Content warning: This episode discusses a scene in a video game that involves sexual assault during war. If you'd like to skip that section, it is from 7:57-8:35. There is a response that discusses the ethical choices in the game beyond that point, but it is more abstract and general about choices.
Video games have not historically been amazing at storytelling. Games prioritize mechanics and gameplay while story takes a backseat. But that isn’t the case at 11 bit studios, which have produced some of the finest video games in recent years, including a series that takes place within a climate-changed world.
Today’s Reversing Climate Change guest is Maciej Sułecki. Maciej worked on three games that RCC host Ross Kenyon is a huge fan of: This War of Mine, and Frostpunk 1 & 2.
The conversation starts with The War of Mine, in which the player plays as a group of civilians trying to survive a fictionalized Siego of Sarajevo. Unlike most war games, the objective is not to win a battle (most characters are ill-suited to fighting) but merely to stay alive and not lose your soul in the process by engaging in unethical or traumatic behavior.
The Frostpunk games each deal with a world that has iced over, and humanity is barely hanging on. Due to the extreme circumstances of survival, the decisions are hard and the political choices tend toward the extreme. It puts players in the role of deciding how to rank liberal values that we take for granted about the consent of the governed and the political process against survival. What’s more: it doesn’t do this in a straightforward way meant to teach you a lesson—a very unusual quality in any media, let alone a video game!
Ross and Maciej discuss other games and series that have prioritized story to varying degrees such as Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Papers, Please, and Disco Elysium, and also end up discussing the degree to which Polish history influenced what are otherwise games meant to be universal.
In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the democratic body of the Sejm had a principle called the Liberum Veto, by which any member of the body could veto a policy. While this was a beautiful idea, it made it easy for members to be bribed by outsiders to block policy changes and cease the development of the state. By some accounts, it led to the weakening of the Polish state and therefore its ultimate susceptibility to the Polish Partitions. Did that influence the gamemakers thoughts on democracy? Is there such a thing as a universal game, or does all art spring from our experience, cultural or otherwise?
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Before I give the intro, I want to give a quick content warning. This show has a brief mention of a scene from one of the games that is being discussed that involves sexual assault during war. Just a heads up in case that is something that you do not wish to hear. If that’s something that you’d rather skip, I’ll put the timestamp in the show notes so you can skip ahead and avoid that. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. My name is Ross Kenyon. I’ve been involved in carbon removal for the better part of a decade, and I’m the host of the show.
A lot of people think that the best shows are the ones with the biggest names, and I don’t think that’s the case. As much as I love the shows where we’ve had major award winners and celebrities on the podcast, they’re hard shows to do because people like that have a lot to lose. They have publicists who coach them. It’s hard to get really authentic communications. Oftentimes they have a shtick. If there are people who are used to presenting frequently, you have to break them out of the spiel that they always give, because otherwise you get the same thing that everyone else does.
And if you’ve listened to podcasts, the famous people on multiple podcasts about a certain book or about a certain topic, you’ll hear the same stories, you’ll hear the same points made, and it’s not good. Podcasting, insofar as it is an important type of media, is for authenticity and to have real conversations. And my favorite shows are the ones when I source someone that I know what they’re doing is important. I’ve just been able to discern that what they’re doing needs more attention than it’s getting, and this is a case where that is happening.
I love 11 bit studios. They’re a Polish video game studio. They’ve made several of my favorite games, and we talked about them on today’s show. My guest, Maciej Sułecki, is the lead system designer for 11 bit studios, and he worked on This War of Mine and both Frostpunk games. So the Frostpunk games are about climate change. They’re about a Victorian civilization that is undergoing extreme stress because of global cooling. Basically, the world just turns into a giant iceberg and you’re trying to survive with steampunk-era technology, and you have to make very hard decisions about what kind of society you’d like to build, how you’re expected to survive.
They are very difficult games. All of my friends who have played them too have had to start over multiple times. It really works your brain. They’re hard, city-builder type games. And we also spend a lot of time today talking about This War of Mine, which is about a fictionalized version of the Siege of Sarajevo, or conflicts like that, where you are a civilian just trying to survive with your group of survivors. You’re not trying to win a tactical victory in a military sense. You are a civilian who is ultimately fairly weak, just trying to make sure you don’t die, and also trying to avoid having to make any truly terrible ethical decisions, which I think is among the most important types of games that could be made.
