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It has been nearly a decade now since This War of Mine came out and changed the landscape of representing war in video games. It dared to raise questions that have long been asked elsewhere but ignored in video games - what about the unarmed, the civilians, the NPCs who are stuck as the two forces rage war?
The trailer starts off with the familiar imageries of a war game. Soldiers decked out in appropriate gear with guns in hand running towards an unspecified target, an armored tank, explosions and gunfire. These are all the necessary tropes that exist through and through in popular and successful war games, but This War of Mine shifts the focus at that precise moment.
The frame shifts into the inside of a house. The music softens down and the gun sounds become clearer. There are three adults, one clearly injured, probably dead, and a child standing behind them. The frame stops there, and the text comes up on the screen –
‘In war, not everyone is a soldier.'
The familiar siren of emergency blares up as the trailer ends with a handprint on the title, This War of Mine. The short video is packed with enough indications that the game is attempting to transgress the prevalent norms of representation of war in the medium of video games.
Surviving in This War of Mine
Polish game development company 11 bit Studios published This War of Mine in 2014. It is inspired by the despicable living conditions and wartime atrocities that were meted out to Bosnian civilians during the 1992-96 Siege of Sarajevo.
The player begins with a random assortment of characters in a broken-down dilapidated house, outside of which "F*ck the War" is written on a wall, amidst a sieged city in war. The playthrough starts with a quote from Hemingway preparing the player for the upcoming ordeal.
And then, Day 1.
The house has some amount of resources, usually in the rubbles or cupboards, to help in the beginning. The characters have their own background stories of who they were before the war and how they ended up there.
Not all of them knew each other before the war, but now they are bound to stay there together and look out for each other. This leads to the forging of camaraderie or a community feeling where each character understands that their survival depends upon not just themselves but also others.
Forging communities in face of adversity
This is the trailer put out by the studio showcasing the gameplay. Radoslaw Bomba comments on this aspect of the coming together of different characters for the benefit of the group and how it is required to survive the war in This War of Mine:
“It is also somewhat the idea of homeostasis, a balance based on specialization and symmetry of needs, which are to be a remedy for large and small conflicts."
The developers emphasize this communal aspect in the gameplay. The characters also have unique skills that factor into the survivability of the group – like Bruno is good at cooking, so he takes less firewood to make a dish. Roman is trained in combat and therefore hardened to violence, while Boris is strong so can carry more items while scavenging, and the list goes on.
The presence of these extra mechanisms in This War of Mine allows the players to carefully plan as to how they will progress. The main goal of each session is to survive till a ceasefire is declared, which is randomized.
During the day, characters cannot go out due to the fear of snipers, and this time can be used for building, eating, resting, and treating wounds. Kacper Kwiatkowski, a writer and story designer on the development team, describes:
"[The limited] choice of activities available for the player during this phase reflects how the lives of people during such events [are] frequently reduced to minimal, primitive forms, where even satisfying basic human needs becomes a challenge."
At night, the player can choose to keep everybody in, sleeping or guarding, or send one out to one of the locations qvailable in This War of Mine's map to scavenge for the necessary materials.
Each location also carries its own narrative – there are locations with thugs, soldiers, an old couple trying to survive, and homeless people who have taken shelter. The player has to direct whichever character they have chosen to send out to navigate through the location and get resources like building materials, food, or medicine.
A look at the characters in This War of Mine
The predominant focus of the game, in which lies its ingenuity, is on the characters, who occupy the margins or are invisible and at most an ill-realized NPC in mainstream games about war. Ryan House in Reframing the domestic experience of war in This War of Mine notes:
"Narratives of war in video games, for instance, typically focus on the hypermasculine experiences of war, presenting the player with a power fantasy in which they assume either the role of the hero single-handedly combatting an onslaught of enemy forces or that of a master tactician strategically deploying troops from the perspective of the general- god, all in the pursuit of an ideologically righteous goal. These depictions of war frame life as existing in one of two ways: either as a subject who exists to inflict death upon others or as objects to be killed."
The imaginary space of war in such military games affects its white male-dominated audience into believing that to be the only narrative of the war. The usual depiction of protagonists in war narratives in games is of a nationalistic one-man army fighting for their country against the villains.
This War of Mine reframes the representation of war from a hypermasculine glorification of violence to the communal survival of those whose marginalized realities are seldom depicted. Ryan House compares these characters to what Judith Butler calls "ungrievable lives" in her 2009 book Frames of War – lives that are not to be grieved for.
