Before a player of Call of Duty returns to the virtual front line after suffering a defeat, he must enter the purgatory of the game’s loading screen. In most iterations of the American-made series, which has generated more than ten billion dollars in sales since its début, in 2003, the screen consists of a still image and a quotation, usually of the martial variety—something attributed to Churchill or Stalin or Sun Tzu. A few of these snippets of wisdom speak to war’s sorrowful costs, but most aim to inspire or ennoble. The Polish-made video game This War of Mine, by contrast, begins with the same quotation every time, a paraphrasing of Hemingway at his most macabre: “In modern war you will die like a dog, for no good reason.”

Not that the surviving residents of the shell-pocked building in which much of the game takes place are likely to come by a whole lot of Hemingway. “We miss books,” Katia, an ex-journalist, says, in the game’s opening scenes. “A good book could help us forget the horrors of war.” Those horrors are visible both outside the building, in the burning silhouette of a war-withered city—the game was inspired by the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted from 1992 to 1996—and inside, where hunger, sickness, and boredom flourish.

This War of Mine is largely homebound. It establishes a regular rhythm of existence: nighttime is for roaming and scavenging, daytime for eating, sleeping, and bartering (all of it to keening electric-guitar accompaniment, as though the XX, or some equivalently mournful group of musicians, were holed up with you). Even if Katia got her hands on a book, she might soon trade it to a haggard local for some fuelwood or bandages. These are the essentials of survival in the besieged city. Without wood, she cannot light her stove, either to cook the scraps of meat that she catches in traps or to heat the room. Her challenge, and yours, is not to escape but to endure.

At a press conference in February, 1991, General Norman Schwarzkopf told the American people that war is “not a video game.” Nevertheless, as the University of Georgia professor Roger Stahl argues in his book “Militainment, Inc.,” games like Call of Duty are “increasingly both the medium and the metaphor by which we understand war.” Authenticity is central to the contemporary military-themed video game’s approach. (Compare, for instance, this footage of an AC-130 gunship strike in Afghanistan with a mission from 2007’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.) While the developers have painstakingly replicated, say, the electrical squeal that a pair of night-vision goggles makes when switched on, you will not see through those goggles such scenes as Hemingway described in “Notes on the Next War,” the 1935 Esquire essay from which This War of Mine’s opening quotation is taken: legs lost in an explosion, “the white bone sticking through your puttee.” Neither do most video games capture the effects of conflict on the human psyche.

“War has many different faces, not only that of the adrenaline-pumped shootout,” Michal Drozdowski, the creative director of 11 Bit Studios, the company behind This War of Mine, told me recently. “The primary experience of people in war is usually of lurking and waiting for things to happen.” Like soldiers, he said, bus drivers, cashiers, and other civilians “must do what is necessary to survive.” In the game, this involves no small number of moral dilemmas. Is it worth venturing to the derelict local supermarket, or should you raid the home of the slow-footed elderly couple next door? A trip to their well-stocked larder may well extend your life, which, in turn, will give you time to learn to live with yourself.

The makers of This War of Mine do not see their game as politically or artistically reactionary. “Our motivation wasn’t so much to create a natural opposite to many war games as to create a different kind of dramatic experience, something closer to a tragedy,” Pawel Miechowski, a senior writer at 11 Bit, told me. But tragedy is the natural opposite of Call of Duty-style triumphalism. In turning its focus away from the high drama of conflict, This War of Mine runs counter to a broader cultural project that, through the lens of entertainment, makes us more familiar with—and perhaps more readily accepting of—war itself. Drozdowski will admit that his team hoped to defy player expectation. “Video games have programmed us to see characters in games as enemies, or to believe that there is always a perfect solution, or even a riddle to be solved,” he said. “But, in This War of Mine, there is often no good or obvious choice. It’s always simply about trying to survive the night, in the hope that, in the morning, the guns will have stopped.”

Despite the two years of research that went into the game’s development, the accuracy of its depiction of life in Sarajevo during wartime is debatable. As one survivor of the siege noted in an online comment, 11 Bit gets certain things right, particularly the feeling of an ad-hoc existence lacking in comforts. “I remember my father bringing me a can of Pepsi,” the commenter wrote. “I looked at that thing for a week before opening and drinking it.” But other aspects of the narrative, he argued, are flawed:

This game portrays people as getting colder and more selfish as the time went on. It was exactly the opposite. Everyone shared everything. People helped each other in ways they would never do today. ... You have people on the hills shelling you with up to three thousand shells per day, trust me, breaking into someone’s place is the last thing on your mind.

This War of Mine may not achieve virtual credibility, but its makers have sought it in the real world. Last month, in conjunction with the charity War Child, 11 Bit released an add-on chapter to the game to raise money for young Syrians displaced by conflict. For Miechowski and his colleagues, the initiative represents a way for an industry that has profited enormously from depictions of war to give something back. “I think pop culture has trivialized war too far and, as pop-culture consumers, we’re all responsible for that,” he said. According to Miechowski, the partnership has raised enough money to fund psychiatric-support services and informal education for four hundred children. Activision, the publisher of Call of Duty, has a similar charity project, which aims to place twenty-five thousand U.S. veterans in jobs by the end of 2018. In each case, the game makers are supporting the group from which they have drawn inspiration and profit—one, the veterans of war, the other, its victims, if indeed there is any distinction.