In War, Not Everyone Is a Soldier
15th June 2014
In most war games, players are out for blood. But a soon-to-be-released game from 11 Bit Studios turns that shoot ’em up convention on its head.
In This War of Mine, survival is the only goal. 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.
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“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.”
This is, of course, horseshit. Games are recreations, nothing more, in which people do things that take them away from the tedium that constitutes the bulk of most people’s daily lives. I’d like to see the author cram golf or tennis or bowling into her grimly ideological framework of ‘talking about important things’.
If someone wants to create a simulation of what it’s like to be a civilian in a war zone, then he is certainly free to do so, just as he is free to write a story about the same thing — but it isn’t a game except in the most academic sense.
June 17th, 2014 at 09:04
“Games are recreations, nothing more”. I find this hard to swallow. Given the passion with which most people play games, they mean much more than recreation.
Because games impose artificial constraints (60 minutes, 9 innings, 18 holes), they bring other aspects of life into focus more sharply. There’s a child’s toy made of rubber, where, if you squeeze it, the character’s nose, lips, etc. bulge out. In a sense, games do the same things to our lives. By squeezing time, they make other characteristics more apparent.
Golf, for example. It’s been written that golf exposes character, or the lack thereof, and I believe it. If you see a man who kicks his ball from behind a tree, or concedes all his own putts, I can tell you he is a man who takes short cuts in life and business. The guy who’s always fuming about the slow play in front is probably the same guy who’s angry at himself for missed opportunities in life; he’s always trying to catch up. Like it or not, the game reveals us to ourselves and others.
Or, since the World Cup is on, soccer/football. There is no ‘official clock’ for the players in soccer; there is only the referee’s watch, which is hidden. Yes, you are aware that time is winding down, but you still have time for that one last spurt that may produce the winning goal – or the referee may blow the whistle while you are getting ready to shoot. As with our lives, we don’t know when the end is coming, and thus we must play hard/live to the fullest until the end is truly nigh.