Between May 14 and May 17, 2015, PolCoRE members Jaroslav Švelch and Jan Švelch presented their work at the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) conference in Lüneburg, Germany. DiGRA is the largest game studies conference which features cutting edge research on the medium of games.

Jaroslav Švelch participated in the Non-Linear Histories of Independent Games and Game Studies in Central Europe panels and presented two papers: What’so Funny About Glitches about games, glitch, and humor, and Protest Games in 1980s Czechoslovakia: Beyond Procedural Rhetoric. The latter presented an innovative view of “political” games, using the example of 1980s games which were made to protest the Communist regime – and were therefore among the first examples of the use of new media in political participation or activism.

Jan Švelch presented two papers The Ludic, the Cinematic and the Paratextual: Towards a Typology of Video Game Trailers and The Joy of Discovery, Experimentation or Just Exploitation? The Roles of Glitches in Video Game Culture. The latter focused on different roles and meanings of glitches. In the context of microtransactions (in-game purchases with real money), glitches can be used as a form of „political“ protest against developers‘ monetization schemes.

DiGRA participants (including Jan Švelch) playing three-sided football, a situationist critique of Marxist dialectics.

PolCoRE member Jaroslav Švelch has recently given a number of talks at conferences and research departments in the U.S. and Canada. Most of his presentations focused on the function of digital games in the everyday lives and politics of 1980s Czechoslovakia. His research shows that several Czechoslovak digital games from 1988-1989 rank among the earliest examples of “political” games which explicitly express the authors’ political opinions, in this case protesting against the totalitarian regime. Jaroslav gave talks at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Montréal, at Concordia University (also in Montréal), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Microsoft Research New England (both in Cambridge, MA), and at the Different Games conference at New York Univesity. To read more about the topic, you can read his article published in the journal Game Studies: http://gamestudies.org/1302/articles/svelch.