Jaroslav Švelch

Congrats!

YouTube video by BBC Archive 1984: BANDERSNATCH, BAILIFFS and the Battle for a HIT GAME | Commercial Breaks | BBC Archive

This was clipped from a vid file I downloaded many years ago, but I've just seen that the BBC have uploaded a new version of the 'Commercial Breaks' expose of the rise of Ocean and the fall of Imagine.

Worth spending a half-hour watching for those interested in the UK's bedroom coder boom.

Also notable is the fact that Czech games set in Czech environments show entirely different parts of the country than you would see in international productions. Including rural countryside and industrial buildings.

We call it 'dual allegiance' - meaning that devs make profit abroad but still feel commitment to their local fans and include content that locals would appreciate.

One of the important findings is the qualitative importance of the local audience even though quantitatively it's quite minor. It's just easier for developers to imagine the Czech audience rather than North American or Chinese one.

We also played the games, of course: 1428: Shadows over Silesia, Hobo: Tough Life, HROT, Last Holiday, and Someday You'll Return. We had so much interesting material that it was hard to present it within one article.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

My and Jan Houška's article "Czech Appeal" is out in open access! We talked to local independent game developers who make locally themed games and asked them about their motivations, production processes, and the reception of their games. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

1/5🎥🏭When platform capitalism meets local labor: A Prague perspective on global streaming production.

My new article examines how Amazon's Carnival Row—filmed in Prague—embodies the contradictions of platform imperialism. 🧵👇

#StreamingMobileProduction #PlatformImperialism #CarnivalRow #Prague.

Go in and do this. I was also 'upgraded' automatically with no notice to the 30eur annually more expensive AI Bullshit Plus version of Office 365. Nothing says "this is a necessary and groundbreaking technology" like having to force-feed it down people's throats.

Happy to announce that for our game studies ERC project GAMEINDEX, we're looking for 2 PhD students. These are fully funded positions. More info here:

Be careful, if you ever played Among Us, or probably watched The Thing I guess, you might be a CEO assassin!

Like fucking clockwork lol

I sense some Blue Ice/Commander Blood vibes!

Happy to announce that my ERC Consolidator Grant project "GAMEINDEX:Politics and Aesthetics of Indexical Representation in Digital Games and VR" has been selected for funding. We're starting in October 2025!
gameproductionstudies.fsv.cuni.cz/2024/12/03/g...

Did you know that in Brazil, there are places where you can pay to play games for a certain amount of time?

I narrated the past, present, and future of some of these spaces in the doc Um real a hora (2022) -- One real an hour --, which is now available in English!

Let me tell you more below! 👇🏽