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/
