In War, Not Everyone Is a Soldier

Saturday, June 7th, 2014

Many video games have a military theme, and in many of those, the player plays as some kind of soldier — or super-soldier. In war, not everyone is a soldier though, as 11 Bit Studios’ This War of Mine illustrates:

By day, your group of civilians hides from snipers. By night, you sneak out for building supplies and medicine, or contrive ways to capture rainwater for drinking.

The game, which will be available on mobile, Mac, PC, and Linux, is about the difficult moral choices people make every day in the face of violence-induced scarcity. “Try to protect everybody from your shelter or sacrifice some of them in order to prevail,” says the press release, “there are no good or bad decisions during war.”

To calibrate the options available to their players, game designers studied accounts from Syria and Sarajevo. They also talked with an American soldier who had been in Fallujah.

“While designing a new game,” lead designer Michal Drozdowski explained in a blog post, he and his team read a viral online account called “One Year in Hell,” written by a Bosnian about his life in the early 1990s. “We learned about his hardships and the horror of that experience. We decided to work around this idea and make something real, something that moves people and makes them think for a second. It’s about time that games, just like any other art form, start talking about important things.”

They should really merge the project with one of the big first-person shooters, so some players are blithely blowin’ $#@! up, while others are losing friends and family and looking for clean water.

Comments

  1. Robb Seaton says:

    The game, which will be available on mobile, Mac, PC, and Linux, is about the difficult moral choices people make every day

    I would like to play a game where you lose points whenever you spend money on a latte instead of doing an expected value calculation.

    “there are no good or bad decisions during war.”

    This is hard to leave alone, but I think I will restrain myself.

  2. Spandrell says:

    Hah, agreed that would be an awesome idea. Some fighters would get distracted and go rape female civilians while better organized teams would win the battle and kill everyone off.

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