Pavle had just done something unthinkable, and it was my fault. This war of mine isn’t just out there in the streets, it’s all around us, and its consuming me. I heard my thoughts over the shelling and the gunshots, tearing me apart that man. As I returned to the shelter, I still couldn’t comprehend what I had done. I watched her, head in hands, sobbing over the events that had just occurred.
As I went through the medicine cabinet, I heard his wife’s cries coming from the next room. I began taking the supplies from the house, but there was too much and would return another day. I didn’t want anyone being attracted to his voice, possibly with weapons so I had to do it - I killed him. In that moment, the his elderly wife began running up the stairs and the old man began crying for help. I had never killed someone before, and I didn’t want this to be my first. The old man stood up and approached me, “What are you doing here, please leave…” I knew I couldn’t leave, so I attacked him, hoping he wouldn’t put up a fight. Remembering that there were people that depended on the supplies they had, I went into the house. I observed them through their keyhole, listening into their conversation about how they had met in war, how he was a soldier who found her priceless in a time one would use cigarettes and stamps as a form of currency. An old couple lived there trying to preserve as much of the pre-war sentiments that they held so dear to them. There was one house, untouched by the war. Instead, it provides answers to the questions the stereotypical modern war game leaves us with by giving us the perspective of those civilians living in an area riddled with war. This War of Mine isn’t a hot-dog, or a mass-produced emotionless and mindless experience. In a way, first person shooters are the hot-dogs we chose to consume without asking why. Games portray the player as a cold-hearted war machine only capable of mowing down anyone and everything in front of them.
The scariest thing is that there is no feedback for having killed dozens of people in a battle or killing your first person in a desperation to survive. As long as there’s a gun in our hand and a grenade ready, we don’t care what we’re shooting at or who we kill. We too often lose ourselves in the illusion of being the all-powerful protagonist in games like these. While their house saved my life, this mindless battle was destroying theirs. Sure, no one is home right now but what if they were? What if some family happened to be in the house while I broke down their door holding a gun pointed right at them. Here I was using someone’s house as cover to protect me from shields. To my misfortune, the tank took down one of the walls I was hiding behind and this made me repeat the dodge and dash to the next house, also empty. I wasn’t worried about who the house belonged to or who was in it, I just cared that these four walls were going to protect me from whatever was out there. The doors were locked so I just shot it down and ran inside. In my desperation to run from an enemy tank, I ducked into a house. While this never bothered me before, I was really disturbed by a wandering thought that whizzed by during an intense game of Battlefield 2:Bad Company. No one takes the time to ask themselves who these NPCs are or more importantly WHAT they are because in our mind they’re as nutritionally empty and uninteresting as the rod-shaped meat log we put between our mouths. While some game vegetarians would rather stay away from the meat goodness of mindless killing sprees, most people bask in the glory of their fallen enemies.
I’ve played dozens of first person war games and let me tell you, they are definitely the hot-dogs of the video game world.
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