Papers by Jaroslav Švelch
Studies in Eastern European Cinema
[full paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040350X.2022.2071520] This paper aims ... more [full paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040350X.2022.2071520] This paper aims to analyse the tension between the universal themes of the horror genre that are appealing for the global public and the local character of the digital games developed by smaller companies/studios from the semi-peripheral countries of Central and Eastern Europe. To examine in-game representation of game spaces as well as the authorial intention and production processes behind their inclusion, we combine close readings of the two titles with interviews with their designers of two digital games: Someday You’ll Return and The Medium. Both games target an international audience but heavily feature real-life domestic locations and landmarks. The digitally represented physical space is also a vehicle for the narration, which is centred around memories of personal trauma of the in-game characters. While using the concepts of hauntology, postmemory, and folk horror, we try to understand the process of creating stories that appeal to an international audience but is heavily rooted in very specific local folklore (Someday You’ll Return) or painful national history (The Medium). This phenomenon can lead to both popularisation of new aesthetics in global market, as well as to perpetuating stereotypical narratives about national cultures and histories.
Game History and the Local, 2021
Drawing on the author’s research into fragmented, heterogeneous ‘local’ contexts, this chapter ex... more Drawing on the author’s research into fragmented, heterogeneous ‘local’ contexts, this chapter explores analogies between local/global game histories and micro and macro (or global) approaches to history, to imagine a heterodox game historiography, conceived as one which undermines old orthodoxies whilst refusing new ones.
EXTENDED ABSTRACT Histories of gaming platforms tend to emphasize the chronological, sequential o... more EXTENDED ABSTRACT Histories of gaming platforms tend to emphasize the chronological, sequential order in which they were launched. This logic reflects the interests of game hardware manufacturers, who invest heavily into advertising the “next big things”, while providing limited support for previous platforms, eventually making them obsolete (Newman 2012). As a result, particular platforms seem to be tied to a particular time period or a “generation”. User practices, however, do not reflect this logic completely. People do not simply throw away an old computer or a gaming device whenever a new one arrives on the market (Sterne 2007). When confronted with the potential commercial demise of their platform, users utilize a range of strategies to prolong the lives of their machines.
New Media & Society, 2020
Commented gameplay video is an established form of online media content, attracting millions of v... more Commented gameplay video is an established form of online media content, attracting millions of viewers on YouTube and Twitch and usually created by fans and players. This article, however, brings attention to video game voice actors who use their involvement in game production to create a new genre of gameplay video. Using a mixed-method approach that combines quantitative content analysis and qualitative thematic analysis, we explore three case studies of successful channels run by video game actors. We find that this new genre, which we term “definitive playthrough videos” based on the label used by one of the analyzed channels, is a hybrid form at the intersection of variety streaming and behind-the-scenes narratives. By broadcasting games in which they performed, actors capitalize on their connection to in-game characters, firsthand knowledge of production trivia, and access to other industry insiders, repurposing a genre of user-generated content from the position of industry ...
Czech Sociological Review, 2015
This article aims to synthesise existing theoretical and empirical work on political participatio... more This article aims to synthesise existing theoretical and empirical work on political participation in social media, a topic especially relevant but still under-researched in post-transformation countries such as the Czech Republic. It argues for encouraging productive dialogue between the political science approach to participation research and the work in media and communication studies. First, the article sums up normative and theoretical standpoints taken when discussing and researching new media, society, and participation. It then reviews existing empirical fi ndings from various countries. It concludes that there is no consensus on either the positive or negative effects that social media have on the extent to which people participate in political life. A possible reason for this lack of consensus is that theories of online political participation are underdeveloped. Any such theories should take into account the unique affordances of social media and the resulting social dynamics of their use.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2015
Using the framework of Language Management Theory (LMT), this article seeks to analyze the ways i... more Using the framework of Language Management Theory (LMT), this article seeks to analyze the ways in which non-native speakers negotiate their position in English-language online discussion forums. Based on the material collected from four discussion forums, competing opinions have been identified regarding the acceptability of “bad English” and the need for language management, i.e. acting upon a perceived lack of compliance to linguistic norms. Some users propose that compliance to communication norms should be enforced in a top-down manner or based on an explicit set of rules, whereas others hold that the community of users can deal with potential communication problems individually in an emergent manner. While the applicability of native speaker norms to the discussion forums is being questioned, non-native speakers, especially in practically oriented forums, tend to perform pre-interaction language management, using disclaimers in their posts, such as “Excuse my poor English”, to...
