The Call of Queue: PRL Heritage and Nostalgia in Contemporary Polish Game Culture

This academic paper examines how nostalgia for the Polish People's Republic (PRL) surfaces in contemporary Polish board and digital games, situating this phenomenon against a contested public memory of the communist era. The authors contrast the official, state-sanctioned narrative, which frames PRL primarily through political oppression and the Solidarity movement, with a vernacular nostalgia among those who experienced the late PRL and the post-1989 transformation. This nostalgia centers on tangible heritage such as 1980s material artifacts, communist-era architecture, and everyday photography, which has fed a broader revival of PRL-inspired design, food, fashion, and media.

The central argument is that games offer a distinctive way to present and potentially reconcile tensions in PRL memory. The authors trace the trend from Kolejka (The Queue), a 2011 board game published by the National Institute for Remembrance that aimed to educate about everyday shortages but became a commercial success largely through its entertainment value and nostalgic appeal. Subsequent board games, including PRL re-skins of established titles and a PRL edition of Monopoly, followed this pattern, while digital games such as The Medium and the upcoming Unholy have been comparatively slower to adopt communist-era aesthetics, often in horror settings. The analysis is qualitative and interpretive, drawing on game studies theory and Polish memory scholarship rather than survey or quantitative data.

The authors propose three explanations for why games are well suited to this role. First, the common game trope of collecting scarce resources and hidden items decouples objects from their original context, transforming the distress of shortage into a pleasant pastime where failure carries no real consequence. Second, this logic allows contrasting memory discourses, the aesthetic appreciation of PRL design and the recollection of everyday hardship, to coexist. Third, many items modelled in contemporary games were export-oriented luxury goods never available to ordinary citizens, so they are reframed as aspirational, while still reinforcing the state's propagandistic image of prosperity. The paper concludes that games paradoxically sustain both vernacular nostalgia and a residue of official communist self-presentation.