Awaken Realms shed light on how this game was designed to be more than just a game in their update #28:
The Scripts are the very core of the game, pushing it beyond being just an ordinary game experience. Each of the over 2,000 scripts can be seen as a vignette (something small, yet detailed and intense). Thus each script will “provide you with intense, short bursts of plot driven events that will cause your immersion to be deeper and deeper as the game progresses.” The scripts should “grab you not only by your heart but also by your throat.”
The source of inspiration for this game came from biographies of war survivors and from war zone documentaries (and not from novels or war movies). The game is not designed to make you feel good about blasting through some unrealistic threat. The game gives you morally ambiguous situations to challenge your choices. There is no obvious “good choice” because life itself is NOT black and white, but shades of gray (and red in war). Much of the inspiration for the game came from the conflict in the Balkans, but (unfortunately) history is full of such conflicts.
Here are some books the game developers and designers used and they encourage you to read some as well:
- Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (Amazon)
- Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (Amazon)
- Sarajevo Marlboro (Amazon)
- Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia (Amazon)
- A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (Amazon)
- Good People in an Evil Time: Portraits of Complicity and Resistance in the Bosnian War (Amazon)
- Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995 (Amazon)
- Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Wartime Sarajevo (Amazon) [and, yes, Zlata is a character in the game as well]
This War of Ours 
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