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2013
This extended Debates section brings together a collection of articles based on papers presented ... more This extended Debates section brings together a collection of articles based on papers presented at the symposium ‘Transmedia Generation: On Empowered and Impassioned Audiences in the Age of Media Convergence’, which took place on 18 June 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic. The event was sprinkled with stardust thanks to the participation of Henry Jenkins. In spite of (or rather because of) Jenkins’ appearance, we tried to avoid straightforwardly uniform reverberation of his key thesis about the creative potential of media audiences. On the contrary, the symposium – as well as this Debates section – took the appearance of Jenkins’ paradigmatic figure as an opportunity for sparking a discussion. Not that there is any shortage of it. The study of media audiences’ agency has been fully saturated with polemic. The dispute over audiences’ self-determination as opposed to external structural determination has been long impersonated in the controversy between cultural studies and critical theory/political economy. Reflecting the sociological matrix of the dilemma between structure and agency, mirrored in the dichotomy of ‘structuralism’ and ‘culturalism’ in cultural studies coined by Stuart Hall (1986: 33–48), revived a countless number of times (Kellner, 1995; McGuigan, 1992), and having survived attempts for integration (Babe, 2011), the clash between cultural studies and critical theory still shapes the field and produces an ongoing polemic. Despite the long-lasting exchange, the borderline separating the two paradigmatic camps does not seem to shift – there has been no consensus and neither of the two paradigms has prevailed. It seems that the polemic between cultural studies and critical theory is showing its limits; the disparity of perspectives concentrated on structures on one hand and actors on the other is so vast
Television & New Media, 2020
Video game voice acting does not rank among the core roles of video game production, yet actors i... more Video game voice acting does not rank among the core roles of video game production, yet actors in leading roles sometimes achieve wide recognition despite their contingent employment. In this article, we explore the role of voice actors in the video game culture using the specific case of the recasting of the video game series Life Is Strange, which was caused by the 2016 to 2017 SAG-AFTRA strike against video game companies. Our qualitative empirical analysis of journalistic coverage (including interviews with voice actors), promotional materials, press releases, and player discussions reconstructs the events of the game’s production and investigates the reception of the recasting with regard to actor-character identification and to labor conditions of voice actors. We find that voice actors, whose status is partly dependent on the popularity of their characters, attempt to rise “above the line” by engaging in relational labor.
Video Games and Comedy, 2022
New Media & Society, 2017
In contemporary online culture, Grammar Nazi (GN) is a derogatory term used to label individuals ... more In contemporary online culture, Grammar Nazi (GN) is a derogatory term used to label individuals who practice excessive language policing but has also been ironically appropriated by groups of users who engage in evaluation of other people’s grammar for entertainment purposes. In this article, we combine approaches from media studies and sociolinguistics to analyze the adoption of the phenomenon by two GN Facebook pages in two languages: English and Czech. Our mixed-method analysis shows that while both pages can be read as examples of media participation, they also exemplify their users’ “literacy privilege” associated with standard language ideology. However, there are differences in the practices associated with the label, reflecting the specific sociolinguistic contexts. While Czech GNs act as “guardians” of the public space, collecting and displaying localized orthographic errors for collective dissection, the English page is more dedicated to sharing jokes and puns typical of ...
