Intentional and Accidental Tropes of Polish Heritage in Sienkiewicz-Themed Digital Games

This paper examines how Polish national heritage is embedded in digital games adapted from Henryk Sienkiewicz's historical novels, and how that heritage is intended, interpreted, and sometimes overlooked. Its central method combines Umberto Eco's tripartite model of intentionality (of the author, the reader, and the work) with Stuart Hall's encoding-decoding framework, applied through analysis of developer statements, player discussions on platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube, and close readings of the games themselves. The authors pursue three questions: which elements of national heritage developers deliberately implement, which elements players with Polish cultural affiliation feel need explaining to international audiences, and which tropes fall into neither category because they are treated as transparent or too obvious to mention.

The corpus consists of four games connected to Sienkiewicz's Trilogy, set in the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and central to the formation of modern Polish national identity and the Sarmatian cultural myth of the nobility. The selected titles are The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone, which adapts Sienkiewicz-derived motifs into a fantasy setting without claims to historical accuracy; Hellish Quart, a sabre-fighting simulator emphasizing historical veracity and combat realism; Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword, a standalone expansion developed by a Turkish studio, adapted by a Ukrainian studio, and released by a Swedish publisher; and the ironic 8-bit mini-game With Fire and Sword: Spiders within Observer. Together they represent markedly different attitudes toward the same source material.

The paper's method is a game-language analysis grounded in Bakhtinian theory, which identifies ideological threads in game design and links them to existing discursive formations. The authors state that the goal is both to catalogue intentional and unintentional national tropes and to test an analytical tool for studying the relationship between digital games and national cultures. The work contributes to emerging scholarship on games, nationality, and cultural heritage, and is presented as a DiGRA 2024 proceedings paper.