In March 2014, a few months before the release of This War of Mine, the developers at 11 Bit Studios were discussing potential endings to their video game story of civilians trying to survive in a war-torn city. Wojciech Setlak, one of the writers, suggested they have a neighbouring country intervene, sending in troops to gain control of part of the weakened nation.

A month later, in the real world, militia flying Russian flags – known to the locals as “little green men” – appeared in eastern Ukraine. “It was uncanny,” says Setlak. “We had anticipated something that actually happened.”

11 Bit eventually decided against that particular ending. As Setlak explains, they didn’t want their game perceived to be about one specific conflict. Instead, the game – a nominee in the Design Museum’s 2016 Designs of The Year awards – uses the fictional city of Pogoren, Graznavia to tell a more general story about what it’s like to be a civilian during modern conflict.

It’s a war game not about shooting, but about trying to survive while caught in the crossfire – a story that has only become more relevant amid the ongoing refugee crisis.

“We didn’t want to set our game in one specific city and in one specific year,” says Maciej Sułecki, a designer on This War of Mine and the lead designer on its child-focused expansion, The Little Ones. “So we tried to catch this general city look. We think about districts with markets, for example, districts with blocks of flats. We tried to add some older buildings to give our city an eastern European look.”

Pogoren is mostly based on 20th-century sieges that took place close to 11 Bit’s location in Poland: the sieges of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992-1995) and Grozny (Chechnya, 1999), the Warsaw Uprising (Poland, 1944), and the siege of Leningrad (Russia, 1941). But it’s easy to see parallels in more recent urban conflicts, like the current battle over Aleppo, which began the same year the game came out. Like Aleppo, Pogoren is without running water, has had its medical facilities targeted, and has been refused aid.

A still from Emir Cerimovic’s game on the siege of Sarajevo, Saragame. Illustration: Emir Cerimovic/Saragame

One common thread, of course, is the urban setting. “This is how modern conflicts look,” says another writer on the game, Pawel Miechowski. “Civilians don’t hide in the forest because the means for living are where they are.”

“We wanted to show how usual [urban] places are transformed during wartime,” explains Setlak. “Well-known and safe places become deathtraps – in Sarajevo, one of the main streets became the infamous Sniper Alley.”

Some locations have multiple possible states, such as the uncovered market: “In one scene it’s still a marketplace; in another it can be deserted because it’s under sniper fire. The church can be a place of refuge, or it can be overrun by bandits.”

Food is hard to come by in This War of Mine, and if your little group of civilians can’t scavenge enough from abandoned buildings, they may have to steal, trade with neighbours, or create makeshift rat traps. Every night you can send one survivor to search one of several locations that vary in safety and accessibility: a ruined block of flats, a supermarket, a hospital.

Women run across ‘Sniper Alley’ in Sarajevo in 1995. Photograph: Tom Stoddart/Getty Images

During development, 11 Bit received feedback from a man named Emir Cerimovic who experienced the siege of Sarajevo as a child, and has even made his own game about it. Other survivors criticised This War of Mine for its pessimistic view of humanity. Setlak points out, however, that Sarajevo still had a functioning local government at the time of the siege “so society didn’t deteriorate”, he says, implying that Sarajevan critics felt the game was an exaggerated version of events. Though 11 Bit’s research into other conflicts revealed plenty of extreme circumstances, like cannibalism in Leningrad.

“It involved a lot of reading,” says Setlak. “And at the height of it I had to take a break because I was becoming depressed. No matter what I thought up, I had no problem finding examples of suffering inflicted on people in war zones that were too extreme to really put them in the game.”

Despite his insistence that the conversation stay away from politics (“we’re game developers, not politicians, and I hope that’s never going to change,”) Miechowski describes This War of Mine as “an anti-war message”, though he’s unsure if that sentiment is a result of their country’s history.

“On the one hand we are the grandsons and granddaughters of war survivors. On the other hand, I hope we’re just sensitive people, and there are sensitive people all around the world.” They also wanted to prove that games could tackle serious topics. “Games grew up,” says Miechowski, highlighting examples like Papers, Please, which casts you as an immigration officer in the fictional communist country of Arstotzka.

“Games have one advantage on movies or books,” says Sułecki, “because games show us the perspective of these people.” He believes their game is ill-placed to specifically tackle the current refugee crisis, however, since it’s set at the end of the 20th century. This War of Mine mentions refugee camps but, as Sułecki says, “I think the nature of these refugee camps during war that happened in the 90s or earlier was a little bit different than the refugee crisis that we have now.”

As far as the broader question of what life is like for a noncombatant in modern conflict, however, Setlak says their game is still relevant today. “People trapped in a war zone suffer the same regardless of time and place, and for all the unbelievable resilience of communities facing deadly threats, their fate ultimately depends on the intensity of the conflict, the ruthlessness of ‘men with guns’.

“This was, I think, the most important lesson from our research, confirming the knowledge ingrained in us by the war stories every Polish family has: that war bears down most heavily on those least capable of influencing its outcome.”

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