Game Studies

What is a National Video Game? A Central and Eastern European Perspective

Abstract

This article examines the growing interplay between video games and national identity. Tracing a research trend that has gained momentum in game studies since the mid-2010s, it addresses the lack of comprehensive scholarship on the concept of national video games and criticises the practice of using the “national game” concept as uniform and self-evident. Instead, it suggests that, in order to better understand the complex influence the context of creation might have on a game, one could benefit from considering various loci of the game’s nationality. Thus, a framework is introduced to categorise games based on their developer, gameworld, language and localisation, and target audience and marketing.

The research underscores the complexity and evolving nature of defining national video games, emphasising the need for continued scholarly work to refine these definitions and to understand the political implications of labelling games by nationality. Examples of games are drawn from Central and Eastern Europe, mostly Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, and the article includes an examination of institutional definitions from several European countries; in consequence, the analysis is the most pertinent to the discussion of the national in the European context. At the same time, a review of scholarship on games from different regions demonstrates that many researchers across the world have similar interests and choose similar perspectives. Therefore, this argument may be relevant to a broader conversation as well.

Keywords: national games, national identity, globalisation, locality, game developer, gameworld

1. Introduction

In 2020, Tomasz Z. Majkowski, Magdalena Kozyra and Aleksandra Prokopek received a prestigious national grant to study the relationship between the Polish video game culture and the Polish national culture. However, many commenters in non-academic online spaces deemed it a waste of public money (Majkowski & Hekman, 2020). They claimed that this kind of research was redundant: after all, everyone knows what Polish games are. Such is the strength of popular discourses that merge video games and national identity -- discourses that have been on the rise in the 21st century (Suominen, 2020).

Likewise, game scholars are now frequently associate video games with nation-states. This was rare in the 2000s, when, for instance, Koichi Iwabuchi (2004) argued that video games from Japan were largely received abroad as “culturally odorless.” Things began to change in the mid-2010s. The earliest major publication is probably the encyclopaedia Video Games Around the World (Wolf, 2015a), with many entries on national themes. This pattern has been copied in the second edition of another reference work (Wolf, 2021) and several other books have been devoted entirely or partly to national games (Švelch, 2018; Penix-Tadsen, 2019; Pérez-Latorre & Navarro-Remesal, 2022; Swalwell, 2021b; Wills, 2019).

In some of these books and elsewhere, multiple chapters and articles have been published that focus on specific countries -- including Austria (Pfister, 2023), Finland (Paasonen & Karhulahti, 2021), France (Jankowski, 2021), Poland (Garda & Grabarczyk, 2021), Spain (Fernández-Vara, 2021), or Switzerland (Rochat, 2023). There are also numerous mentions in publications that analyse game industries or game cultures in more detail than games -- for instance, in Estonia (Ozimek, 2021), Romania and Bulgaria (Policov et al., 2009), or Brazil, Argentina, China, India, Australia, the United States, Iran and a number of Arab countries (Huntemann & Aslinger, 2013). Yet such publications largely fall outside of the purview of this article, which is centred around the national definitions of games themselves.

Locally oriented research has highlighted underrecognised games and national aspects of internationally popular games. It continues to challenge the view that video games and the video game industry are essentially global. In addition, some researchers have questioned the assumption that nationality is inherently built into video games and that it can be objectively observed. These researchers have studied the establishment of Canadian indie gaming identities and communities on different spatial scales (Parker & Jenson, 2017), the relation of games to British national identity (Webber, 2020), the socially constructed definition of “Swedishness” within the Swedish game industry (Avorin & Myhr, 2019), the ways China and the United Kingdom use national historical representations in games to project soft power (Donald et al., 2023), the different models of “authentic Chineseness” created by Genshin Impact players (Li & Li, 2023), or the convergence of the insular and the transnational in the construction of the concept of Japanese games (Fiadotau, 2021),

However, there seems to be no review of the literature on national video games, and there are hardly any publications focused on the concept of the national video game itself rather than on the status of games tied to a particular country [1]. These are the gaps in which we situate our argument. Based on available research and selected games produced in Central and Eastern Europe, we provide an overview of various issues due to which the superficially simple action of defining national games is in fact a highly complex process.

The way we approach these issues is rooted in our academic backgrounds. We are all European scholars, so we mainly use examples of games with ties to our continent, countering the traditional view of the video game industry as “a field dominated by Japan and the United States, with Europe being seen as ‘third space’” (Pérez-Latorre & Navarro-Remesal, 2022, p. 15). We do not group the titles from Europe and North America under a common moniker of “Western games,” which would downplay regional differences. Further, we come from the same region: Central and Eastern Europe, specifically from the Czech Republic, Poland and Switzerland, and we are members of national research teams in publicly funded projects (see the acknowledgements section for details); these teams are preparing lists of video games associated with their respective countries, and most of the game examples below are related to these countries.

