The Best Non-Traditional War Games
PC GAMER
Is it possible for wargamers to give peace a chance?
Shoot = 1. Wait = 0. Hit = 1. Miss = 0.
The language of videogame technology lends itself to conflict. It’s been part of its DNA since Spacewar! took MIT by storm in 1962, and we’ve been playing war on the tabletop, from Chess to Risk, for thousands of years. But…
War is a preoccupation of mine. As a writer of historical fiction, I’m immersed in battle. It’s a dark fascination, especially for a pacifist of sorts, but wars show humanity at its very best and its very, very worst. They are the turning points of history itself. We are defined by them.
I’m also a gamer, and love sneaking and sniping, dropping bombs and torpedoing ships. However, that can often provoke moral questions that I struggle to answer. Besides, we’re in a period of high-profile conflict, again, and it’s on our screens, 24/7. We may crave escapism at times like these, but should we make fictional war when there are so many for whom it’s a daily reality?
So, I set out to find war games playable today on PC that don’t ask you to do that, at all. This was not an easy ride by any means, and I found varying degrees of success for sure.
RELEASED Jan 2024 DEVELOPER Brave Lamb Studio SA
War Hospital
The First World War is solid ground for a pacifist narrative. Never has the futility of the whole mess been writ as large as on the Western Front. War Hospital puts you in charge of a failing field hospital on the very edge of the trenches in 1918, balancing morale, resources and staffing to save as many lives as possible.
‘It’s called triage’ is a stock trope for murderous villains in many media, but this simulation comes down to the infamous trolley problem. Do you kill one person if it means saving more? Here, the yawning horror of shuffling the critical cases into the “Denied” file and consigning them to death so that your tired surgeons can save others, is occasionally punctuated with their curses and invective. It’s especially hard watching them deteriorate, waiting for a surgery slot that just isn’t coming. There’s a narrative, but you soon find yourself opting out of the humanity of it all. You start out reading everyone’s file, prioritising family men or the particularly interesting cases, but in short order you’re just looking at their wounds and making a cold calculation. You stop noticing the absence of regret in the aftermath. Your cold ruthlessness is an asset, and the next wave of injured is just around the corner. It’s deeply chilling.