Many of the games that I love are ethical games, games that force you to think, to understand what it might be like to be put into some of these positions, and ask you questions that make you think three years after you played the game. 11 bit studios is a master craftsperson at these skills. They are, as far as I know, best in class. I don’t think there’s anyone else out there making games quite like them in this way, and I really respect them for it.
I don’t want to overdo the intro so much as to say you should play these games. They’re great. They have a lot to say about climate and war and humanity, but they do so in a rather understated way, too. They don’t spoon-feed you these thoughts. They don’t spoon-feed you what you’re supposed to think or feel. I think that’s what makes them amazing media producers, is that they respect their audience enough to let you come to your own conclusion, to make hard decisions and to think about them afterwards. So 11 bit studios is a group that I greatly respect and admire. I hope you feel the same way and I hope you enjoy the show.
Maciej, thanks for being here with me. I’ve played so many of your games and at such a great length that this is a great pleasure for me to have you here.
Maciej Sułecki: Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me here today.
Ross Kenyon: I know we’ve been trying to do this for a long time, but I want to do this because Frostpunk 2 came out recently. Frostpunk 1 is a great game, one of the few games that has a climate dynamic in it, although it’s not specifically about climate change in the sense that most people think about, which I think actually makes it a more powerful type of communication tool. And then I’ve also played a huge amount of This War of Mine, which is where I’d like to start the show, because you worked on all of these games and have been at 11 bit studios for a very long time.
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I started working in 11 bit studios more than 10 years ago, and yeah, one of the biggest games I worked on, the first serious game, was This War of Mine. So This War of Mine was released 10 years ago, 10 years, 10 years ago. So it’s quite, quite a lot, quite a lot of time. And then after This War of Mine, I worked on Frostpunk, and then quite recently on the second Frostpunk.
Ross Kenyon: Wonderful games. If you’re listening and you like playing games, you should play them. What’s great about them too is that you don’t necessarily require a lot of video game dexterity. It’s not like some first-person shooters or other types of games you play where you essentially have to be good at gaming to enjoy them. This War of Mine is not a fast-paced game, it’s not meant to test your agility, it’s much more emotional, and we can get into why it’s that way mechanically. But perhaps first we should introduce what even is This War of Mine about? Why did you make it? Of all the games that could be made, how did 11 bit decide to make This War of Mine?
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah. So yeah, This War of Mine is basically a game about surviving in a besieged city. So what is quite unusual and unique for games is that the player is controlling civilians. So basically the game is about experiencing the war, but the player is controlling civilians and the goal is simply to survive the siege. We use the very hostile environment to induce some, you know, deep thoughts in the player. Basically, we’re trying to test the morality of the player during the gameplay, during the playthrough, and basically because of that, I think the game was quite successful. Successful because no one before that basically made a game from this angle.
Ross Kenyon: At least if they’ve made them, probably nowhere near as successfully as This War of Mine. I loved it because most war games — I like various military-themed games and most of them seemingly have no conscience at all. They’re not concerned with matters of conscience or ethics. Most of the battlefields are depopulated of civilians. There’s no real risk of doing anything except maybe friendly fire of your allies. But mostly it’s just to kill the enemy. And the fact that there’s an environment where you’re a civilian, where you’re trying to survive and you would face these decisions.
One of the best early examples is at the grocery store, where you’re outside of a door and you hear these soldiers and they’re at least going to rob someone, if not actually rape someone, and you have the chance to intervene. But there’s a decent chance that if you’re not equipped, and if you chose a character to act as that is not good at fighting, your character might be injured or killed in the process. And even if they do prevent this action from happening, the mere act of being involved in violence is traumatizing too, and that causes effects in your home life as the survivor. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dynamic like that in any video game ever. It’s so complex and enriched emotionally.
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, yes, I think the key to success and the key to how we managed to create a game like that is basically we started with the idea, with the story we wanted to talk about, and then we tried to adjust the whole gameplay to this idea, to this story. So basically the story came from our CEO at the time, so from Grzegorz Miechowski. Grzegorz Miechowski read some diaries from the Bosnian war, and basically those diaries and those materials inspired him to make, to give us an idea to make the game. So he inspired us as a team later on. And we thought that this civilian perspective is quite interesting, not only interesting, but quite, how to say, quite important to show.
