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There are circumstances in which a bandage is worth more than a diamond. For example: any circumstance in which you happen to find yourself bleeding heavily. This War of Mine pretty much buries you in these kinds of circumstances. It's a survival game, and, for all its panic and blind grasping, it's also a game about economics. Wartime economics. Prison economics. Diamonds are down, and bandages are up - way up.I was introduced to this collapse in the value of diamonds because I'd been asking 11 Bit Studios' senior writer Pawel Miechowski about the grotesque nature of war - or rather, about how it's the innate grotesqueness of war that comes through most vividly these days now that the stoical, stagey distance of newsreel men has been replaced with something a little more immediate.
"We found some very grotesque facts," Miechowski says. "We found the grotesque wherever we looked in our research. In Sarajevo, which is a very well-documented siege, vodka was the best tradeable item. That's the grotesque, right? They were using the vodka to clean wounds, to drink when they needed cheering up, and to trade for the supplies they needed to get by. Vodka and cigarettes. When the Second World War was over, the official currency of Germany was cigarettes. You trade items for items in war. There's no money any more."
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