Jaroslav Švelch announcing the release of their book Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games.
The book covers the social history of computer games in 1980s Czechoslovakia in seven chapters, starting with technology policies and hardware manufacturing, and ending with activist games about the 1988-89 demonstrations that led up to the Velvet Revolution. Along the way, the book peeks into paramilitary youth clubs, arcades on wheels, and bedrooms and kitchens of computer enthusiasts. It also discusses informal software distribution, gaming fanzines, DIY joysticks, illegal arcade machine manufacturing, ports and conversions, and some very local computer game genres. They’re hoping the book will be of interest not only to historians and history fans, but also to theorists and designers, as it sheds light on some unconventional play and design practices.
The book is coming out on December 18 with MIT Press in the Game Histories series: https://mitpress.mit.edu/
If you’d like to ask for a review copy, please contact David Ryman at MIT Press: dryman@mit.edu
An official summary follows:
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GAMING THE IRON CURTAIN
How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games
Jaroslav Švelch
https://mitpress.mit.edu/
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SUMMARY
Aside from the exceptional history of Tetris, very little is known about gaming culture behind the Iron Curtain. But despite the scarcity of home computers and the absence of hardware and software markets, Czechoslovakia hosted a remarkably active DIY microcomputer scene in the 1980s, producing more than two hundred games that were by turns creative, inventive, and politically subversive. In Gaming the Iron Curtain, Jaroslav Švelch offers the first social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, and the first book-length treatment of computer gaming in any country of the Soviet bloc.
Švelch describes how amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Sheltered in state-supported computer clubs, local programmers fashioned games into a medium of expression that, unlike television or the press, was neither regulated nor censored. In the final years of Communist rule, Czechoslovak programmers were among the first in the world to make activist games about current political events, anticipating trends observed decades later in independent or experimental titles. Drawing from extensive interviews as well as political, economic, and social history, Gaming the Iron Curtain tells a compelling tale of gaming the system, introducing us to individuals who used their ingenuity to be active, be creative, and be heard.