And we started, you know, to read materials, to read about how to live in a besieged city, what difficulties people had to overcome, what struggles they experienced. And the more we read about that, the more we watched the documentaries, the more we liked to create such a game. And after we decided to create a game like that, we didn’t want to put the game into some kind of a genre. Basically, we didn’t want to simply take a well-established genre like, I don’t know, a platform game or a strategy game, or an FPS or FPP or something like that, TPP. But we wanted to simply craft our game and adjust all the mechanics and the perspective around the story.
So it came, I think, very, very well, because we like to break some rules. For example, in other games in general, your characters are very — or maybe not very, but are quite powerful. In games in general, players like to use, like to control powerful characters, good fighters, I don’t know, swift and very agile characters. And in This War of Mine, we thought that, hey, this is a game about civilians, and civilians are very different. There are, of course, some people with good strength, who are very agile, but there are also a lot of people with abilities below normal, below the average. And this is a very good example that we broke that rule.
And we assumed that, hey, in our game, those characters that the player controls won’t be very powerful. So in general, I think from — I don’t remember the exact number of those characters. I believe it’s more than 10, 14 at this moment. But the minority of them are good fighters. Basically, we have just one good fighter, one person who somehow knows how to fight, and any other design decisions were also made with this principle in mind. So we tried to create a game around the story. Basically not a game with the story. It was a game crafted around the story.
Ross Kenyon: I know the character you’re thinking of. He’s a deserter, right? He was a soldier and decided no longer to be, and now he’s just joined up in this house trying to survive. Yeah, a lot of the characters, maybe they’re able to carry more goods away from the scavenging opportunities. Maybe they’re good at playing music or good at cooking. But I think if there’s a stat I read recently, that was almost all men overestimate their ability to get into a fight and win. If you don’t have training, fighting — like, you are not going to be good at it if you’re called upon to do it. And of course that should take place in games as well, especially a game with civilians.
Obviously people who have served in the military are trained in this, but the average person is not. And do you know what to do if your city became blockaded and there’s a sniper on the corner and you have to run between cover to get food for your family? No, God forbid. In fact, most people, I hope, never have to experience such a thing. But even people in the game here, you can easily have a bad situation. Or I’ve had situations in the game where I sent someone out who was a good scavenger but a bad fighter and had to turn back before I could take as much stuff as I really wanted to because it was too dangerous. And then you don’t have food for the people in your home and it hurts their morale, it hurts their health.
I think questions like that about risk and probability and survival are never asked by video games like this, because mostly it’s about closing with and killing the enemy — which there also are opportunities to do in this game too, with that one character especially. But as you say, that’s the minority playing option.
Maciej Sułecki: Yes, yes, yes, yeah, yeah. All those decisions that you mentioned, it’s also quite cool. Because most of the decisions are not presented to the player as a simple question, do this or do that. Those decisions are quite organic. Basically you as a player are deciding, do you want to scavenge further, or maybe it’s a good idea to go back with less scavenged items, with a smaller amount of scavenged items. And yeah, I think those decisions that the player is making in his mind are maybe even more impactful than a simple A or B presented on a screen.
Ross Kenyon: I think so. I’ve certainly made the wrong decision, and the way that it saves is pretty automatic, so if you do make the wrong call, it isn’t as simple as reloading. Oftentimes you have to live with the consequences of your decisions, which is not always the case in video games unless you’re on something like survivor mode or legendary mode or whatever elite status you choose for difficulty. But I like that, because the game is about the cost of decisions and decisions under duress, and if you made it easy to just reload every hard decision until you got it right, it wouldn’t really mimic what it’s like to be a civilian in war.
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, yeah. So basically I think this also was a good design decision in our game, that we wanted to show the consequences of each of his decisions. And yeah, I think that mechanic, the game mechanic, should really fit the narration. Because if, you know, if there will be a possibility of saving in every moment, I think most of those decisions will be less impactful, because the player could quick-reload the game and choose the different options. So yeah, we wanted to fit the mechanic to the narration, basically.
Ross Kenyon: Has the game seen increased success after the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Is there increased interest in games that display civilian consequences of war?