Gaming Globally, 2013
Computer and video game scholarship seems to be a foremost example of a truly global academic end... more Computer and video game scholarship seems to be a foremost example of a truly global academic endeavor. Most of its output, as well as its objects of study, are in English, which has become the lingua franca of both game studies and a large portion of the game industry. At first glance, it is unsurprising: video games seem to be an eminent example of cultural globalization. This contributes to the illusion that digital games are a homogenous phenomenon hovering weightlessly in a culturally undefined space, independent of local contexts—with the widely acknowledged singular exception ofJapanese culture. This volume argues that the situation is not nearly as simple—that gaming cultures around the world involve a complex interplay of local and global influences. This chapter focuses on a specific time and place—the 1980s Czechoslovakia—and introduces the Czechoslovak text adventure games of the 1980s as an example of specific textual and gaming practices influenced by the social, economic, and cultural context of the era. Inspired by British and American text adventures, Czechoslovak text adventures (called textovky, or textovka in singular) became a genre of their own, employing a particular range of fictional settings, design conventions, and humor. The history of textovk demonstrates that even behind the Iron Curtain, not only were Western computer games played, but Western genres were also being adapted and localized by local hobbyists.
Building on a larger research of the early gaming cultures in the Czech Republic and Czechoslovak... more Building on a larger research of the early gaming cultures in the Czech Republic and Czechoslovakia, this paper describes the alternative distribution channels of computer game software in the post-communist environment and their relationship to gamer communities. Before 1990, there was virtually no computer software or hardware market in the former Czechoslovakia. Copyright of digital works was rarely enforced or debated. Instead, informal distribution structures were forming, many of which survived well into the late 1990s. The “shadow economy” worked on a number of levels. Exchange and distribution of game software was an important activity of local gaming communities. On top of that, there was a huge number of “mail order pirates”, predominantly young gamers, who published their contact info in ad papers and copied games for money. Using archival material and oral history interviews, I will (1) describe the way informal distribution worked socially and economically, and (2) analyze the way distribution influenced the gaming culture in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.
First Monday, 2016
This paper develops the idea that recent “networked” social movements are driven by emotions and ... more This paper develops the idea that recent “networked” social movements are driven by emotions and provides an analysis of the role of emotions in movement mobilization. The case study focuses on the 2013 protests against a “coup” within the Czech Social Democratic Party. The protests had an immediate impact, resulting in a series of demonstrations, mainstream media attention and a successful overturning of the “coup”. The movement’s Facebook page served as an important catalyst for the protest. We argue that the movement’s success can be explained by its emphasis on perceived issues of morality. As people tend to gather on Facebook to express their feelings, social media become a primary conduit for emotional protest, which can be subsequently taken to the streets.
Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 2015
This article explores the strategies of queer playing of video games and their relationship to th... more This article explores the strategies of queer playing of video games and their relationship to the heteronormative game culture. Its premise is that most video games are, either implicitly or explicitly, heteronormative and the inscribed player of such games is in the majority of cases a heterosexual male. In order to achieve the same level of identification with an avatar and to enjoy a similar gameplay experience as the heterosexual player, the LGBT player may have to deploy various strategies to challenge the game and work around it, or to find the LGBT content which some more progressive games offer. The study is based on in-depth qualitative interviews with six players (5 males and 1 female) who identified themselves both as homosexual and as players of the Mass Effect or Dragon Age series, games that include several opportunities to initiate same-sex romance. We have identified three different queer playing strategies: imaginative play (queer reading of unspecified or heterose...
Language Policy, 2014
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +B... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, 2019
This article traces the intersections of Western computer technology and everyday life in communi... more This article traces the intersections of Western computer technology and everyday life in communist-era Czechoslovakia. It follows computer professionals and hobbyists who participated in bottom-up computing practices, and it discusses the improvised, do-it-yourself aesthetics of the artifacts they created. It focuses on three key examples: the printing of biorhythm charts, which provided the first personal encounters with computing to many ordinary citizens in the 1970s; hardware tinkering, which remedied the scarcity of computer equipment by salvaging and repurposing local resources; and production of local computer games, which built on Western templates but engaged with local themes, sometimes even subverting the authority of the communist party and ironically appropriating its propaganda. It concludes that computer enthusiasts were ahead of party officials in realizing that computers are not just data processing machines but also tools for making and dissemination of culture.
Perspectives on the European Videogame
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Papers by Jaroslav Švelch