Hellish Quart
Game
Documents about Hellish Quart
Whitepaper4 pages
The Name of Janosik Will Never Perish: Górals Tradition in Game Culture
This paper examines a corpus of independent video games that feature Janosik, the folk hero of the Polish-Slovak borderlands, and considers how these works draw on Góral (Highlander) cultural tradition in the northern Carpathians.
- The paper is a qualitative, game-language analysis of independent video games featuring Janosik, the Polish-Slovak folk hero, and Góral (Highlander) tradition in the northern Carpathians, rather than a quantitative study.
- The authors argue that game portrayals of Janosik and Góral culture are shaped by nearly two centuries of appropriation by surrounding nation-states, including Polish, Slovak, Austro-Hungarian, and Third Reich discourses.
- The corpus includes Mirage (1994), Retrovibe (2020, with a 2024 sequel), Juro Janosik (2021, Slovak), and Hellish Quart (2021), which uses a Janosik analogue named Yendrek, alongside tabletop RPGs Corny Groń and Beyond Corny Groń.
Jagiellonian UniversityJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Intentional and Accidental Tropes of Polish Heritage in Sienkiewicz-Themed Digital Games
This paper investigates the intentional and accidental incorporation of Polish national heritage tropes in digital games based on the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz, particularly his "Trilogy."
- The paper analyses how Polish national heritage is embedded in digital games adapted from Henryk Sienkiewicz's historical novels, combining Umberto Eco's tripartite model of intentionality with Stuart Hall's encoding-decoding framework.
- Its central questions are which national-heritage elements developers deliberately implement, which elements Polish-affiliated players feel must be explained to international audiences, and which tropes are treated as transparent or too obvious to mention.
- The corpus comprises four games tied to Sienkiewicz's Trilogy, set in the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone, Hellish Quart, Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword, and the ironic 8-bit mini-game With Fire and Sword: Spiders within Observer.
DiGRASep 2024