‘Died from Debeeration’ : the Case of the First Belarusian Political Game

Early computer games of the ‘Eastern bloc’ have been studied as important artefacts of early digital media, but their significance is usually limited to the historical context. In this article, I present a case study of the first popular computer game made in Belarus, which political relevance has persisted through over two decades. In order to achieve multi-sided description and interpretation of the case, three methods are combined: semantic analysis of the game itself, a survey of its typical players, and comparison to similar cases in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia. The proposed explanation of the game’s origins highlights the importance of ‘shared commons’, relics of socialism reused for a variety of purposes during the brief period of ideological liberalism. This allows situating this particular form of subversive media in the process of transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe – the process that has never been concluded in contemporary Belarus, contributing to the totalitarian situation of 2020–2021.© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Crudely, a Machine. The Dream Machine Through the Lens of Russian Formalism

This article explains how specific aesthetic decisions work in the game The Dream Machine. I analyze it through the lens of Russian Formalism: particular techniques of making a video game are judged through Shklovsky’s Art as a Technique, and the problem of the game genre is presented through Tynianov’s The Literary Fact. Theoretically, I aspire to reclaim the original context for these ideas, which is surprisingly relevant to contemporary horror media. Digital games as an artistic form re-introduce the effect of estrangement into the ongoing experiments with their medium; in The Dream Machine, this effect is created by replacing a digital simulacrum of computer generated imagery with high resolution scans of real life objects, made of modeling clay, cardboard and found objects. I label this technique “scary matter”, and it can be found both in games, animation films and pop music videos, such as Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer. The medium of a digital game suggests it is timeless and infinitely replayable, which intensifies the effect of estrangement in the case of always-already dead ‘scary matter’.© 2022 Authors. Published in Topos by European Humanities University This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License. This journal allows the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions. Topos Journal uses CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license (license URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

“Ghost Riders in the Sky” : (Post) Colonial Tropes in Belarusian Horror Media

The object of inquiry in this article is the subgenre of Belarusian cinematic horror, which, as of 2024, encompasses three to five exemplary cases depending on the genealogy and the degree of ‘family resemblance’. Based on the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School, I analyse structural elements of the genre and expressive means that support and disrupt them, in order to reveal the postcolonial underpinnings of the typical Belarusian horror narrative. Three most important structural elements are revealed in the narratives of Belarusian horror: the Gothic heroine, the tourist, whom I characterise as a ‘mimic man’, and the ambiguous monster – the covert representation of Belarus who is made evil by ‘slippage’ of the oppressed cinematic language. In the end, I argue that some of the same structural and expressive means have been implemented in the multimedia opera King Stakh’s Wild Hunt (2023) by Belarus Free Theater. Such an approach both clarifies the anticolonial message of the Wild Hunt, as well as in horror films inspired by it, and explains structural incongruities in the resulting narratives. The article's title references the American dark country song written by Stan Jones in the late 1940s.©2024 2024 Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The articles in Apparatus are published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This license does not apply to the media referenced, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms. The authors hold the copyright without restrictions and retain publishing rights without restrictions.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

What Would Make a Robot Sad? Robot Werther vs. Marvin the Paranoid Android

In this paper, I compare two fictional artificial agents who appeared on television in the 1980s in the USSR and in the UK. Despite their unrelated cultural genealogy, both characters project the similar emotion of sadness from the screen. First and foremost, I focus on the robot Werther from the Soviet children’s TV series Visitor from the Future (1985). This character subverts several stereotypes in representation of artificial intelligence: he possesses high emotional intelligence, as well as the ability to make independent decisions and moral judgements. His equally subversive British counterpart is Marvin the Paranoid Android from the fictional universe of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, namely from the 1981 TV series: unique human-like personality of this robot is defined by his inability to achieve satisfaction of any kind. These two representations of sad, melancholic and depressed robots are united by the fact that neither of them has a fulfilling job. I argue that this trope mirrors the popular human fear of robots taking over human jobs, resulting in “technological unemployment” of human workers, and more generally, losing one’s purpose in life. If designers and developers assume their responsibility for well-being of artificial beings that they create, they should be able to predict scenarios when robots become sad, depressed or even suicidal for the same reasons as humans do.©2023 Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO ESTIMATION OF EFFICIENCY OF INTERNET ADVERTISING

For several years, the Internet as an advertising platform, leading in growth compared with any other media. This article examines key indicators of the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on the Internet. The study proposes a number of measures aimed at a more complete and accurate assessment of the effectiveness of online advertising in modern conditions of the global computer network

Fancies explained : Converting symbolic capital into NFTs

The concept of symbolic capital, introduced by Pierre Bourdieu (1986), has been applied to explain the circulation of value between game communities and the industry. The bottom-up approach can be found in the studies of so-called “gaming capital” accumulated by gamers (Consalvo, 2009), while the top-down approach focuses on the agents who hold the most power in the gaming industry (Nichols, 2013). These perspectives may require reconfiguration today: since the end of the 2010s, traditional power relations have been contested by ‘decentralized’ gaming that uses blockchain technologies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Their early adopters suggest that NFTs may disrupt traditional circulation of value to the benefit of players as opposed to major corporations. Many gamers, however, vehemently oppose NFTs in games. By combining these top-down and the bottom-up approaches, this article explains that the specific symbolic gaming capital remains systematically underappreciated in blockchain gaming, which operates along different vectors of power. To support my argument, I turn to the longest-running blockchain-based game CryptoKitties (Axiom Zen, 2017), and analyze the elements of the role-playing genre that appeared in the game during the collective process of continuous development. In the first case, these elements (‘fancies’) were added by the developers of the game, and in the second case, an RPG-like extension emerged as one of its fan spin-offs (KotoWars). I conclude that symbolic capital is community-specific in the case of blockchain gaming. It is only available to those who already possess considerable symbolic, and, much more importantly, financial capital within the crypto community.© Alesha Serada. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Does #selling sell? Analyzing content of CryptoKitties traders’ talk on Discord

