This War of Mine is an indie survival game on Steam, created by 11 bit studios, that strips away the glorification of war, uncovering the grim, raw, and brutal reality sheltered underneath. In this game, the developers importantly shift the narrative away from combatants, instead opting to tell the stories of the often unheard — citizens, the victims of wars.
I played roughly over an hour of this game.
This War of Mine follows a group of citizens attempting to survive in a besieged city as they fall ill, try to survive the elements, and are forced to scavenge for supplies, navigating hostile encounters with competing survivors for scarce resources.
The target audience for this game is indubitably a mature audience: one that hopes to understand—as best as they can through a video game—the experience of a citizenry ravaged by war and the tribulations they encounter.
The tone and message of the game is clear and pronounced, declared to the reader upon starting the game: War is ugly, brutal, and unglorifying.
Image: On starting the game, This War of Mine shows this quote from Ernest Hemmingway, setting the tone for the game to follow.
This War of Mine’s message is unfiltered, blunt and efficient. War is not romantic, nor beautiful, nor fun and exciting. War is survival in its rawest, most unfiltered form — a crude example of human depravity. War destroys people, from the inside out.
The game’s mechanics of looting and scavenging help to hammer this down. As you move through locations, you’re forced to make difficult, immoral decisions. Do you steal from vulnerable survivors to help your own people? Do you help other survivors, sacrificing scarce resources, at your group’s expense? Somewhere in making these decisions, ethics falls through the cracks and all that’s left are the monochrome afterimages of moral grays.
The game’s genre, as an indie survival simulation, further helps to more convey the studio’s message as it allows players to more fully immerse themselves in the struggle of the wartime experience — through gameplay and mechanics, ludonarrative harmony is achieved, and players are forced to weigh strategic decisions and tradeoffs of what to bring with them on scavenging runs, what resources to bring back, and who to help.
Image: Players decide what tools to bring with them when scavenging locations. These tools can help — or they can be dead weight.
Over the course of the game, the player listens to their characters’ dialogue, often mutterances to themselves as they complete tasks for survival. They talk about mundane, human things: books they’re reading, pain, hunger, the cold.
Image: Characters talk — helping create a more immersive narrative and empathy between the player and their characters.
The game’s ability to create empathy for their characters is something I want to translate to my game. It’s seamlessly interwoven into the fabric of the game, through not only the dialogue, but also the mechanics and every action that players decide to make. You are even able to put faces to your characters.
Image: Faces of the characters are in the bottom right.
This War of Mine masters meaningful choices. The choices you make — like which survivor to prioritize with scarce resources — are immediate and clear (and may result in death). The dilemmas are also real — helping one person may mean another dies. It provides a paralyzing agency to the player.
The sound effects (both the music and gunfire and shelling in the background) further help immerse players into the game. For my interactive fiction, I am considering adding sparing sound effects to also help engage readers, drawing them into the narrative more than pure reading may.
Overall, this game was successful in its messaging. This War of Mine made me feel stressed as I made tradeoffs for my group and attempted to survive, day by day, as my morals slipped from my grasp.
IAN BOGOST READING NOTES:
Animal Crossing
• Short description of the game (including description of playable character and Tom Nook)
• Challenging task: paying off mortgage
• Author’s five year old’s experience
◦ Recognized trade off between debt and acquiring more goods/needing more space for them/renovating your home
• Impacts of mortgage:
◦ Not seen IRL but very tangible in the game since Tom Nook upgrades his shop after you make big mortgage payments
• Townspeople:
◦ Don’t consume much
◦ Disdain for Tom Nook
◦ Offer to trade (longing) instead of buy
• Player:
◦ Contrasts townspeople, very consumeristic
◦ Debt, buys, sells, etc.
◦ Financial transactions condensed to only be between player and Tom Nook, models redistribution of wealth very clearly (five year old understood)
• “Keeping up with the Joneses”/small town social dynamics
• Sandbox: explore recombinations of personal wealth
• Animals: Ideal life:| not capitalists, just get to enjoy, don’t pursue wealth or goods
• Takeaways: small town life, environment protection/customization/care, making friends, hobbies (collecting insects), long-term debt, repetition of work to pay for material things, etc.
◦ Model of commerce/debt
◦ Simplification of real systems
• Video games: unique ethos
◦ Build communities, strong “gamer” identity, groups with shared social situations/values in relation to games
◦ Unique culture for different games
◦ Caveat: values for games exist outside of game itself
▪ Social practices of playing instead of social practices represented in the game
▪ Media where cultural values can be represented
▪ Useful for education and modeling real world
Play
• Video games not seen as educational because primary emphasis is often on “play”
◦ Children’s activity
◦ “Valid learning” distinct from play/recess in school
◦ Play only useful to let off steam
• Games: often seen as leisure
◦ Byproduct of misunderstood nature of play
◦ “Play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure”
▪ Possibility space
• Imposing rules on play makes it possible
◦ Ex: playground, physical properties of play space (equipment), given allotted, number of children, etc.