Thus, the aim of this article is twofold: to offer a way to organise the academic study of video games related to particular nation-states, but also an insight into practical classification problems that appear in preparing national game databases. While closely related, these two aims reveal underlying tensions between theoretical framing and practical categorisation. Whereas a strictly research-oriented approach may justify replacing the label of “national games” with that of “games with national characteristics” (Li Mengqi & Webber, 2022), in practical database work it is difficult to avoid the former label altogether. In this article, we employ the term “national video game” (or “national game,” for short) to denote games that are deemed national by individuals, groups or institutions. To avoid implying that the nationality of certain video games is objectively inscribed in them, we do not directly call games “Czech,” “Polish” or “Swiss.” Instead, we use more concrete designations (for example: “produced by a Polish studio”, though the notion of national developers is complex as well). When abstract designations are needed, we use phrases like “related to the Czech Republic” or “associated with Switzerland.”

The national perspective is not the only one that scholars may adopt in their study of the connection between video games and particular locations [2]. Some analyses have been conducted on a regional scale (Liboriussen & Martin, 2016), regarding the areas of Africa (Blignaut & Ravyse, 2018), East and Southeast Asia (Anh, 2021), Europe (Pérez-Latorre & Navarro-Remesal, 2022), the Indian subcontinent (Mukherjee, 2022), or Latin America (Penix-Tadsen, 2016; Ramírez Moreno, 2021). Video games have also been examined through the postcolonial lens (Mukherjee, 2017), the lens of centres and peripheries (Švelch, 2021b; Baeza-González, 2021), the lens of cultural flows (Šisler, Švelch & Šlerka, 2017) and the lens of cultural heritage (Eklund et al., 2025). They have also been examined through the concept of transculturation, which distinguishes between regionalist and cosmopolitan forms of cultural representation (Ramírez Moreno; Navarrete-Cardero, 2024).

In addition, locality may denote a limited area such as a town or district, but it can also function as a broader conceptual counterweight to globality (Swalwell, 2021c). Yet the national perspective continues to be the most prominent one, and it is often adopted as self-evident. This invites further reflection on what we actually mean when we write about national video games. That reflection aligns with a significant tradition in the humanities and social sciences demonstrating how nations are socially constructed as imagined communities (Anderson, 1983). Film scholars have long employed that tradition to inspect the general concept of national cinema (Higson, 1989), or to observe that the homogenising discourse of national cinema has been used to support both the First World’s “imperial aggression and defiant national chauvinism” and “the struggle of many national cinemas... for cultural, if not also economic, self-definition against Hollywood or Indian product” (Crofts, 1993, pp. 62-63). An application of this work to the analysis of the idea of national games, building on its application by Nick Webber (2020) to the idea of British games, would be an important contribution. Here, however, we have chosen a different path to build our own framework: an inductive study of game scholarship. This way we can derive insights from existing research as well as indicate which research areas have been covered often, and which remain underexplored.

We begin with an examination of definitions formulated by European national governments, game industry associations and other institutions particularly in the Czech Republic, Poland and Switzerland. Afterwards, we draw from game studies scholarship to present four general categories that can be used to describe national aspects of video games. We conclude that non-academic and academic definitions have often been similar, and that they could both be complemented by a more complex and explicit approach to defining national video games.

We also comment on the political aspects of national definitions. Our analysis is mostly relevant to the European context, especially that of Central and Eastern Europe, which is in line with the recent attempts to increase the visibility of Central and Eastern European games (Kristensen, 2023; Mochocki et al., 2024). Even so, many game scholars in various parts of the world seem to have related interests in nationality -- or, more generally, in the broadly understood locality -- and we hope that our conceptualisation of national video games will be useful, even though it cannot fully cover the multiple differences between countries and regions.

