The gameplay of the building strategy game Frostpunk takes place in a post-apocalyptic ice age. It is set in an alternate timeline of the year 1886 in England. The player takes the role of a leader and tries to build one of the last cities on earth. There is a main scenario in which the pure survival of the city through the ice age is at stake. The player must provide the inhabitants with shelter, food and warmth. The population is divided into workers, engineers and children. In addition, there are machines called Automatons, which can take over parts of the work. Workers and Automatons collect raw materials, which are necessary for the construction of buildings, the supply of the population as well as for research. Through different research directions, additional buildings and game mechanics can be unlocked. The game is characterised by a scarcity of resources and temperatures of -20 degrees Celsius at the most. In the course of the game, the player has the possibility to send scouts into the tundra. In doing so, the population can be increased and raw materials and outposts can be found. The latter enable a permanent import of a resource after their establishment. The player often has to make decisions and pass laws, which can cause moral and social dilemmas. In addition to ensuring survival, the main goal is to keep the dissatisfaction of the population as low as possible and their hope as high as possible. In the course of the game, the player is confronted with radical and quite morally questionable possibilities to keep these variables within the desirable range. For this purpose, laws can be passed, whereby after some time an orientation in religion or discipline can be selected, which depending on the law decision can take on a totalitarian or character in its extreme form. Apart from the main campaign, there are three additional scenarios and an endless mode. The difficulty is freely selectable at the beginning of the game. The game can be saved at any time. There is no real tutorial, the player can only read about some of the game mechanics in texts that appear in the background during the game.

Within the research on Frostpunk, it is investigated whether the player recognises the social and moral dilemmas created by the game during play and how he/she deals with these dilemmas. The focus is on whether the player has made decisions on a moral, strategic or pragmatic basis. During the game phase, the players are observed and their decrees are noted down. Immediately after the game phase, the players will be interviewed about their reasons for their actions, looking for social and moral reasons. In addition, the interview will reflect on the extent to which these decisions would be made in the same way in reality, in order to control the effect of the fictional reality of the game. The aim is to find out to what extent immersion takes place and whether there is a connection between the players' actions, their own moral conception and their degree of reflection.

The series of experiments is currently still in the experimental data collection phase. After the data evaluation, a teaching concept for the school subject ethics will be developed.