Jagiellonian University in Krakow

God's Playground: On Polish History, Games, and Discourses

This paper examines Polish discourse surrounding digital and tabletop games set in Polish history, framing the topic through Norman Davies's notion of Poland as "God's Playground" and the tension between game conventions and dominant narratives of Polish cultural memory.

• The paper is a meta-study based on preliminary research and analysis of critical commentary and existing scholarship, not a large-scale empirical survey, so its findings are interpretive rather than statistically grounded.
• Polish debates on historical accuracy in games centre on two periods: the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (e.g., Medieval II: Total War, Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword, Hellish Quart) and the Second World War, especially the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
• Critics praise the seventeenth-century games for accurate events, maps of real Polish cities, and atmosphere, but the authors argue this praise overlooks how the vision draws on romanticized literature such as Henryk Sienkiewicz and nostalgic 'retrotopia' that sustains national myths.