2. Institutional Definitions

2.1. Cultural Tests and Other State Policies

Most European national video game markets have traditionally been dominated by games made in the United States or Japan. At the same time, a number of governments have introduced various forms of support for national games (Wolf, 2015b). In order to make decisions about direct funding, tax reliefs, or tax exemptions, those governments have needed to adopt certain defining criteria (cf., O’Brien, 2023). For example, some European countries use so-called cultural tests to define which companies or games are eligible for financial support. These tests vary from country to country, but they generally include a list of conditions that a given company or game must meet. In the UK, for instance, an application for tax relief is scored in several categories, with a total possible score of 31 points. A third of the points (11) are awarded for production aspects (such as the nationality of the production team, production location and so forth), and 20 points are derived from the game’s content and cultural contribution, including setting, characters, plot and language (British Film Institute, 2025). Both aspects are likewise important in the cultural tests of Germany (Federal Ministry…, 2025), Ireland (Department of Tourism…, 2023), or France (The French National Centre…, 2025) [3].

The tests can be understood as an attempt by the national governments to not only support local companies but also define what is a part of the national canon. Although the goal of the cultural tests seems explicitly practical, they have implicit ideological consequences. The state’s definition of a national game or industry can have the power to shape the general understanding of the concept of the “cultural heritage.” As an outcome, companies are tempted to identify themselves as national bodies producing national content -- at least if they want to benefit financially. However, several commentators have observed that the practical effects of such schemes often diverge from their declared cultural aims. In the UK, a substantial share of tax relief has gone to large multinational studios such as Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive. Reports in The Guardian (Holmes, McDonald and Stuart 2019) and GamesIndustry.biz (Taylor, 2019) have pointed out that these companies receive extensive tax benefits whilst routing profits abroad, which raises concerns about whether such forms of support truly foster a local industry. Similar dynamics have been discussed by David Nieborg, Chris Young and Daniel Joseph (2019) in the context of the Canadian game economy, where tax incentives primarily benefited US-based corporations. These cases complicate the notion of “national support,” showing how cultural tests may, paradoxically, serve transnational capital while symbolically reinforcing national identity.

This effect is reinforced by another feature of the cultural tests. Namely, they have been introduced in keeping with the requirements of the European Commission, and many of the conditions can be met if the tested game is related to any country in the European Economic Area, not necessarily to the home country. With regard to the UK, Webber (2020) argues that this “enables games... to effectively circulate in an international space under the auspices of non-British publication and/or ownership, while retaining recognisably British (or Scottish, and so forth) qualities and sensibilities” (p. 145).

A government may operate with a generalised definition of a national game as well. In Poland, the Centre for the Development of Creative Industries (Centrum Wsparcia.., 2023), which was established in 2022 by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, provides funding for “cultural video games.” It specifically notes that history is just one possible source of inspiration, and that the content and form of cultural games may be inspired by numerous areas of “culture in a broad sense” from literature to science. The Centre also assigns a special value to the projects in which “elements related to Polish culture and heritage will be combined harmoniously with cultural codes intelligible and attractive to global users.” Other than that, a list of evaluation criteria enumerates “the cultural and artistic value of the project, especially in the areas of the subject matter, narrative, gameplay, and image and sound” (Centrum Wsparcia..., 2023, pp. 5-6, 15). There is no detailed cultural test in this case, and the funding is relatively low: in the second edition of the programme, no game could receive more than an equivalent of about €100,000 [4].

In some countries, such as the UK and Norway, cultural test applications are handled by national film institutes. To illustrate, the Norwegian Film Institute administers funding schemes that require games to meet criteria related to content and language, and it covers a substantial portion of development and marketing costs for qualifying projects (Sotamaa, Jørgensen & Sandqvist, 2019). Although this is in line with the mutual indebtedness of game studies and film studies (Girina, 2013; Pigulak, 2022), scholars have noted the need for differentiating between national game and film frameworks and schools (Schreiber, 2019). As Webber (2020) notes when discussing British media, “ideas of ‘national cinema’... remind us that games and films differ. The term encompasses medium, venue and canon in one, with a grandiosity about a sense of exhibition which is entirely absent from (and arguably inappropriate in) the debate around games” (p. 137). Recent research further demonstrates how national funding initiatives have evolved in other European contexts. Emil Lundedal Hammar et al. (2023) analyse the Danish system of cultural funding for games, showing how these policies intersect with both creative industries and state definitions of culture. Overall, in the long run it seems that specialised institutions might be useful in dealing with the nationality of games.

Cultural tests are not the only mechanisms through which states can support their game industries. However, in many cases, the connection between games and films extends beyond evaluation criteria to broader funding and preservation frameworks administered by film institutions. For instance, under Czech law (Czech Republic, 2024), an audiovisual work is considered Czech when its production meets specific material conditions (for example, a producer or co-producer with a place of business in the Czech Republic has contributed at least 10 percent of the total production costs) or when it complies with the conditions of the Council of Europe Convention on Cinematographic Co-production. Every producer of a Czech audiovisual work that fulfils this definition must offer two undamaged copies of the work to the National Film Archive for purchase within 60 days of its first public release. The NFA is a state-funded archive whose mission is to “care for the film heritage, facilitate its recognition, and assist the development of the Czech audiovisual industry and film culture” (NFA, 2024).

