First person refugee: Can a video game teach military personnel empathy? (Vol. 3)

By Jim Gourley

Best Defense video games critic

Telling the same old war story can also wear out the game makers themselves. That was Pawel Miechowski’s sentiment when he pitched the idea for This War of Mine to his company 11 Bit Studios. In the game, you play as a civilian trapped inside a besieged city, forced to scavenge for food and supplies to keep your group alive. Miechowski got the idea for This War of Mine after reading a newspaper story recounting a Bosnian man’s tale of survival during the war there in the 1990s.

"He talked about how they chopped the door to their house up for firewood, but then it let in the cold air. I remember thinking that these were very hard choices, and it was always difficult for him to weigh the consequences. I took the article in and suggested we make a very adult, serious game out of this. There are only ever a finite amount of resources to provide for each member of the group, and this is where the moral/ethical problems come in. You have to decide whose needs take priority, and how you’re going to fulfill them. Will you trade food for medicine, or will you kill someone and take it? The game does not force any preconception of morality on the player. They do what they think they can live with."

This hardly sounds like the kind of game that will produce hours of laughs and excitement, but that’s not what Miechowski is trying to achieve. He believes that if games can be produced on the same scale and in the same manner as Hollywood films, then the game industry can think of its talent as artists and its products as a genuine medium with greater depth and breadth. "People play games in a similar manner as reading or watching movies. They seek stories. You watch an action movie for adrenaline. You watch [Saving] Private Ryan as history. We decided to show stories of civilians in war. That’s a very mature subject, but games are becoming more mature. People who grew up with games want a more mature experience. Sometimes you want to see a comedy. Sometimes you want to see a movie like The Pianist. This is a story for people who are looking for this sort of emotion." 

It seems his bet has paid off. Scheduled for release this November, This War of Mine has already found a highly supportive demographic in early demonstrations at major game conventions such as E3. Many gamers have expressed a sense that the current market is "overloaded" with war games. But though This War of Mine is certainly a war game, it constitutes such a unique look at the subject that people feel it is something radically new. "People have said to me, ‘finally, someone is making this game.’" 

Dr. Brockmyer says that "This War of Mine" isn’t a radically new concept. Rather, it’s just the newest entry into a new but slowly growing market of games tackling the realities of armed conflict. She mentions Darfur is Dying, a flash-based game that won an MTV contest supporting the crisis there in 2008. However, it doesn’t take too long to realize that the game’s intent is a bit disingenuous. The map of the refugee camp you inhabit is a mine field of information points that constantly explode with trivia about the horrors of life in Darfur, all aimed at getting you to click the "take action" button which will bring up a screen asking you to send a message to the president or your congressman to help the people there. The game itself isn’t that stimulating, and if the only way to reach the end is to hit the "take action" button, then the conclusion leaves you feeling empty. Brockmyer mentions the website Games for Change, which hosts a large catalog of similar titles. Some of them are only about as fun as Darfur is Dying. Some are worse. But there are examples of the impulse Miechowski talks about. Games like Papo and Yo, which traps a boy in a fantasy puzzle world with a raging ogre as a metaphor for children with violent alcoholic parents. Or Nevermind, a horror game that forces players to traverse the imaginary landscape of a trauma victim’s mind as a means to learn how to deal with stresses in everyday life.

In contrast to Darfur is Dying, Miechowski and like-minded upstart developers have created games where the brilliance of the learning experience lies in its subtlety. The games have standalone objectives, their environments are engrossing, and their stories and characters are riveting. And in the case of This War of Mine, the experience is as viscerally haunting as that of Carl Helgegren’s sons touring Shuafat.

The game is a constant struggle to gather the necessary materials to survive. In addition to the cityscape plagued by the warring factions, the player must also negotiate the tenuous humanity and dubious morality of other survivors they encounter. Whereas shooter games require good hand-eye coordination to mash the right button combinations to execute opponents, This War of Mine forces the player to exercise their ethical dexterity with a rapid cascade of choices that have life-or-death consequences.

It’s never in your face, though. The player feels like they spend the majority of their time finding enough food and water to get by, while picking up enough items along the way to either assemble or barter for creature comforts like bedding or a radio. But when presented with a shady customer, a woman begging to join the player’s group, or a fellow civilian who happens to have a gun, things get difficult quickly. Threats are made. People are turned away. Tomorrow’s breakfast is given away to avoid tonight’s potential death. The environment draws out the utmost sympathy for everyone you encounter, but ruthlessly limits your capability to help even the smallest number of people. Suddenly players finds themselves in an extremely realistic crash course in humanitarian crisis management without even knowing it. Part of the magic is Miechowski’s faith in the intelligence of gamers. He believes they can handle a game that doesn’t end with the good guy rescuing the princess, and that they’re independent enough to appreciate a game that doesn’t shovel a narrative viewpoint on the circumstances of the world’s refugees down their throats.

"We did not want to make this a game about a certain geographic region or ethnic group. In these types of situations, it doesn’t matter who you are. Your nationality and religion don’t matter as much as your family and who you are as a person. The experience is not about fighting for a cause. It’s about saving yourself. It’s also not so much about violence in games as the way we approach games in general. It’s about the art and story and how we as people interact with the medium. Games can be art, entertainment or education, and they are often some combination of the three. We are offering the player an experience, and it is up to them to decide what they take away from it."

Dr. Brockmyer is of the same mind as Miechowski on this point. She says that while the U.S. Army meant their blockbuster shooter, America’s Army, to only serve as a recruiting tool, it met with unintended consequences thanks to its success as entertainment. Originally free online or from recruiters as a PC-only game, it wound up being commercially distributed for the Xbox. Brockmyer says that led to its contribution to the desensitization phenomenon. It taught players things that the Army wanted them to know, and some things it didn’t.

But if Helgegren and Miechowski have shown so profoundly that the gaming medium is a two-way street, can things work both ways for the military? It is a force that developed a combat shooter game to recruit people into its ranks, then went into conflicts where adaptability, interpersonal relations, and moral agility were more critical to success than marksmanship.

Can the military adapt to or adopt from the game industry again, this time perhaps taking a page from This War of Mine to create a game that will advance its own conduct of warfare? If it can, perhaps the best man to carry the message to the Pentagon is Dave Anthony, the former game developer turned Atlantic Council member. In his first public address on the future of unknown conflict, he remarked on what made his two iterations of Call of Duty so successful. The development process began with bringing several different personalities into a meeting to discuss ideas for the games’ concept. The cast featured Oliver North, David Goyer, an "active member of SEAL Team 6," and Peter W. Singer. The key, according to Anthony, was fostering an environment for constructive debate where "feedback was not seen as a threat; feedback was seen as an opportunity."

In short, solving problems in military thought depends heavily on empathy.

Jim Gourley is still an author, journalist, and former military intelligence officer.