Digital Frontiers: The Polar Regions and Popular Geopolitics in Video Games

Erdem Lamazhapov
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Erdem Lamazhapov: Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Norway / Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway

Ocean and Society, 2026, vol. 3

Abstract: Video games have emerged as a significant domain of popular culture, offering an excellent arena for analyzing popular geopolitics. Meanwhile, the polar regions occupy a marginal position in global geopolitics, yet they play an important role in geopolitical narratives. By connecting the literature on critical geopolitics and studies on ecocritical games, the current research examines how the polar oceans are portrayed as geopolitical frontiers across various video game genres, including strategy, adventure, and survival horror. It explores how video games produce and reproduce popular geopolitical imaginaries of the polar regions amid a global polycrisis. Drawing on the concept of governmentality, this study also analyzes how different titles encode state‐centered, extractive, and colonial logics as well as alternative decolonial perspectives. We argue that video games both mirror and shape public understandings of polar geopolitics: They naturalize administrative, utilitarian views of the poles while also offering spaces in which to critique coloniality and imagine alternative relations to environment and governance.

Keywords: Antarctic; Arctic; climate change; governmentality; Indigenous; popular culture; popular geopolitics; strategy games; survival horror; video games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:ocesoc:v3:y:2026:a:11462

DOI: 10.17645/oas.11462

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