Author: Bartłomiej Musajew

Bartłomiej is a Cracow-based student of British and American literature interested in game studies and translation.
Feature

Stop calling Eastern European videogames pessimistic

It’s been 30 years since the Chernobyl disaster. There’s no denying that the explosion joined the gallery of horrors that haunt our collective imagination. As such, just like the images of concentration camps or the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, it has been fueling the anxiety on which popular culture, including videogames, thrives. Even to most Eastern Europeans Chernobyl is a post-apocalyptic fantasy. It’s why accounts of the Chernobyl disaster and its effects, even from those closest to it, usually employ conventional narrative schemas. Typically, these are borrowed from the media and globally-consumed popular fiction, and so before worrying too much…
Feature

The prison of the videogame camera

Techniques such as lens flare or liquids splattered on the camera (usually blood) have become so commonplace in videogames that we no longer pay attention to them. This indifference is a bit disquieting. After all, with videogames, we play two roles at once: the character on the screen, and ourselves in our own body viewing the screen. We act by pushing buttons and at the same time passively watch those actions performed by somebody else through the distancing filter of a camera lens. We accept this double perspective so wholly that in our minds it seems to become one. When…
Feature

Pathologic and the disease of language

Boredom is usually considered to be the death of a game. You play, you get bored, you switch off. Popular thought demands that videogames be engaging at all times, whether through direct action or intellectual thrill. It matters less as to how it’s achieved as long as boredom is avoided. But Pathologic, a game by Ice-Pick Lodge released in 2005 but re-released in HD last year, goes against this thinking—it forces its players to get bored and for good reason. Pathologic is a game about an epidemic. However, it does not follow the clichéd narrative of a crisis revealing the…