Maciej Sułecki: It’s hard to tell for me, because basically the first war in Ukraine broke out during the development. So basically we were during the development in 2014 when the first phase of this war broke out. And for us as developers it was very — very, how to say it — a very, very strange feeling that, you know, we were making a game about war. The main premise of the game was that war can break out on your doorstep, basically. And we were trying to design the city, the whole game, as universal as possible. And then during the development the war broke out in a neighbouring country.
So at the beginning of the development, I was searching for the documents, you know, from the Bosnian war, from the Warsaw Uprising, from other very old events. And at the end of the development, basically, instead of searching for the documents, we could just turn on the TV and watch the news. And it was really, really strange feeling for us. It was frightening. And yeah, it was frightening, basically. So yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think there is an opportunity, same as Frostpunk, to update the mechanics and how you approach the subject area to make another This War of Mine? Please, please, please do it, because I would gladly play more scenarios, even beyond the original This War of Mine that already existed.
Maciej Sułecki: I cannot tell anything, but I think, you know, it was like 10 years, 10 years passed, and we were making this game in quite a different environment — basically the world was in [unclear] back then, 10 years ago. And I believe there is, how to say, there is a space for updating the message maybe, but it’s hard to tell if we will be updating the message. Maybe someone else, some other companies could make also quite a similar story about the current events, the current struggles. There is a space for that, for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I think so. I think the message is very easily — it’s humane in the best sense. There seemingly is not a strong perspective taking on who is in the right in the war. Is this militia more just than the other? It’s really not about right or wrong. It’s just about what it’s like to be caught in the middle. And therefore I think it transcends any particular ethics in any particular war. It’s just, what do you do when it’s on your doorstep, as you said, and the ethics that it takes to keep a group alive. And I guess in some sense, maybe you don’t even need to update it, because it can be easily applicable to essentially any modern war. It’s just as cruel. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the invading army and think they’re ultimately just or not. It probably still puts you in this very similar situation.
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, for sure. Like the This War of Mine story, or the This War of Mine message, is quite universal. We wanted it to be quite universal, and sure it is. But what I mean, there are so many different stories. I personally heard so many different stories related since the release of This War of Mine. I believe there could be, you know, games as a medium could really tell some other different stories inspired by quite recent events.
Ross Kenyon: Which I think games are probably the media type that is the weakest at storytelling of essentially all of the types. I expect very little from storytelling from most games. I expect it to be fun, and story very secondary or maybe even tertiary. I’m lucky if there is a good story at all in a lot of the games that I end up playing. But I think the kind of world building that you do in the Frostpunk games and This War of Mine are really strong. I’m trying to think of even other games that compete for world building. You know, Bethesda does some great world building games too, like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls are very powerful and very immersive. Or The Witcher, you know, another great Polish series. You guys have water balloon fights with them too, as neighbors?
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah. You know, it’s one — it’s a good one, one city. Yeah. Our companies are quite close to each other.
Ross Kenyon: I figured that was probably the case, yeah. But besides that, I can’t think of too many games that prioritize storytelling and are nearly as successful and as immersive. Do you have any idea why don’t game makers focus on story to the same degree as 11 bit and some of your peers?
Maciej Sułecki: I think, you know, it’s maybe because companies like to use already established genres. And there is this term, ludonarrative dissonance, when there is some kind of game with a gameplay and this gameplay doesn’t really fit the story. Basically like this. For example, there was a game, Spec Ops: The Line, quite a cool game, also about horrors of the war, and the story — the message behind this game was also quite interesting. But still, during the gameplay, you as a soldier, there’s a lot of enemies. And basically because it was an FPS game. So in an FPS game, first-person shooter, it’s basically the core mechanic, yeah, fighting enemies.
And sometimes I believe it’s hard to adjust the story to the gameplay, because there are some genres, there are some gameplay schemes. So maybe this is hard, to think outside the box. Maybe because of that, it’s hard to adjust the story to the gameplay. Because I believe that if the game wants to tell some story, you know, pass some message, the game also should have quite interesting gameplay mechanics. Because without the gameplay mechanics, the game won’t be successful. It will be hard to present the game to a wide audience.
Ross Kenyon: That’s true, although I can think of some games that have weaker mechanics to them and are heavily text driven that are great, like Disco Elysium. I think is a game like that. Did you play that one?
