Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games by Jaroslav Švelch (review)

The first monograph to appear in MIT's Game Histories series, Gaming the Iron Curtain offers an engaging, well-researched, and clearly organized social history of DIY gaming culture in 1980s Communist Czechoslovakia. It places the amateurs and teenagers who imported, "cracked," played, and circulated Czechoslovakia's gaming technologies deservedly front and center. Their inventions did not achieve the commercial success of Soviet-invented Tetris, and their pioneering political games did not end the Communist regime in 1989. Instead, Czechoslovak youths turned games into their medium of expression, carving out their own digital spaces despite the restrictions that life behind the Iron Curtain entailed. By analyzing games as continuous bricolage, Švelch greatly adds to our understanding of technological development, youthful agency, and "everyday life" during the final decade of state socialism. Gaming the Iron Curtain underscores that Communist power was not "monolith[ic]" but operated through "numerous rules" that gamers creatively "circumvented or subverted" (p. xxxiv).

The book's first three chapters detail the tactics involved in assembling hardware in a "shortage economy." For although Czechoslovakia's authorities endorsed computing for productivity and education purposes, their production plan focused on mainframes and minis. The Federal Ministry of Electrotechnical Industry tried to game the lack of micros themselves by calling for "bottom-up" initiatives (p. 22). This resulted, by the mid-1980s, in the PMD 85, the IQ 151, and the Ondra (all using COMECON components), while agricultural cooperative Didaktik even managed to develop a home computer for retail with imported British ULA chips. Combined domestic output, however, remained small. The Iron Curtain was only successfully gamed by committed enthusiasts who "hunted" down their hardware through individual Western imports (p. 38), preferring the British Sinclair ZX Spectrum—not the Atari—for its affordability and compatibility with local electronics. Hobbyists also gamed their own accessories (with DIY mice, joysticks, and keyboards) and repurposed furniture in cramped family apartments. All these individual acts of bricolage, Švelch stresses, were ultimately anchored in hundreds of computer clubs, embedded in state-sponsored youth and paramilitary organizations, across Czechoslovakia. By accepting official patronage, youths gamed access to local buildings where they could use computers, share technical know-how, exchange games, and communicate with peers, all largely uncensored.

Czechoslovakia's gaming culture, including its national discourse on gaming, its informal distribution networks, its hobbyist and homebrew productions, and their expressive significance, is analyzed in the final four chapters. Drawing on interviews, club publications, and an impressive range of gaming technologies, Švelch finds that for many Czechoslovaks, "playing with the game was [as] rewarding as playing the game" itself (p. 118). This pro-hacking attitude was encouraged by hobbyists in charge of computer clubs but also necessitated by the scarcity of games. Czechoslovak authorities, moreover, did not consider games part of culture or politics (unlike Western music or dissident literature). They saw little reason (and lacked the knowledge) to stop youths from "poking," "cracking," "cloning," or "converting" Western originals. While engaged in such distribution bricolage, Švelch argues, youths learned to code and, by the mid-1980s, produced over two hundred originals for their peers. Text adventures (textovkas) became the hallmark of Czechoslovak gaming; amateurs employed the medium to comment on unofficial popular culture, on their local surroundings (e.g., turning one's mundane socialist dwelling into a text adventure); even political protests were incorporated into games just days from their occurrence. ("Text adventures" are a subset of games, dating back to the 1976 U.S. text-based game Adventure, in which the player controls the protagonist by typing in "verb+object" style commands [p. 175]. The Czech term textovka refers to text-based games in a broader sense, including "text-based management and strategy titles" and "hacking games" [p. 178].)

In sum, Gaming the Iron Curtain offers a fascinating read for students and scholars of STS, history, and media studies alike...