The player has to keep a close tab on the moods of these characters, like hungry, ill, sad, wounded, etc. The conditions progressively become severe if not taken care of and usually result in death from starvation or severe wounds.
Sometimes characters will even commit suicide if they are depressed and broken. The alteration to mental health happens because of actions like theft, or stealing from others, or killing others.
In playthroughs, the player can come across the Quiet House location where an old couple was staying. The player can choose to raid their house for actual need back at home or without a reason, as the husband pleads not to because they need the food and medicines to survive.
When the player comes back the next morning, all of the characters in their house will be sad because of their actions, irrespective of why they did it. If the player later again visits the Quiet House, they will find the couple dead, presumably because they stole their supplies.
Agency, choices and morality
The moralistic options in This War of Mine are didactic in nature, but here the reality of war forces the player to make choices whose right and wrong is shrouded. Should the player have not stolen and let the wounded person back at home die?
The game provides the possibility of actions like stealing, killing, ignoring, trading, etc. when possible, but it does not enforce it. The game simulates the experience of civilians struck in these war-stricken areas by putting the player in an uncomfortable situation.
A person being told about the game commented, "This is not a game to me." It was their childhood.
There is a touch of personal within the game, enforced by its title, This War of Mine. War can happen at anyone’s doorstep and the reality that most of us will live through is echoed in the narrative of This War of Mine rather than that of Call of Duty.
Janeth Murray, in Hamlet on the Holodeck, defines agency as the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices. The video game medium offers such an agency where the player, through a possible recognition or misrecognition, with the protagonist of the game, writes their own narrative in each playthrough.
In This War of Mine, the actions the player takes have serious consequences that play out as the days go on. The aspect of perma-death showcases how much weight each of those decisions carry.
A wounded, depressed, or starving person will move slower and be unwilling to perform a task. If anyone leaves or dies, the playthrough has to be finished with the other remaining characters. The gameplay further emphasizes this unique portrayal of war.
This War of Mine is played from a side-scrolling 2D perspective with the locations looking akin to a doll-house. The color shade of the game is predominantly on the darker side with visible line strokes. Contrasting this, the mainstream or popular action games have hyper-realistic representation of the characters, the surroundings with a first-person or a third-person view.
In This War of Mine, the characters have little cards at the bottom left of the screen with their picture, bio, and thoughts. The pictures are photos of actual people, which furthers the player into being empathetic towards the characters.
The haunting music score and the looming threat of winter, violent raids, and escalation keep the player and the characters on their toes and at the edge of their nerves. In its portrayal of war, This War of Mine’s inclusion of children as playable characters provides further depth to understanding domestic life in a zone of conflict or a besieged city.
Children are usually filtered out in war games but their presence in this game becomes a constant reminder to the player of the number of lives, irrespective of age, affected by war. One particular incident in This War of Mine is a harrowing bit of an event that invokes a similar moralistic dilemma as the ones mentioned earlier.
Two children show up at the door of the house and ask for two medications to help their sick mother.
"We live several blocks away from here, our mom's very ill, she needs medications, could you please spare any? Without your help she will die! After daddy went to fight, we have only her ... Please, help us save her ..."
Medications are hard to come by in This War of Mine and are a precious commodity. The dilemma then is if the player provides them with the necessary medicines, if they have that much amount, or if the player keeps it fearing a bleak future for their "own" people.
How can war be represented, if at all
This War of Mine provides a nuanced representation from a different perspective than usually found in this medium. The central narrative of the game written by the player, different in each iteration of the play, is informed by the stories of struggle of the various characters, each unique from the other.
The gametext of This War of Mine is thus not one streamlined experience glorifying war and military achievements, but a mesh of fleshed-out beings trying to survive a struggle that they cannot affect but that which constantly affects them.
The game’s shift to allow the player to control civilians in the besieged fictional city of Pogoren destabilizes the prevalent norms of war games. It introduces the player to an experience that was filtered out, overlooked, or simply pushed to the margins in other games. This is the reality that countless people around the world live in, even now.
This War of Mine becomes an exercise in morality, where the player is not a super-soldier single-handedly bringing down a regime but the common man, the NPCs in mainstream war games. The stage is no longer the trenches or the battlegrounds, but the broken-down buildings in the city. War is in our home now.
