game internation relationship

The video game industry in Poland is fast becoming one of the most respected and proli�c in Europe.

GamesBeat spent a week visiting some of the game development and �lm studios making a

worldwide name for themselves. You can read the stories that came out of our visit here, including

our in-depth look at the growth of the gaming industry. The Polish government paid for Daniel

Crawley’s trip. Our coverage remains objective.

This War of Mine is the total antithesis of Call of Duty and its glossy, ultraviolent spectacle. In

this game, war is not fun, it is hell. And survival is the best you can hope for.

While developer 11 Bit Studios insists that This War of Mine is set in an entirely �ctional city,

the ghosts of Warsaw inevitably linger in the shelled, gray landscape of the game, released on

PC, Mac, and Linux last Friday (and reviewed here).

GAMES

War is hell: How This War of Mine drew on real-life survivors for inspiration DAN CRAWLEY NOVEMBER 19, 2014 7:00 AM

Above: This War of Mine sees war through the eyes of civilians. Image Credit: 11 Bit Studios

The city of Warsaw was reduced to rubble in the Nazi ‘liquidation’ that followed the failed

uprising of 1944. The resistance movement had tried to �ght back against the occupying force

but was defeated after 63 days of bloody street battles, public executions, and atrocities

beyond belief. After the uprising, the German army razed the city to the ground, and where

once had lived over a million citizens, there was nothing left but dust and destruction. Around

1,000 people remained in the ruins of their once-great capital, trying to survive.

This desperate struggle for survival is what drives the gameplay in This War of Mine.

Scavenging for food each night and trying to stay warm feels dark and real. And that is how it

should feel, as this is a game about the forgotten many. The civilians trapped unwittingly in the

middle of a warzone.

This War of Mine’s insistence on remaining true to its realistic vision is a credit to 11 Bit, the

blossoming Warsaw-based studio that isn’t afraid to show the darker side of war.

Welcome to 11 Bit

11 Bit’s development studio is in an o�ce block in Warsaw’s bohemian Praga District. It’s on the

side of the river that best survived the levelling of the city, but if you head just a few blocks

away, you can still see the signs of con�ict from 70 years ago, such as telltale bullet holes

staring out from crumbling walls.

On the main door are the names of the many other

companies that share 11 Bit’s building, including a

haulage operator and a security �rm called Colt

Security. I hopped in the lift with two 11 Bit workers

back from their break and met up with Karol

Zajaczkowski, the studio’s head of marketing, to talk

about This War of Mine.

“When you play most war games, it looks like fun,”

said Zajaczkowski. “It looks like kids playing in the

back yard. We have plastic guns and we shoot and

we are the heroes and you are the bad guys. The

war doesn’t look like that. It doesn’t look like that for

soldiers and, even more, it doesn’t look like that for

civilians.”

So 11 Bit set out to make a game that did actually represent war, and it did that by researching

exactly what it’s like for civilians caught up in con�icts and speaking to survivors.

“We reached [out] for people from Sarejevo [the city under siege for 1,425 days during the

Bosnian War of the 1990s] because it’s one of the closest con�icts, so we were sure that we

would �nd some people that were really there. We contacted some museums and some

foundations that helped those people and we told them what kind of game we were doing.

“But it’s hard to get people to speak because they want to forget. They lost their relatives, they

lost their homes. And they moved on, and they want to forget that they were there.” They did

managed to �nd some people willing to share their experiences, however, and �ew them out to

Poland to talk to the team.

Above: Inside 11 Bit Studios, home of This War of Mine and Anomaly: Warzone Earth. Image Credit: Dan Crawley

This constant reference to real-life con�icts is ongoing, and a Sarajevo survivor had been in the

studio just a week before I was there. 11 Bit has also used the input of a former U.S. Marine on

the project, o�ering a di�erent perspective on the grim realities of war. He’d been involved in

the bloody, controversial battle of Fallujah in Iraq in 2004 and left the army on his return to the

States, su�ering with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Playing This War of Mine was tough for him, and he took a number of days to do so,

confronting di�cult memories along the way. But “he’s glad that someone’s done this hard

topic because he’s seen people there, and he’s been shooting people, and he knows that the

war is not like in the movies,” said Zajaczkowski. “He’s forever reviewing all our changes to the

game. We’re in constant contact with him.”

Struggling to survive

This War of Mine doesn’t lead you by the hand. It makes you �gure things out for yourself.

“Failure is a part of the game because you have to learn all the mechanics,” said Zajaczkowski.

“From the very �rst day, you have to take care of the most basic things. You don’t make long-

term plans, you have to survive day by day.”

This �ts with the experiences of con�ict survivors, who initially expect everything to return to

normal after a few days. “You think that the Americans will come or something will happen,”

said Zajaczkowski. “But as more days pass, you never know when it will end. So you stop

thinking about surviving the month, you start thinking about tomorrow. You wake up, do your

stu�, and hopefully survive another night.”

Above: Choosing where to scavenge is tough. Easy targets are often home to good people. Image Credit: 11 Bit Studios

Likewise, in the game, you never know how long you have to survive. And your survival may

depend on making tough choices.

“There’s a balance in the game,” said Zajaczkowski. “You don’t have to be hostile. You can be

friendly, but other people can be either friendly or hostile. Sometimes you’ll be a good guy and

someone will use you. You’ll give them medicine and in the night they will come and kill you.

Taking food from others is as good as killing them, too, but what choice do you have? “You

know by stealing their food, you are killing them,” said Zajaczkowski. “You’re not putting a pistol

to their heads but you know that old people won’t be able to survive. So you are trying to be

the good guy but you know inside you that you killed those guys.“

Di�cult decisions

Just as the game forces you to make di�cult decisions, 11 Bit also had tough choices to make

during development. Just how realistic should they make a game about such a dark topic?

“From the beginning we knew that we would like to publish the game on our own because big

publishers in�uence the development process,” said Zajaczkowski. “For example. I’m not sure

all publishers would allow us to show some scenes that are part of the game.”

“There’s a rape,” he explained. “You’re not the person that’s doing it, but you hear that

someone’s been raped. That happens during a war. I can imagine some publishers would say

remove it because when people hear rape they already think, ‘Oh that’s a bad game.’”

Above: This War of Mine is dark, gritty, and often depressing. Image Credit: 11 Bit Studios

And does the game feature women and children dying, as a real-life con�ict would? “There are

children in the game at the moment,” said Zajaczkowski. “There are children that are looking

for medicine for their mother. There are still borders that we have to decide if we want to

cross.”

“You could put a scene where soldiers kill a whole bus of school kids, but you have to ask

yourself, ‘Whats the point of that?’” In the end, the studio decided not to show any children

being shot, as I clari�ed with Zajaczkowski just a few days ago.

11 Bit’s choices became more relevant as the reality of war appeared in Eastern Europe once

again, in Poland’s neighbor, Ukraine. “When we started working on the game one and half

years ago, no one even imagined the things that have happened to Ukraine,” said Zajaczkowski.

“Everyone believed that war was a thing of the past.”

“Here we are one year later and there’s con�ict on the Russia/Ukraine border and there’s some

people in ISIS �ghting in Syria. War is not a thing of the past.”

And that, really, is the point of This War of Mine. “It’s not about war in Europe, or the States, or

Asia because we want to give people the idea that nowadays war can happen anywhere,” said

Zajaczkowski.