From the Story of Four to the Fate of Forty Thousand

This War of Mine, Frostpunk and Frostpunk 2 are games about difficult moral choices, which differ in one very important thing – the scale of the experience. As that scale increases, it becomes a greater design challenge to maintain the player’s emotional involvement. This talk explores the designer’s tools we used to emotionally engage the player – from giving characters personal stories, to exposing their suffering, to building systems that maintain emotional attachment. I’ll show you how to set the environment for moral choices, whether you’re trying to save four people or forty thousand.