ROMchip Presents: Jaroslav Švelch on Player vs. Monster
Join us Friday, March 8, as ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories hosts games studies scholar Jaroslav Švelch for a talk about his recent book, Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity. The event will be at 1PM EST on the ROMchip Twitch channel, https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal. Sign up for our newsletter to never miss an update.
About the Book
Since the early days of video games, monsters have played pivotal
roles as dangers to be avoided, level bosses to be defeated, or targets
to be destroyed for extra points. But why is the figure of the monster
so important in gaming, and how have video games come to shape our
culture's conceptions of monstrosity? To answer these questions, Player vs. Monster explores
the past half-century of monsters in games, from the dragons of early
tabletop role-playing games and the pixelated aliens of Space Invaders to the malformed mutants of The Last of Us and the bizarre beasts of Bloodborne, and reveals the common threads among them.
Covering examples from aliens to zombies, Jaroslav Švelch explores the art of monster design and traces its influences from mythology, visual arts, popular culture, and tabletop role-playing games. At the same time, he shows that video games follow the Cold War–era notion of clearly defined, calculable enemies, portraying monsters as figures that are irredeemably evil yet invariably vulnerable to defeat. He explains the appeal of such simplistic video game monsters, but also explores how the medium could evolve to present more nuanced depictions of monstrosity.
About the Author
Jaroslav Švelch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Charles University, Prague, and Lecturer in the Department of Game Design at the Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He is the author of Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games.
Upcoming Talks
On Friday, April 12, we'll be hosting scholar Whit Pow for their talk "People Orientations: Toward a Transgender Video Game and Software History." The event will be at 2PM EST on the ROMchip Twitch channel. REGISTER HERE.
About ROMchip
ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories is a free, online scholarly journal for game history. ROMchip develops, edits, and publishes ad-free, open access game history research for a range of audiences. It supports any discipline of work enlivening the history of games in local and global contexts, and embraces diversity in how game history is studied, documented, collected, preserved, and practiced. ROMchip is a donation-based organization fiscally sponsored by The Hack Foundation (d.b.a. Hack Club), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN: 81-2908499).