◦ Kids create their own rules: “You be the monster”
◦ Renegotiating relationship w/ space
• Traditional restraints: Haiku, restrains creativity to one structure
• Oulipo: palindrome, lipogram, etc.
◦ Artists invented new constraints
◦ Readers must consider constraints
◦ Equity between audience/author
• Possibility space
◦ Configurations under a set of rules
Procedurality
• Craft representations through rules
• Procedure: static course of action (traditionally)
• Here, much more broad: all constraints that create possibility spaces to explore through play
• Hamlet on the Holodeck: properties of digital artifacts
◦ Procedurality, participation, spatiality, encyclopedic scope
◦ Software authorship as definition for procedurality
◦ Procedure → processor
◦ Algorithms, heuristics, exact or general rules of behavior of a process
• Video games; stronger emphasis on procedurality
• Crunch per bit ratio
◦ Potential for meaningful expression
• Games: express purpose in mind, not just general tool
• Real/imagined systems
◦ AC = everyday life, labor systems
• Game represent things through procedurality
Rhetoric
• Procedure can = entertainment space
• Others → claims about human experience
◦ Often inadvertent
• Making claims = rhetoric
◦ Negative connotations
◦ Flourish, lexis
◦ Smoke screen
◦ Actually just means oratory
• Rhetoric: seen as an art and a skill
◦ Civil rhetoric
◦ “Here, persuasion shifts from the simple achievement of desired ends to the effective arrangement of a work so as to create a desirable possibility space for interpretation”
◦ Need to identify with others
• Burke’s view → visual rhetoric in video games
◦ New rules for visual medium
Procedural Rhetoric
• Using processes persuasively
• Authoring arguments through processes
• Authorship of rules of behavior through programming
• Need a new field to talk about a type of system (like writing vs. oral) that we now interact w/ everyday (software)
• Helps us understand how things work
◦ Assemble particular rules that define a particular function
• Models
◦ Describe function
◦ Persuade a machine works in a given way
◦ Games: extend beyond physical/formal models, might model social/cultural/political processes
• Can argue things don’t work
◦ McDonald’s Videogame
▪ Critic of business practices
▪ Model IRL messed up practices
▪ Public interest groups (reinforce corrupt nature)
▪ Can corrupt scientists/etc.
▪ Tradeoffs of restaurant sector
▪ Rhetoric about “necessity of corruption”
▪ Temptation of greed
• Read argument and interpret relevance in context of own life
Ways of Using Procedural Rhetoric: Interrogating Ideology
• Expose and explain hidden ways of thinking driving social/political/cultural behavior
◦ Ideology
◦ History or work ideology: Plato, Napoleon (substitute abstract theories w/ reason), Marx
• All games have cultural biases
• America’s Army: Operations
◦ Unreal 2
◦ Realistic view of army career opportunities
◦ Abide by rules of warfare, breaking rules = jail in game or expulsion from game
◦ No foul language
◦ Builds a mission-oriented portrayal of the army
• Epistemic games
◦ Model how professions work
◦ Follow values blindly or question values?
Ways of Using Procedural Rhetoric: Making and Unpacking an Argument
• Expose ideology
◦ Not always intentional
• Unpack arguments through play
• Illinois House Republicans
◦ Represent public policy
◦ Rhetoric interacts with candidate’s positions
◦ Subgames
▪ Three for each policy issue and one about citizen participation
◦ Mechanics follow real policy development techniques
◦ Section performance impact one another
◦ Players acknowledge campaign’s position on issues
▪ Can only win medical malpractice subgame by reducing maximum noneconomic damages for malpractice lawsuits
• Bully
◦ Criticized for glorifying bullying
▪ Doesn’t frame it as pleasant, shows impact on Jimmy
▪ Privileges underdogs
◦ Part satire, social commentary
• Spore
◦ Start as cells, end as space-traveling superrace
◦ Theory: life doesn’t arise slowly and naturally but by transport by other lifeforms
◦ View of astrobiology
◦ Explore theory by playing in its possibility space
Learning from Procedural Rhetoric
• Games = model real / imagined systems
• Always play games, but not always leisurely
• Make arguments about the world
• “When we learn to play games with an eye toward uncovering their procedural rhetorics, we learn to ask questions about the models such games present.”
• Tech literacy
◦ Better critics of random-access media
◦ Parents should play game switch kids in all forms, including digital
• Video games aren’t just distraction
• Educators:
◦ Give video game their own place, not just as distraction, replacement, or supplementing other lessons
◦ Practice argumentation
• Teaching programming and development
◦ Can increase interest in math, science, and technology through games
▪ Risk assuming that creating any game is equal in pedagogical value
◦ Need to support sophisticated responses
▪ Critical response, not just producing fun
◦ Conclusion
▪ Videogames aren’t just amusement, but they also aren’t intrinsically sophisticated unless they are designed to be so
▪ Play games critically!
▪ Required fluency in procedurality
▪ Way to understand possibility spaces so we can recognize their extensions IRL
