A Story or a Machine? Revisiting the Work of Bohuslav Blažek, the Czechoslovak Pioneer of Game Studies
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11230%2F25%3A10499857" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11230/25:10499857 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://books.punctumbooks.com/10.53288/0441.1.00.pdf" target="_blank" >https://books.punctumbooks.com/10.53288/0441.1.00.pdf</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.53288/0441.1.00" target="_blank" >10.53288/0441.1.00</a>
Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
A Story or a Machine? Revisiting the Work of Bohuslav Blažek, the Czechoslovak Pioneer of Game Studies
Original language description
This chapter introduces the game scholarship of Bohuslav Blažek, a forgotten Czechoslovak pioneer of game studies who published several texts on games in the late 1980s as well as the book The Labyrinth of Computer Games (Bludiště počítačových her), published in 1990 but written in the final years of the Communist regime. Trained as a philosopher, psychologist, and filmmaker and better known for his work on theatre, media, and environmental issues, Blažek drew from an eclectic selection of literature and promoted play (including computer games) as a way towards a more participatory and communal post-industrial society. His 1990 book contains a sophisticated inquiry into the structure of computer games as a medium, anticipating some of the formative questions of game studies. One section headline asks whether computer games were "stories or machines," predating the so-called "ludology versus narratology" debate by about a decade. Moreover, the book embodies an inclusive and interdisciplinary vision of games research that remains inspiring to this day. This chapter revisits Blažek's writings on computer games and situates them in the background of his intellectual biography and the historical context of late socialist Czechoslovakia, offering an alternative to the Western-centric and Anglo-Saxon histories of the intellectual inquiry into digital games.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
C - Chapter in a specialist book
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
50802 - Media and socio-cultural communication
Result continuities
Project
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Continuities
I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace
Others
Publication year
2025
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Book/collection name
Historiographies of game studies: what it has been, what it could be
ISBN
978-1-68571-200-6
Number of pages of the result
23
Pages from-to
307-329
Number of pages of the book
774
Publisher name
Punctum Books
Place of publication
Goleta
UT code for WoS chapter
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