Patryk Wasiak: Die Debatte über den erzieherischen Wert von Computerspielen und die Ideologie des technologischen Fortschritts im sozialistischen Polen, in: Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2021. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, pp. 283-296.
Abstract
This essay investigates key elements of the public debate about the legitimacy of computer games in late state socialist Poland, exploring in particular how controversy over the emergence of gaming culture was contextualized in a normative approach to the role of computers in society and to the contribution to the modernization project required from all citizens. Debate over the legitimacy of using home computers for playing games, raised by this movement, was one of the key elements of public discussion regarding the desired course of computerization in a socialist state. In such a specific context playing computer games became a controversy because this was a form of pleasure that can be chosen by computer users instead of adhering to social discipline by gaining computer skills necessary to foster the common good and a technology-based modernization project.
Über den Autor
Patryk Wasiak, Dr., geb. 1978. Assistant Professor am Institut für Geschichte an der Polnischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, Warschau. Masterstudium der Soziologie und Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Warschau, Promotion in Kulturwissenschaften an der SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warschau. Ehemaliger Stipendiat der Volkswagenstiftung, des Leibniz-Zentrums für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam, des Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study und der Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