Maciej Sułecki: No, not yet. I had — I don’t have time to play, but yeah, this is for sure a good example.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, or another game, Papers, Please, I really enjoyed too, where you’re just a worker at the border and there are ethical decisions to make, but there’s some animation, but it’s text-based decision making and living with the consequences of your actions. It’s pretty weak on the — there’s no fancy button mashing. There’s no skills or dexterity. It’s just ethical decisions and storytelling. But I think the fact that I can only think of a couple examples that are good at that maybe tells us everything that we need to know, that it’s not typically a priority for the medium, sad to say.
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, yeah, it’s for sure hard, you know, to make such a game. And the developers, for sure they’re brave. You need to be brave to create a game with little or no gameplay and to count that it will be still successful. It’s really high risk, I think.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve covered at this point This War of Mine, which if you’re listening, go back and play it, is well worth your time. It’s one of those games I can unreservedly recommend. And then the Frostpunk series is a game that came later than This War of Mine, but I love it too. There’s not a lot of games about climate, or even that have a climate element to them at all. And when they are present, I’ve not found any of that do it in a way that isn’t — do you know what the expression “on the nose” means? Much as you do. You know what that is, on the nose?
Maciej Sułecki: Not exactly.
Ross Kenyon: Like, really in your face, in a way that is not subtle or creative in any way.
Maciej Sułecki: OK.
Ross Kenyon: I feel like climate games, the ones that I’ve played, have been very on the nose. They’re really didactic. They’re trying to make a teaching point about climate. Now, what I like about Frostpunk is it takes place in a world where climate change has occurred in some way, but it isn’t the dominant part of the story. It basically helps people imagine what a world would be like to survive when it became extremely cold, that we entered a new glacial period or something even worse than that. But how did that idea come about? Why make a game that sort of is steampunk? It’s set at the turn of the century. But it’s Frostpunk because it’s in a freezing environment. It’s a weird pitch. How did this even happen?
Maciej Sułecki: OK, so, where to start? So basically I would start with This War of Mine. Basically, you know, we released the This War of Mine game. And This War of Mine was about a group of people. So we thought that, OK, so we show how a group of people could behave in extreme stress, in an extremely stressful situation, in high pressure. And we thought that maybe, OK, so let’s scale that concept up. So let’s think about how a bigger group of people could react, could behave, in a hostile environment. And from this idea we basically started to think about some kind of a city builder, some kind of a society builder.
And when we started to, you know, design such a game — because in 11 bit studios, basically we don’t have a concept of each game at the beginning. So of course each game starts somehow, and with some initial idea, but quite often we’re iterating even on the main idea. So This War of Mine started as a little bit different game. Frostpunk also started as a little bit different game. So at the beginning we just have, you know, an idea of quite a generic city builder with some kind of a pressure to, you know, to draw out those behaviours of a group, of a society.
And then we searched for some ideas, like what could be such pressures? What elements could pressure the whole society, or somehow present a threat? And from this process, we came up with the idea of basically climate change, of putting a group of people, of society, into quite a new environment. We changed the weather, we changed the climate, and we started to build on that idea, basically. Why steampunk? I believe, you know, it’s because it’s cool, for sure. But this Victorian era with steam is also quite nice, quite nice. What to say it? It’s quite a cool contrast to the global cooling, because, you know, steam is hot, of course.
And then the industrial era was a period also of great change in societies. And this contrasts quite well with the global cooling that we presented in our game.
Ross Kenyon: I think that aesthetically makes it fun. I’m thinking about what would it be like to create a game with global cooling in it that happened in 2024, when we had extremely advanced digital technology. There’s, you know, AI is coming online very quickly. I think if you had to choose between that time orientation of past or present, why go for something that has that nostalgia factor that steampunk baked into it?
Maciej Sułecki: In general, in our games, we are trying not to portray the present time, basically. Also in This War of Mine we wanted to show the universal story, but we researched, how to say, researched for showing a city that is set like a few years ago. We didn’t want to portray, how to say, real countries and present time, because this gives us a little bit more creativity, space for creativity. And but still, if we portray some kind of fiction, it still can be applicable to the present times and real people and real countries. So for a creator, it’s more comfortable to create fictional worlds. But with real-life problems, with human nature, that is something that we can portray both in realistic games and in fictional games.
