This War of Mine

A version of this article appears in our most recent podcast episode dated 7th March, 2022.

Video games have the power to take us to many different places. Fantasy worlds, worlds in the distant past or the far flung future, and occasionally to other parts of our world to shine a light on different cultures, communities, environments, social structures and events.

I had a fantastic experience playing a game called Raji: An Ancient Epic last year, which was a game developed by independent game studio in India which used the ancient mythology from Indian culture to paint a brilliant fantasy action-adventure story which simultaneously shone a light on an incredibly deep well of amazing stories that you don’t often see pulled from in Western media, but with so many familiar elements from what we know of modern day Hinduism and from other cultures’ myths and legends that really highlights the melting pot of global religion and how many shared elements there are between them when you examine them at their core.

This War of Mine shows us a world that I have no touchstone for. In an industry like the video games industry where fighting, guns and especially warfare are monumentally glamourised, sensationalised and capitalised into billion dollar franchises, I cannot express how important it is for a game like This War of Mine to exist to show us what the real cost of conflict is. Not the cost of ammunition, not the cost of expanding an army base, not the cost of a vintage WW2 skin for your character, and certainly not the cost of a novelty hat for your avatar to wear as you throw bigoted insults at your competitors’ mothers. 

This War of Mine shows you how war affects those left behind from the fighting, those trying to stay safe, stay sane and survive. The game will present different scenarios to you depending on how you want to play the game, but you will typically start with 1 or 2 people in a house. Your first port of call is trying to make sure that you have food and water, make sure the entrances and exits to your shelter are protected from threats or the weather. You can use your time in the day to repair things in your house, clear debris and craft essentials, or simply just to rest and recover from what happens in the night. Because it’s only under the cover of darkness that it’s safe to go outside to see if you can scavenge resources to help you through to the next night. 

When the sun sets, you’ll be able to explore nearby towns, settlements and buildings and try and find anything that can be of use. It might be a firearm, it might be some rations, it might be some materials that you can use to fashion a workbench or a new bed back at your stronghold, or you might find a broken guitar that you can repair or a book to read to help boost morale in your company. 

There was an extraordinary moment when I was on one of my first raids that opened my eyes to what this game was really trying to tell me. I’m playing a video game, so I’m approaching it like I’ve approached other video games. When you go to a location to scavenge, you might be unlucky to run into some soldiers who you have to either sneak past or confront - although confronting soldiers will almost certainly result in instant death. You can’t crouch and wait for your health to recover - you can’t superhumanly pull off a combo that nabs you three headshots and a XP bonus.

This isn’t a game.

If a soldier sees you where you’re not supposed to be, they will kill you, but sometimes you will find other people trying to survive, they might have formed a small community and are cagey, trying to protect their own and they don’t know if you’re a friend or foe, they don’t know what you’ve done to survive so far and what you might be willing to do to survive another day. They don’t know if you’re a spy or a soldier or a civilian. You might find a couple of people just hunkering down and hoping that if they stay quiet they might escape unseen, and it was a couple like this that I encountered on this raid - just an old couple in a house, trying to stay calm and safe. They were easy to sneak past, they were just sitting quietly in their living room and I could go through all their drawers, cupboards and fridges to take as much as I wanted. I was so glad that I hadn’t filled up all my inventory slots with wood and nails because I had found enough food and water here to keep myself and the two people back at the house going for several several days, which was a huge relief because resources are so scarce, and it meant that I could focus my future scavenges on finding other resources to develop my homestead further. Why wouldn’t I fill my pockets with everything that I could - Skyrim style - just taking as much as I could carry and filling up my inventory? Because this isn’t an item list, this isn’t just a bunch of materials to make daggers and swords from, this is the food and water of two people trying to survive, and if I take it, they don’t have it. And come the morning, I found out that my actions had resulted in the death of these two people. My character didn’t know how to take this news, his morale fell to dangerous levels, I sent him to lie down to try and rest, he wasn’t willing to eat, he didn’t have the strength to do any work to take his mind off things. I sent another of my group to talk to him to try and support him, he didn’t want to talk, I sat somebody next to him to play some music, he went to sleep. By the next morning he’d taken his life. This devastated the rest of my party, they couldn’t cope, they didn’t make it.

Actions have consequences. And the thing this game does so well is show that your specific actions, your specific choices have specific consequences. Not to use this as another opportunity to rag on The Last of Us - but that is a game, we have said, that forces you to kill someone and then forces you to feel sad about it. This War of Mine, those decisions are yours to make and how you feel about it afterwards is all the more powerful knowing that you had the power to do or not do it. 

This isn’t a game. 

There is no crescendo to a finale showdown or a big set piece to close the story. You don’t know how long you need to survive for, it could be 2 weeks, it could be 10, could be 20 - you can’t pace yourself, and you can’t always prepare for what’s to come. I woke one morning in the game to find that there had been an earthquake which had collapsed a floor in my house. One person dead, one person injured and too much debris for one strong pair of hands to clear. All you can do is take each day and night as they come and try and make it to the next one. And if you keep doing that, one day, hopefully you wake up to the news that the conflict has ceased and you’re still alive. But there isn’t any fanfare, you don’t have a celebration with everyone else who made it, because the cost of human life vastly outweighs the reality of your individual situation - you will not make it through a campaign of This War of Mine without understanding that in war, usually the cost of one person surviving is the loss of many many other human lives. 

In the current climate with the Ukraine - Russia conflict threatening to escalate at goodness knows what rate, the developers of This War of Mine have said that they are donating all their profits from the game to the Ukrainian Red Cross. That window will have passed by the time this is published, but I would really urge you, if you can to find a charity to donate to, to support the Ukrainian people against a megalomaniacal tyrant. But also, think of the Russians who oppose this, they will also have people left behind, people trying to survive and hoping their family members come back to them, or hoping that they can oppose the war without receiving a bullet to the head themselves for daring to oppose the power. 

I’m not qualified to take a stance on these things, and to know the full breadth of the reasons behind warfare, invasion, national borders and history, but I’ll always remember what Andy Burnham, who’s the Mayor of Manchester, said to me when I spoke with him when he was in the running for Labour leadership. We spoke about nationalism, and he said that the problem with any nationalist party or nationalist views is, by their nature, they will prioritise borders over people. The same way that Boris Johnson prioritises the economy over human life in the COVID pandemic. If your priority is not to help and save human lives, what are you doing?

The tagline of This War of Mine is a simply defiant ‘Fuck The War’.

Fuck all wars, fuck conflict, fuck egos, fuck power, fuck money, fuck nationalism, fuck patriotism, fuck pride, fuck politics, fuck Putin, fuck dictators, fuck the unkind, the selfish, the bigots, the arrogant and the ignorant, fuck borders, fuck history, fuck entitlement, fuck fighting, fuck death. 

Have courage and be kind.