This War of Mine (2014)
Civilian Wartime Survival Simulation Developed by Warsaw's 11 bit studios and Added to Poland's School Curriculum
Developed and published in November 2014 by Warsaw's 11 bit studios, This War of Mine is a side-scrolling wartime survival management game inspired by civilian accounts of the 1992–1996 Siege of Sarajevo. Dividing gameplay between daytime shelter upkeep and nocturnal scavenging with psychological consequences, it entered Poland's national secondary-school reading list in 2020.
Siege of Sarajevo Testimonies, Diurnal Survival Loop, and Moral Trauma Mechanics
Founded in Warsaw in 2010 by former Metropolis Software developers, 11 bit studios conceived This War of Mine to invert the dominant perspective of commercial war video games, replacing trained military combatants with ordinary, untrained civilians trapped inside an encircled city. Drawing primarily on survivor testimonies from the 1992–1996 Siege of Sarajevo alongside historical records from the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and Grozny, the development team rendered a cross-sectioned, bombed-out apartment dwelling in the fictional city of Pogoren using digitized portraits of staff members and acquaintances stylized with monochrome charcoal shading. Gameplay enforces a strict diurnal cycle governed by outside sniper fire: during daylight hours, players remain indoors managing survivors such as Pavle, Bruno, Katia, and Marko—constructing rainwater filters, stoves, beds, and bandages, boarding up structural breaches against nighttime raiders, and treating starvation, winter hypothermia, and infection. At nightfall, one survivor ventures quietly into shelled supermarkets, hospitals, churches, or inhabited homes to trade or scavenge scarce supplies, where stealing medicine from elderly residents or committing lethal violence inflicts cumulative psychological states ranging from guilt and depression to emotional breakdown or suicide.
Commercial Reach, Humanitarian Fundraising, and 2020 Polish Curriculum Inclusion
Released on November 14, 2014 for Windows, OS X, and Linux, This War of Mine recouped its entire two-year production budget within forty-eight hours of launch on Steam and went on to sell more than nine million copies across personal computers, mobile operating systems, and home consoles over the following decade. Beginning in March 2015 with the War Child Charity DLC—featuring in-game street murals by international artists—11 bit studios established recurring fundraising campaigns donating net proceeds to humanitarian organizations assisting children affected by armed conflicts, including later emergency drives in 2022. In 2016, retail partner Deep Silver published the console adaptation This War of Mine: The Little Ones, introducing child survivors whose emotional well-being depends on adult caretakers, followed between 2017 and 2019 by three narrative-driven Stories expansions scored by composer Piotr Musiał. Beyond museum exhibitions and an analog tabletop adaptation designed by Michał Oracz and Jakub Wiśniewski, the work achieved an international institutional milestone in June 2020 when Poland's Ministry of National Education formally added This War of Mine as optional supplementary reading for final-year secondary school humanities students aged eighteen and older.