Video Games and Post-Soviet Social Thought

(SPRING 2027)

Course Description:

Video games globally have vastly overtaken the film industry not only in terms of financial revenue but also in terms of cultural ubiquity. Two of the largest emerging markets in the industry now hail from the Post-Soviet region: Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Beginning with Tetris on the eve of Soviet glasnost and continuing through to contemporary game releases such as Indika, Metro Exodus, Atomic Heart, Disco Elysium, and Cyberpunk, this class will pair gameplay with philosophic and social theoretic readings from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Stanisław Lem, Slavoj Žižek, and Alexei Yurchak, among others. Reading these different media—created by people whose personal and social histories were entwined with the Soviet Union and its socialist Eastern Bloc—with and against each other, students will consider why Post-Soviet thought has so often centered utopia and dystopia and how the video game medium in particular has engaged with this aspect of Post-Soviet thought.