Since 1 January 2025, video games have also been explicitly included in the legal definition of audiovisual works under the amended Audiovisual Act (Act No. 496/2012 Coll.). This update, a significant recent change, recognises games as part of Czech audiovisual culture and opens access to public funding through the restructured Czech Audiovisual Fund, which now covers cinema, television, animation and video games alike. It also allows representatives of the game industry to participate in the Fund’s decision-making bodies (Ministerstvo kultury, 2025). While video games are now legally treated as audiovisual works and form part of the NFA’s collections, the obligation to deposit copies currently applies explicitly to cinematographic and television works; for games, deposit procedures are expected to follow through specific implementing guidelines issued by the NFA.

Institutional definitions of nationality may also encompass more than just audiovisual or artistic works. In Switzerland, the designation “Swissness” serves as an internationally recognised marker of origin and quality for products and services. Nevertheless, defining “Swissness” proves challenging, since Switzerland represents a prototypical “Willensnation” (literally, “nation of will”; Widmer, 2007), with no single common language or religion. Therefore, the Swiss legislation defines the criteria for “Swissness” solely on the distribution of cost. For instance, in the case of products, at least 60 percent of the cost price must be realised in Switzerland [5]. The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property provides a spreadsheet to calculate the “Swissness” of a product or service based solely on the cost distribution [6]. However, “Swissness” in graphic design is not defined by location or origin but by formal, aesthetic, or procedural criteria (Budrick, 2020). The Cinémathèque Suisse, established in 1943, collects and preserves Swiss and international films. But there is no agreement on how to define “Swissness” in these titles, partly because Switzerland lacks institutions that would establish “Swissness” in film (Summermatter, 2015).

All these examples are relevant not only as descriptive accounts but also because they show how governments actively construct the concept of a national game, defining what counts as culturally valuable or eligible for support. Comparing the Czech, Polish and Swiss approaches highlights the diversity of detailed criteria -- from production location and funding contributions to content and cultural codes -- and illustrates the contingent and socially negotiated nature of national game identity.

2.2. Game Industry Associations and other Non-Governmental Institutions

National games can also be defined from the perspective of the game industry itself. Various institutional and infrastructural supports show that nationality in games is partly a matter of the industry ecosystem, which shapes how games are produced, circulated and perceived globally (Consalvo, 2016; O’Donnell, 2014).

Industry associations play an important role: the goals of the Czech Game Developers Association (GDACZ, 2025), the Polish Games Association (PG, 2025) and the Swiss Game Developers Association (SGDA, 2025), according to their websites, are the support, growth and visibility of respective national industries. Although these associations operate independently, they frequently collaborate with state institutions and contribute to an institutionalised vision of national game industries. In the case of GDACZ, this is evident not only in their membership in the committees at the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic (GDACZ, 2025) or in their consulting role in the Audiovisual Act’s subsidy scheme (GDACZ, 2025), but also in its participation in international initiatives, where representatives work together with government officials to negotiate agreements and partnerships (GDACZ, 2023a). This involvement demonstrates how the association helps frame the concept of national games in relation to the international context.

As one of the ways to define the national identity of game industries, SGDA awards the Swiss Game Awards (SGDA, 2025) to games whose production costs must be borne at least in 60 percent by Swiss citizens or by persons residing in Switzerland (Swiss passport or residence permit) [7]. Alternatively, the Swiss Design Awards, awarded by the Federal Office of Culture (FOC), require applicants to be Swiss nationals or designers residing in Switzerland. The current Swiss game industry is highly dependent on public funding bodies because the private sector in Switzerland still does not recognise games as a viable business.

Similarly, the Czech Game of the Year (Česká hra roku, 2025) has been conferred in the Czech Republic by the MediaRealms company since 2011. Although the award is not officially organised by GDACZ and has no connection to the government, it shapes an understanding of a national game. However, the only variable defining what exactly a Czech game is can be found in one of the selection criteria -- the title must be created primarily in the Czech Republic or by authors who live and create there. A comparable framework is applied in Poland for the Digital Dragons Awards (Digital Dragons, 2025), with winners selected by experts from nominations submitted by the game development community via an open survey. According to the regulations, the developer’s head office must be situated in Poland.

