This War of Mine Analysis, or: Persuasive Games

(This entry was written for SNHU's GAM-205 class in the Fall 2017 semester.)

    This week's entry is about persuasive games. The topic of persuasive games can be a bit misleading. It's not about games that convince you to spend your life savings on their in-game currency so you can, I don't know, be a pretend celebrity with the help of a in-game representation of Kim Kardashian. No, persuasive games are games that attempt to convey a message about real life issues through the gameplay. A good example of this would be This War of Mine, by 11 bit studios.

Sorry, unknown graffiti artist. Boatmurdered was several years ago.

    This War of Mine is not what most people would call a "fun" game, but it's not because of being bland or buggy to the point of being difficult to play. It's because the game is a depressing look at the life of a group of civilians during an expy of the Bosnian War in 1992-1995 During the day, your ragtag group of survivors build improvements, make repairs to their home, and live their lives. At night, one group member can use the cover of night to go exploring and loot abandoned areas, although there may be others who may or may not be friendly. This leads into some heavy ethical dilemmas on the part of the player. Dilemmas such as "Do I let one of my survivors starve or do I rob this old couple?" Being regular people, the survivors, even if they're doing it to survive, will fell guilt over killing and robbing other people, even possibly leading to a member leaving the group or committing suicide. It's a bleak look at a harsh reality with no easy choices., and it's a game I struggled to play. It was either get this blog post out, or spend a week staring at the ceiling trying not to cry. Like I said, no easy choices.

    The message of This War of Mine is a pretty obvious one: War is Hell. But it makes this classic statement in a different way by changing who the player controls. They're not a 'Murican soldier who can survive countless bullets as long as they get several seconds of rest to get the ketchup off of their faces. You're controlling civilians who need actual medical supplies to recover from injuries and who hasn't passed "How to Mow Down Swathes of Your Fellow Man Without Emotion 101." They have to scavenge for supplies when even the military can't be trusted. In a grocery store, for example, you can witness a scene where a conversation between a solider and a survivor turns ugly as the soldier, if uninterrupted, eventually leads the woman away for some "alone time." Obviously this is horrible, but given that you're generally armed with weak, makeshift weaponry, and there are others who rely on your survivor's help, can you really risk it? I would go deeper into the whole "responsibility to others vs. risk" thing, but Roy Halladay died this week, and I don't want to open the same can of worms that was opened on Felger and Mazz, a sports radio show local to the Boston area. (For context, Felger was a bit critical of Roy's actions in the plane since he was a husband and father, and Felger, said if he was the one in the plane, than he felt his death would be well-deserved for being so foolish and irresponsible.)

    The primary goal of a persuasive game is to inform the audience on a real-world issue and persuade them to do something about it. If you want to see another good example of a group who makes persuasive games, I'd suggest the website Persuasive Games. They make a variety of small games on a variety of topics. I remember them from their game on airport security. The game has you examining customers and removing banned items and clothing, which are arbitrarily declared as safe or banned based on security alerts that pop up on the bottom of the screen. The player loses if they let the waiting line fill up, or miss three times on either the security or rights meter. I mostly remember that game because the game would practically ALWAYS say that something I removed is safe seconds before I let someone through, dinging me on the rights meter. Even if the announcement happened early in my screening, I couldn't let the person put their hat or pants back on. Kind of weird how everyone in that game liked running around in their underwear, even if they complained about it.