Blockchain technologies have further gamified finances and created new classes of tradeable digital assets. Their early adopters anticipate mutually beneficial ‘sharing economy’ on integrated blockchain platforms, but the practice of non-fungible token (NFT) trading seems to be undermined by the dubious ‘ludic ethics’ of virtual worlds. To find out who benefits from decentralized ecologies on blockchain, this study explores the marketplace of the first popular and the longest-running blockchain-based game CryptoKitties. It uses mixed methods content analysis to analyze textual communication on the gaming platform Discord that serves as the primary tool to advertise tokens on sale. Quantitative measurements and qualitative assessment are applied to approximately 100,000 lines of marketing messages posted in the dedicated channel within the first two years of the game's existence, which encompasses development, maturation and decline of the CryptoKitties market. Three main ways of value construction in NFTs emerge from the linguistic data based on three main types of actors: developers, players, and traders. Furthermore, four distinct clusters of sellers are revealed, whose marketing strategies are characterized by both qualitative and quantitative differences in the language. According to the data, the gaming ecology of CryptoKitties relies on informational asymmetry and monopolization of buyers’ attention. This suggests that a typical NFT marketplace could be better described as a ‘bazaar economy’, rather than a ‘sharing economy’.© 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Will Kentucky Route Zero Take You to Twin Peaks? Tracing the Narrative of the American Weird

In this article, I analyze the narrative of Kentucky Route Zero in search of tropes and constructive principles already known from Twin Peaks. I seek to find out how interactivity of the game adds to these tropes and techniques, and whether we can project our findings about its interactive hypertextual narrative back to Twin Peaks. I suggest that, in both cases, the fictional world largely emerges from the interaction with the audience that actively interprets the narrative and extends it far beyond the ‘tangible’ text. Furthermore, the authors explicitly call for such involvement by introducing self-reflexivity and metacommentary in their work. I conclude with the perspective of the American Weird setting, implemented in both ‘story worlds’; it can engender new meanings that surpass the linear logic of narration.©2021 Authors, published in WiderScreen by Filmiverkko.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The Continuous Materiality of Blockchain

Both cryptocurrency researchers and early adopters of cryptocurrencies agree that they possess a special kind of materiality, based on the laborious productive process of digital ‘mining’ [1]. This idea first appears in the Bitcoin White Paper [2] that encourages Bitcoin adopters to construct and justify its value in metaphoric comparison to gold mining. In this paper, I explore three material aspects of blockchain: physical infrastructure, human language and computer code. I apply the concept of 'continuous materiality' [3] to show how these three aspects interact in practical implementations of blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. I start from the concept of ‘digital metallism’ that stands for ‘fundamental value’ of cryptocurrencies, and end with the move of Ethereum to ‘proof-of-stake’, partially as a countermeasure against ‘evil miners’. I conclude that ignoring material aspects of blockchain technology can only further problematize complicated relations between their technical, semiotic and social materiality. Both cryptocurrency researchers and early adopters of cryptocurrencies agree that they possess a special kind of materiality, based on the laborious productive process of digital ‘mining’ [1]. This idea first appears in the Bitcoin White Paper [2] that encourages Bitcoin adopters to construct and justify its value in metaphoric comparison to gold mining. In this paper, I explore three material aspects of blockchain: physical infrastructure, human language and computer code. I apply the concept of 'continuous materiality' [3] to show how these three aspects interact in practical implementations of blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. I start from the concept of ‘digital metallism’ that stands for ‘fundamental value’ of cryptocurrencies, and end with the move of Ethereum to ‘proof-of-stake’, partially as a countermeasure against ‘evil miners’. I conclude that ignoring material aspects of blockchain technology can only further problematize complicated relations between their technical, semiotic and social materiality.© Hochschule Mittweida. All rights reserved.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Death and the Plague in The Story of Wanderings

Little known beyond the Russian speaking world, The Story of Wanderings is a dark fantasy film produced in the late period of the Soviet cinema. The film was classified as a children’s film by the director, film critics, and the state. Produced by Mosfilm, the third oldest and the most influential film studio in Soviet Russia, it is a rare example of Soviet children’s horror, featuring several death scenes and a personified plague. Death’s presence in The Story of Wanderings stands in contrast to idealised Soviet pioneers self-sacrificing themselves for the good of others, by presenting a world of flawed characters stymied by the ambient ever-presence of death. In post-Soviet Russian-speaking territories, the film is understood critically as a masterfully constructed ‘adult’ horror disguised as a state-sponsored family film. This article examines the way Alexander Mitta’s film serves a ‘dual audience’ in the context of a socialist ‘cultural industry’ that lacked an established horror genre. It also highlights how the contradictions of late Socialism are revealed in the specific power dynamics between the adult and child characters of the film.© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed