Romanticizing Tragedy: Should Disaster Games Be Fun?

I know how to turn Oregon Trail, that old milquetoast edutainment game, into an action-packed romance. You can buy only bullets and shoot only rabbits—they’re the fastest and trickiest to hit. You can name all of the wagon riders after your current crushes, even the ones who don’t know who you are in real life, so their ailments and illnesses will feel all the more overwhelming and poignant. You’ll have to rest for every broken arm and increase rations and shell out for fancy ferry rides—all to protect your darling harem.

I was a pretty lonely middle schooler. For a game that is purportedly about a team traveling cross-country to build a future home together, Oregon Trail is a surprisingly lonely experience. No one but the wagon leader seems to have any sense of personal responsibility at all; the members of your party do nothing but eat the food you hunted, get sick and break bones. You’re doing all the work! You’re absorbing all of the stress! The rest of your family members and/or cute crushes are just a bunch of freeloaders!

That’s just what I loved about it, though—playing the protector, the hero. I lived for the moments when someone would get dysentery and then make a narrow recovery thanks to my patience. I felt like I was making a real sacrifice, like someone’s life was really on the line. Every time I caulked my wagon and let it float, I would cross my fingers and chant “please,” out loud, over and over, until we made it safely across. My heart would skip a beat every time that notification box popped up—had we lost someone? It felt stressful, and horrible, and amazing, and real.

Oregon Trail is a survival game, and also a disaster game. Most of the choices are opaque; you don’t know whether caulking your wagon will get you safely across the river or not, and it all depends on an invisible roll of the dice. You can’t prepare for the unexpected, nor does the game allow you to do so; all you can do when disaster hits is rest and hope that circumstances improve. It’s not a power fantasy. It’s unpredictable. You’re never safe. You’re constantly waiting for something to go wrong, again, and again, and again.

Nobody enjoys stress, right? Stress is bad! It makes you feel bad!

And yet I have actively been seeking out stressful games since I was a kid. I did my best to make even harmless edutainment fare like Oregon Trail into as stressful an experience as possible; as an adult, I prefer StarCraft. Many strategy games, especially survival games, are built to be voluntary, borderline-masochistic engagements with one stressful situation after another. There’s that sweet adrenaline rush, that sense of unknowable and impossible circumstance, that head-pounding rush of despair when you fail—and that sweeping, dizzying relief when you land on your feet.

But I’ve had to make an exception when it comes to This War Of Mine, a disaster-themed, strategic survival game inspired by the Siege of Sarajevo. Unlike other games with “survival” as their genre, This War Of Mine never lets you feel in control or like you have it all together. You aren’t some individualist demi-god with tons of rations and guns saved up for the apocalypse—you’re part of a ragtag group of civilian survivors who have very few resources or strategies beyond stealing from other people. Stealing is stressful. Scavenging for medical supplies and conserving energy and planning out who’ll get to sleep at what times is stressful. But this time … I don’t like it.

I don’t think anyone is meant to “like” This War Of Mine. It’s meant to help you empathize with how the civilians in a war-faring area might feel, day to day—how their struggle for survival depends on factors beyond their control, and how their own nourishment and self-care must always come at the expense of others’. There is never enough of anything to go around in This War Of Mine; the decisions are hard because there is often no “morally correct” answer. You do not get to gun down any mustache-twirling Nazi zombies; your only enemies are hunger, illness, weather, and the other people around you. Even your own makeshift family begins to feel like a burden, especially when they’re sick or wounded. This War Of Mine is not only about stress, but also resentment—of poor circumstances, of systemic unfairness, and of one’s own drive to live. If only you could just lie down and sleep forever. Actually, if circumstances in the game get rough enough, your heroes will commit suicide.

Pretty damn dark, right? From a design standpoint, This War of Mine pulls out all the stops when it comes to ripping up heart-strings—and not in a thrilling way, like when I worried my imaginary crushes might die in Oregon Trail. On the contrary, This War of Mine evokes a thoroughly unromanticized position of despair and desperation; the deck is constantly stacked against you in terms of resources and supplies. Every time you instruct your heroes to scavenge and remove garbage and build radios and beds and chairs, they drag their feet as they walk, cast their groggy eyes downward, pull at the moaning floorboards in submitted defeat. Who do they really resent: the soldiers who’ve left their city in relentless shambles, or you—the player—for forcing them through these pointless motions? What purpose can there be in stealing a loaf of bread today, when tomorrow everyone will wake up hungry once more? What use is it to feed a man who’s already halfway in the grave?

So I guess This War of Mine achieved what it set out to do, which is teach me that trying to survive as a civilian during wartime is a waking hellscape. Given how many other war games make combat into a thrill-packed roller coaster, it makes sense that these developers would want to push back by creating a game about the intense, inescapable suffering that civilians suffer during wartime. More importantly, though, I think This War of Mine grapples with a question that niggles at me from time to time, which is whether or not games about disasters are inherently exploitative.