Ross Kenyon: I noticed this trend strongly in This War of Mine. The objective is to survive the war, and if you have to survive the war by acting unethically, sometimes that’s part of the cost of it that you have to live with. But if you play the game well and you get lucky, you might not actually have to do any of the bad things that are necessary to survive. But in both of the Frostpunk games, it seems like the technology trees both point you towards rather authoritarian governments, where it has a much more pessimistic view of human nature.
I think it’s saying that in times of extreme duress, in the first game you can basically either go to a Robespierre — and it’s like French revolutionary quasi-communist government — or fascism, are basically your choices of survival and consolidating power. And then in Frostpunk 2 there’s some sort of parliamentary system set up, but also the mechanic drives you towards, how do you concentrate power in the Steward, which is you, in order to have total control over voting. The first game very optimistic, This War of Mine. The other two games seem like not a pretty picture for humanity’s future. Am I reading you correctly, or do you dispute what I’m trying to say?
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, you know, because both Frostpunks have those paths more — how to say it — more visible. Because, you know, in both Frostpunks we have something like an idea tree in the second Frostpunk. In the first Frostpunk we have those policies in the Book of Laws. So those concepts are more visible. They are clearly presented to the player. In This War of Mine, basically we don’t communicate all of those shady actions that you can do. Basically, you can rob people, you can kill people, but it’s your own decision. And because of that, I believe you found that impression that there is no good ending in both Frostpunks. But there is, there is.
So basically in both Frostpunks, both Frostpunks are possible, how to say, to be finished without going to extreme measures. Basically, in the first Frostpunk, we have those two paths, the religious path and the fascist path, let’s say like that. It’s a little bit more nuanced, but in general those two paths are presented to the player. But still, the game could be finished without using solutions from any of those paths. In the second Frostpunk, we have much more possibilities, much more paths.
Basically, we have this one axis that defines you as a leader, as a dictator or a steward. And those two paths are possible to take. But also we have those six affinities that the player could take, and those also could be helpful, of course. But they’re quite morally — yeah, already shaded. But we design our games, all of them, to be — they can be successfully finished without going into extremes, but it’s extremely hard, on the other hand.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, the games are already hard. Both of the Frostpunk games are extremely challenging. I’ve had to restart scenarios several times, be like, oops, made the wrong decision there, got to start over. And that’s true. So maybe I just took the easy way out. I wanted to poke on this theme of universalism, because this being caught between powerful ideologies that surround you — this seems like a very Polish theme too. You have plains. The Polish story of Partition is horrifying, and I think you have powerful neighbors that you must live between that have strong opinions on how the world should be structured. So how universalist is it and how Polish do you think it is?
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, I believe that, you know, every designer grew up in some kind of environment, and in some country. And of course is surrounded by some ideas. Even during the development of Frostpunk 2, we had quite an interesting argument between one of our Polish designers and one of our French designers. And it was about democracy, basically. So we were thinking about some kind of mechanism that, if there was a vote and you as a player lost the vote, or the policy that you wanted to pass lost the vote by fewer votes, basically we wanted to add some kind of a mechanism like, you know, recount votes. And of course with recounting votes, those few votes could be added, so basically after recounting votes, the policy should pass.
And for Polish designers, it wasn’t something, how to say, it wasn’t a big thing. But we were arguing with our French colleague, colleague that was very against that. And it was very interesting for us to see that we have different points of view. We grew up in different countries and therefore we have our different opinions, and those views are, yeah, reflected in our game. And in the second Frostpunk, we try to be quite a universal game, because of course we’re making games for different people and basically we want to be universal. But I believe even the whole concept of society’s survival — I think that our common history, our nationality, could be one of the reasons that we even started to think about this topic.
Ross Kenyon: That’s what I’m getting at here too, because when I think about Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Sejm and the Liberum Veto — basically Polish democracy, early forerunner in democracies in the early modern period. But they had a policy where one delegate could veto essentially anything, which in some histories led directly to the partitioning of Poland because it weakened the governing structure. It was a great idea for freedom, right? The idea that one person could block policy is a beautiful, liberty-oriented way of thinking about democracy, but it made it really hard to govern. So I could see why you would focus so much on democracy, because Poland has contributed so much to that thought, but also been victimized by perhaps too much democracy in some cases as well.
