Playing with the Family: An Exploration of Computer Clubs and Arcades in Soviet Russia, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia during the 1980s and 1990s

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the region and its aligned countries experienced massive political changes, mirrored in socio-cultural attitudes and technological developments (Okrest, Kuvaldin, and Buzev 2021; Schlögel 2023). While the West saw a revolution in home computing in the 1980s, the East was faced with more limited access to leisure electronics (Judy and Lommel 1986, 108). The reason for this is that in former Soviet and Eastern Bloc (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania) countries, computing technology was mostly used for state-facing purposes, following an “application-oriented teleology of computing” during the 1980s (Švelch 2018, 15). To that end, Mikhail Gorbachev announced in 1985 that computers “are the catalysts of progress” (Judy and Lommel 1986, 108), with which he heralded a computer literacy programme throughout the state. This new era coincided with changes in foreign affairs policies, notably the lifting of CoCom sanctions in 1984, which previously prohibited many Western countries from exporting certain desktop computers to the Soviet Union (Lewis 1990; Cain 2005).

Beyond the surface of state-owned computers offered to people in public places such as libraries and educational settings, arcade halls and computer clubs emerged throughout the USSR and its aligned countries from the 1980s onwards (Afinogenov 2013; Švelch 2018, 63–98; Lin 2019). Our paper investigates their evolution, role, and status in Soviet Russia, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia to trace the unfolding of leisure electronics and their use in the geopolitical East of the late 1980s and early 1990s. We will argue that collaborative and competitive programming and playing became a replacement for a family that was metaphorically embodied by the state. They also became the place where creativity and passion pushed technological and socio-political boundaries, often also within the authority’s blind spot (Gießler 2018a, 2018b).

Our idea of ‘family’ is two-fold: (1) computer clubs as surrogate families, and (2) the kinds of games played in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Regarding our first focus, we are interested in studying the social structure of computer clubs and arcades as well as their socio-historical impact on today’s notion of Central and Eastern European gaming. We will combine ethnographic and archival research to map out the history of computer clubs and computing in Soviet Russia, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia to understand how this subculture created a network that is akin to familial structures. In the context of the second focus, we want to determine to what degree games played and/or produced under these circumstances share certain features that allow their classification as ‘family of games.’ On the one hand, we will look at games popular in this geographical area during this time, e.g. the arcade game Gorodki (1982), Tetris (1984), Colour Lines (1992), and Doom (1993), and on the other hand, we will trace production circumstances, from amateurs to state-owned factories (Ovchinnikov 2023). Peripherally, we will argue that the state, as a surrogate family, is often targeted in political resistance games of this time, encouraging a break from a forced union and emphasising the individual, e.g. Perestroika (1989) and The Adventures of Indiana Jones in Wenceslas Square in Prague on January 16, 1989 (1989).