Štěpán Šanda is a PhD student in the Media and Communication Studies program at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. In his dissertation thesis, he focuses on Czech landscape representation in Czech games. In 2022 he was part of a research team on European media transparency EurOMo.
Such a disaster: Apocalypse in Eastern European Landscapes
FROG 2024 – Talk
One can come across both Czech and Polish versions of the meme where a state representative sits on a train and inspects the surrounding poor conditions. However, the caption says that they are still in Czechia (or Poland). The two images point to a general (self-)perception of Eastern Europe as a neglected region whose identity since the 1990s has been based on “catching up with the West”, a process that entailed an attempt to implement its imagined features such as the unregulated market as a defining social principle (Buden, 2013). But what if the West starts to resemble the post-communist region in desolation? And does the Eastern European apocalypse look different? Pérez-Latorre (2019) has identified several hopeful motifs in post-apocalyptic games, but he also mentions the Czech zombie survival game DayZ (2013) and its rather dystopian prospects. Moreover, the game’s terrain is modelled after a Czech structurally disadvantaged region. The game builds on the experience of an ongoing apocalypse, focuses on everyday surviving apocalypse and thus highlights “the precarious position that humans face in a thanato-political reality in which no institutional security guarantees the players’ status” (Schmeink, 2016, p. 74). This absence is embodied in a landscape full of dilapidated houses. Conversely, some titles with Western post-apocalyptic setting include the theme of renewal – the flourishing of a non-human and post-human world, such as mutant organisms in the Fallout series (1997-2018), or the return to a pristine state of nature, as in The Last of Us (2013), where one can also observe intersections with environmental fiction (Green, 2015. Is the world of Eastern European games such as the DayZ (2013), S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007) or Metro 2033 (2010) different? The setting, and landscape especially, are crucial in apocalyptic fiction interpretation because a “wider renegotiation of social orders, fragmented and disintegrated urban and rural spaces work as a means to comment critically on contemporary social formations” (Walter, 2019, p. 134). By close reading of Eastern European post-apocalyptic games, I will identify how Eastern European semi-peripheral environments show the end of the world and how it relates to the idealized West.
References:
Buden, B. (2013). Konec postkomunismu: Od společnosti bez naděje k naději bez společnosti. Rybka.
Green, A. M. (2015). The Reconstruction of Morality and the Evolution of Naturalism in The Last of Us. Games and Culture 11(7-8), p. 745-763. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015579489.
Pérez-Latorre, O. (2019). Post-apocalyptic Games, Heroism and the Great Recession. Game Studies 19(3). https://gamestudies.org/1903/articles/perezlatorre.
Schmeink, L. (2016). “Scavenge, Slay, Survive”: The Zombie Apocalypse, Exploration, and Lived Experience in DayZ. Science Fiction Studies 43(1), p. 67-84. https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.43.1.0067.
Walter, M. (2019). Landscapes of loss: the semantics of empty spaces in contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction. In: Campbell, C. J., Giovine, A., Keating, J. (Eds.). Empty Spaces: Perspectives on Emptiness in Modern History. University of London Press.
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