Stanisław Krawczyk:

Michał Mochocki, myself, and Aleksandra Mochocka have published a paper in the journal “Games and Culture”. The paper’s title is “Polish History up to 1795 in Polish Games and Game Studies”.

Link to the full version (paywalled): https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120241228490

Link to the version before final proofs and typesetting (free): http://stanislawkrawczyk.pl/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Polish-History-up-to-1795-in-Polish-Games-and-Game-Studies-Accepted-Version.pdf

Abstract in the attached image (alt text).

Polish History up to 1795 in Polish Games and Game Studies

Michał Mochocki, Stanisław Krawczyk, and Aleksandra Mochocka

Abstract

Situated within historical and regional (CEE) game studies, this article is an overview of games made in Poland after 1989 about Polish history up to the eighteenth century. It also outlines research made on those games, and it comments on changing cultural and political factors shaping the development of Polish history/heritage-themed games over the last three decades. We group the games in thematic-chronological categories: early medieval Slavic settings up to 1000, medieval to Renaissance Poland, and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569–1795. Main findings: (a) Slavic fantasy became very popular with game developers after Witcher 3, but it has received little scholarly attention beside the witcher series. (b) Medieval Polish monarchies have barely caught the eye of game developers, which translates to the absence of related research. © The PLC period is well-represented in digital and nondigital games, and well-researched in historical games studies by Polish scholars in Polish and English.

  • @uservoid1English
    2•10 months ago

    Page 24 of the free pdf sums the whole paper:

    We believe there are two main reasons why mediaeval Poland is less inspiring than the PLC to contemporary Polish creatives, both related to the search for an appropriate heritage for the post-1989 Poland. In 1989 Poland abandoned the USSR-dominated Soviet Bloc to embrace Western democracy and capitalism, so it was in need of a new heritage to replace the (post- )Soviet legacy – but it also searched for some degree of its own national identity defined against the universalising pan-European narrative. The Catholic feudalism of mediaeval Poland could not help much, built as it was under German and Czech influence within an analogical panEuropean universalism. The (arguably) exceptional Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth provides an alternative point of reference, distinguishing Poland from both Eastern and Western neighbours. In the discursive construction of heritage and memory, the PLC heritage was a working solution for nationalist EU-sceptics and multiculturalist EU-enthusiasts alike: the former variant interprets the PLC as an imperial Polish conservative Catholic project, the latter as a joint Polish–Lithuanian–Belarusian–Ukrainian project of an EU-like commonwealth of many cultures and faiths (more about it in Mochocki, Schreiber & Majewski, forthcoming-b). The second reason why the PLC is a more “productive” heritage than mediaeval Poland is its political system: the republican character of its parliamentarism, elective monarchy, and civil liberties is much more relatable for the 20-/21st-century parliamentary democracy than mediaeval dynastic monarchies.