“We’re dealing with a strange epistemology that the gamemakers don’t understand themselves.” - Daniil Leiderman, Assistant Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh.
On Monday, September 8th, the Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies (REEES) hosted “Let’s Play Perestroika!” a lecture uncovering the political undertones of three video games in different areas of the Soviet Union amidst the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. The scholar arrowheading the lively discussion was Daniil Leiderman, who studies games as an art form after receiving a PhD from Princeton University in Art History. Focusing his work on the Soviet and Post-Soviet world, he links his knowledge of art and protest culture to video games to study Perestroika’s complexities via a playful form.
The lecture started out with an introduction to Perestroika, which is the rebuilding as a Soviet policy for both political and economic reforms that would contemporize the Soviet system. During this time, video games were a new entity that were free from censorship, as computer and internet access was still only available to a limited audience.
“This was the golden age of the internet where you could download anything on your computer and play it. It was before administrative passwords and two-factor authentication.”
Leiderman then introduced the political nuances to video games at this time such as their attempts to understand capitalism and the ways players can both make money and lavishly spend it in a contradictory manner.
“The game has many layers of different epistemologies that contradict each other. It is such an interesting simulation seemingly about capitalism because you can responsibly invest and gamble money.”
The games subtly tried to better understand capitalism in a way that made sense to Soviets, ultimately reinforcing the country’s shared confusion and looming inevitability in a new political atmosphere. Closing talk by viewing a player get frustrated at Getting Over It, a game where an animated man in a cauldron climbs a mountain via a pickaxe, the conversation highlighted exactly what it needed to: Perestoika’s effect on the Soviet people, how they turned to video games, and how those games interpreted capitalism in their own complex, comical ways.