Humanities

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.