Full Description
This book explores the representations of Central and Eastern European histories in digital games.
Focusing on games that examine a range of national histories and heritages from across Central and Eastern Europe, the volume looks beyond the diversity of the local histories depicted in games, and the audience reception of these histories, to show a diversity of approaches which can be used in examining historical games - from postcolonialism to identity politics to heritage studies. The book includes chapters on Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Estonia, Slovakia, Czechia, Finland, and (a Western guest with regional connections) Luxembourg. Through the lens of video games, the authors address how nations struggle with the legacies of war, colonialism, and religious strife that have been a part of nation-building - but also how victimized cultures can survive, resist, and sometimes prevail.
Appealing primarily to scholars in the fields of game studies, heritage studies, postcolonial criticism, and media studies, this book will be particularly useful for the subfields of historical game studies and postcolonial game studies.
Contents
1. An Introduction to CEE HGS: Central and Eastern European Historical Game Studies
2. From Vampires to Partisans: Serbian Cultural Heritage in Video Games [Serbia]
3. The Heritage of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Polish Video Games [Poland]
4. Unearthing the Past: Historical Heritage of Post-USSR Ukraine in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
[Ukraine]
5. A Devious Archive: The Affective Historicity and Paratextual Russian Folkloristics of Black Book [Russia]
6. Realism in World of Tanks: From a World War II Simulator to a Celebrity Tombola [Belarus]
7. Hungeon Crawling: Reinventing the Hungarian Fairy Tale Tradition in Operencia: The Stolen Sun [Hungary]
8. "Sunrise, Parabellum." The Crisis of State and the Individual in Disco Elysium [Estonia]
9. The Communist Tycoon: Simulating the Command Economy in Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic [Slovakia]
10. Czech and Slovak cultural heritage in video games. Case studies: Kingdom Come Deliverance, Hrot, and Felvidek [Czechia]
11. "Realistic but Humorous": Finnish Army Simulator as a First-person Video Game on Finnish National Service [Finland]
12. Luxembourg 1867: Gaming Communities, Co-production, and Engagement with the
Imagined Past [Luxembourg]