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, even if we didn’t think about that directly, the Liberum Veto is something that all of us was taught in school, for example, and we knew the consequences of this concept. And basically also this, I think, reflects in our game, where the democracy is a great tool for governing the city, for maintaining the city. But it’s also very — how to say — very unreliable. It’s really hard to pass policies that are good for all people when there are different factions in the city, when different factions have different points of view, when each decision needs to be passed in the parliament. So yeah, I think Polish history is unfortunately a good example of that. You know, it’s really hard to maintain and make effective democracy.
Ross Kenyon: I think that makes it a richer game. That adds a lot of ability to tell a complex story. I essentially revealed myself as a poor player of the games, because I’ve seemingly always taken the easy way out where I’m like, actually democracy is too difficult, I need to become an authoritarian just to survive. And you’re telling me you don’t actually have to do that? I’m telling you that I’m not very good at your games and I’m taking the easy way out. I need more practice, I think. Is that essentially what happened?
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, it was designed. That’s right. Basically it’s, you know, it’s a cheap trick. It’s a cheap trick. But yeah, most of our games, it’s like — it’s maybe not a cheap trick. It’s basically, you know, from the observation of reality. But quite often the morally shady decisions, the morally shady options, simply morally bad solutions, are the easiest ones, right? And yeah, this is the concept of our game, that basically we quite often use that.
But the other thing is, you know, presenting for the player — the one thing is presenting those morally bad decisions for the players. And the other thing is basically judging or not judging him after he takes them, because I believe that the player should judge himself. And basically he should assess all those decisions and the outcomes and the consequences by himself. Because even if you’re playing Frostpunk 2 and you will become a dictator, it will be easier for you to manage the city and you might save more lives, basically, by passing the laws more smoothly. And at the end, at the end, it’s really hard to tell what was the right — if it was a good or bad decision. So it’s also very, very satisfying to us making our games, to ask those questions, not to give the player an answer, any answer, but just to ask questions.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s why I connected so strongly with your way of thinking and making games, because it is so rare. And that’s the kind of media that I like consuming in other formats as well. I like watching films or television that ask questions, and I often feel patronized when I watch a documentary and it tells me exactly what to think about a subject. I don’t actually think you do that. I think you offer me new areas to think, but you’re not presenting me with an easy answer that I can go spout off on social media about.
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, great. It was basically our aim that, you know, just ask questions, not to give you an answer or show you the right way. It’s also quite interesting that, you know, we are making games worldwide, basically, like for a very wide audience. And we are right now in the phase of gathering data. But we already see that different people from different countries, different continents, different cultures take those decisions differently. Basically, there is a trend that players from Asian countries are more likely to go into dictatorship, while America or, you know, Europe is less likely to go in that direction, which is also quite, quite interesting.
But I don’t know if we should, you know, judge and try to assess which way is good or which way is bad, because it’s totally — what to say it — our point of view might be simply different than the point of view of people from different cultures.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a good point as well. I also like that even if you do value democracy and you do value it while playing the game, trying to be an ethical ruler has cost to it, and you have to judge those costs and trade them off against other goods that you want to achieve. That is not something that people have a lot of practice with.
Maciej Sułecki: Yeah, of course. And games are a great medium to, you know, to ask those questions basically, because when you read a book or watch a film, watch a movie, you just see or you just read about, you know, some decisions of other people. And when playing a game, you can test yourself. Even if it’s just a game, you know, it’s just a game, the stake is really low. Basically you have saves and you can simply load the game from there or start the game from the beginning. So the stake is really, really low comparing to, you know, real life situations. But still, there is that — you can take a decision by yourself. And this is quite unique in this medium, I believe.
And it’s really, it’s really unique. And I believe games should — what to say it — should use that advantage over other media when they want to tell some stories, pass some messages. I’m just really glad that games are, you know, quite a new medium, and the games with each year are talking about more and more serious issues or topics. And I hope that this will be quite normal and we will have more and more serious and interesting games, because it’s a great medium, you know, to experience.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks so much for being here. I’m glad we’re able to make this happen. I’m a big fan, as you know, and look forward always to your future creative work.
Maciej Sułecki: Thank you for being here.
