A healthy person walks into your ward, an orphan, with no family or friends, perhaps having taken a wrong turn. No one would miss him. You have your scalpel in your hand. Killing him, and transplanting his organs into your dying patients would save five people. I understand the viscera of the killing would put some people off, so lets say that you could order one of your nurses to do it for you, out of sight. Would you do it? Afterall, it's five lives for the price of one.

By the end of Frostpunk 2 the city has fallen into civil war between religious and revolutionary extremism. Protests are rocking your farming districts, disrupting food supplies and threatening to undo one of humanities’ last hopes and the lives of tens of thousands. You can try to negotiate a settlement, exile one of the factions, or seize control for yourself. Settling for peace seems infinitely challenging, exile risks further conflict and empowering the victorious side, so … become a dictator. It is the easiest way to minimise the pain of the civil war, and by this point you have been ruling for decades. Who better to control the city? Do the delegates, with their biases and factionalism, know better? Surely, you know best for the citizens. Can you not maximise their pleasure?

If you could not tell till now, I am not a utilitarian. Ethics, I believe, is not a maths game. Morality cannot be decided by a calculator. Frostpunk 2 does not espouse how it thinks you should play the game, only it gives you a reminder at the end of why we are moral. A description of your policies and their effects, questioning why you did what you did. A short description of a fourteen year old girl, on the verge of tears in her photo, whose life is shaped, and possibly ruined, by your decisions. A stark reminder, that even in a world of 1’s and 0’s, our cold utilitarian calculations affect people far beyond our flawed reason can comprehend.

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