The research project ‘On Thin Ice: Precarious Polar Worlds in Indie Video Games’ examines the forms and potential functions of the depiction of polar ice landscapes in indie video games. Firstly, the project assumes that the portrayal of the polar regions (and their disappearance) in times of advancing climate change possesses a specific symbolic power, which is also brought to the fore within the games. Secondly, it posits that, through the direct involvement of players, video games are particularly well-suited to enabling players to experience feelings of agency (or powerlessness) in the face of acutely threatened (polar) habitats, and are capable of contributing to the development of players’ sense of responsibility.

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In order to reconstruct the forms and functional potential of the games, ‘Auf dünnem Eis’ analyses selected indie video games as case studies across four work packages: Using an approach informed by a critique of representation and guided by categories of game narratology, the project investigates how these games depict the polar regions—on an audiovisual, narrative and ludic level—as regions that are both hostile to life and under threat; how they hold whom responsible for the threat to these landscapes, and to whom they attribute what form of agency . In doing so, the games are viewed, on the one hand, as potentially critical and reflective spaces for thought and experience; on the other hand, however, they are also examined to determine whether and how, in addressing precarious conditions, they sometimes also reproduce these conditions, be it through the repetition of stereotypical representational patterns or their embeddedness in production relations that are based on global inequalities and ultimately contribute to the further endangerment of the regions in question. Building on this analysis of narratives of precarity, ‘Auf dünnem Eis’ develops the concept of ‘Polar Precarity’ as an analytical framework in a fifth work package, which cuts across the case studies. This perspective, informed by ecocritical and postcolonial approaches, makes it possible, on the one hand, to highlight the interconnection between ecological and social developments in the production of multiple forms of precariousness in the polar regions. On the other hand, it also allows for a critical reflection on the potential reproduction of precisely these conditions in and through the games and can – not least in the sense of a self-reflexive examination of the positionalities of both the players and those researching the games – to highlight the ambivalence of the playful engagement with anthropogenic climate change.

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