For September, I invited folks to read along with me as I started the process of clearing my to-read pile — at least the game studies part of it. First up was Jaroslav Švelch’s Gaming the Iron Curtain, which was the month’s selection for what I’m calling Game Studies Book Club.

Over the past few years I’ve seen Švelch present research on computer games in communist Czechoslovakia, and I’ve even read bits of the manuscript in progress, but I hadn’t yet looked at his book in whole. Regional histories are always interesting to me for a few reasons. One, I’m an Americanist (it’s right there in my grad degree), so I love to learn more about history broadly and history I don’t know about specifically. My knowledge of post-WWII Europe is not great. Second, what might seem to be niche histories are often extremely useful for thinking through particular concepts or ideas. I consider Jaroslav Švelch a colleague (we’ve been on panels together, he’s writing a book for the series Jennifer deWinter and I co-edit), so I am not reviewing his book. Rather, I’d like to suggest a few reasons to read it.

Code acts

Gaming the Iron Curtain is very firmly anchored in cultural history, and it does an outstanding job of forwarding the idea of homebrew games as code acts somewhat akin to J.L. Austin’s speech acts. This is a pretty useful idea, and I would love to see other scholars pick it up and use it as a lens for analysis of other areas of game production. As code acts, games are more than artifacts or bodies of code, they’re declarations and demonstrations of skill and a complex invocation of accomplishment. To riff on another Austen, think about how characters in Pride & Prejudice or Sense & Sensibility wield accomplishments as a way to vie for social and cultural capital. Making a game isn’t needlepoint, but as a hobbyist pursuit, perhaps there’s some overlap worth teasing apart.

The youths and amateurs making games in Czechoslovakia were often doing so using media that would have been considered antiquated or inefficient even at the time. They were also taking resources often quite deliberately intended for serious, productive uses and playing with them. Daily life in communist Czechoslavakia in the 1980s, just like in the capitalist United States in the 2000s, is highly political. To play with serious tools, to valorize play, to claim expertise through the creation of games is far from a neutral undertaking.

As a reader, I always find some real joy in seeing how people continue to be idiosyncratic, unruly, and playful in the most unexpected ways in the most unlikely places. Gaming the Iron Curtain is a serious book, but it also offers a lot to delight in. Homebrew game developers worked to claim space and define culture even when the resources available to do so were very limited.

Those interested in video game history should read it, as should anyone thinking through the uses and applications of cultural history as a research approach. The book also has direct relevance for computer history and for the understanding of transnational flows of culture and technology.

Next month

If you want to participate in Game Studies Book Club for October, just read Andrew Reinhard’s Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games (totally on sale right now!) this month and post or tweet about it by the end of the month. Send me your link or tweet using #gsbc1019 and I’ll link your thoughts in my wrapup post in early November.