National identity in games is also shaped and reinforced through marketing practices, industry networking and institutional support. Platforms like Steam occasionally host country-specific sales, highlighting games from specific countries, which boost visibility and frame the titles within a national context. The Polish Constitution Days 2025, held from April 26 to May 3, celebrated Poland’s gaming heritage and the 3rd May Constitution of 1791, featuring discounts on Polish-developed games (Steam, 2025b). In a similar vein, the Czech & Slovak Games Week on Steam and GOG platforms is an annual event offering discounts on over 160 titles, providing a platform for developers from both countries to showcase their games and foster community engagement (Steam, 2025a).

Apart from these digital sales and national promotions, international trade conferences also serve as a stage for reinforcing national identity in games. At major trade conferences, like GDC or GamesCom, national delegations -- such as the Dutch one (Dutch Game Association, 2022) -- often gather to collectively showcase their country’s games, further linking national identity to international visibility. Likewise, at Gamescom, GDACZ organised a booth showcasing Czech game studios, presenting national talent in an international setting (GDACZ, 2023b).

Finally, it is crucial to acknowledge the role of the media in defining what counts as a national game. Specialised game journalism plays a key role by assigning cultural and commodity value to titles through reviews or other journalistic texts (Carlson, 2009; Foxman & Nieborg, 2016; Perreault & Vos, 2020). As reviewers position themselves as experts endowed with gaming capital (Consalvo, 2007), their evaluations not only guide consumer spending but also establish comparative frameworks that situate certain games within national canons or production traditions. At the same time, the structural dependencies of the enthusiast press on industry sources (Fisher & Mohammed-Baksh, 2020) influence which games are highlighted, how they are framed and whose perspectives are legitimised.

Based on this limited overview, we can tentatively frame institutional definitions in terms of two very general criteria: production and game content (the latter being more relevant to governments than to industry associations). To be more specific, and also include other aspects of national games, we now turn to the definitions used in game studies.

3. Academic Definitions

3.1. Methodology

To prepare for our analysis of publications on national video games, we first consulted a working list of about twenty database categories compiled by the research team working on the project The Polish Video Game Heritage (1958-2025): A Catalog and a Bibliography (the two Polish co-authors of this paper also belong to that team). The list, itself based on an overview of existing video game databases, contained such categories as title, release date, developer, director, platform or engine. After comparing that list with our own initial review of game studies literature, we decided to distinguish just four general categories: developer; gameworld; language and localisation; target audience and marketing. These categories are types rather than classes, and so they are not all mutually exclusive.

In the next step, we employed these categories in a more systematic reading of academic literature. We selected ten publications -- eight journal articles and two book chapters -- about several different countries, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, to gather information on how national game scholarship defines its object. For every publication, we took notes to record if and how it discussed game developers, gameworlds, etc. This way we were able to examine the representation of each category across different publications. Finally, based on these representations, an additional internal discussion and some more publications we consulted as needed, we described the definitional issues related to each category. The following descriptions are thus informed by game studies literature, but they are not a reflection of its state; rather, they are an instrument others can use when considering the nationality of particular video games. We also refer to a selection of Czech, Polish and Swiss titles which we identified as the most illustrative or clear cases supporting the description of each introduced category.

3.2. Developer

Bradley Stevan McAvoy-James (2019) states that words like “Western” and “Eastern” are often applied to “large groups of people within predesigned geographical constraints... Yet... few institutions and parties have defined or even clarified what exactly these words represent and mean” (p. 5). In a similar manner, academic publications on national video games rarely specify the meaning of “Czechness,” “Polishness” or “Swisness,” let alone the meaning of “nationality” (the word “national” itself is rarely used). However, we may look for implicit definitions, and possibly the most frequent one is centred around the country in which the development studio has produced the game. A game is Swiss if the developing studio is located in Switzerland -- this appears to be the tacit assumption.

In the early days of game development -- i.e., during the homebrew era between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s (Swalwell, 2021a) -- defining a game’s nationality based on the country of origin might have been easier to justify than now, given that both obscure and well-known games were often created by individual developers within domestic settings. Nevertheless, even in those early days a game developed in a particular country could be subsequently published by a company located elsewhere. For example, the games by Linel -- a Swiss game studio active in the 1980s -- were often published by the German publishing company Starbyte Software. Were they seen as Swiss games or as German games?

Today, defining a game’s nationality based solely on the country of origin frequently neglects many factors pointing toward a more nuanced reality. One criterion worthy of consideration may be the sources from which a studio secures (public) funding, and the jurisdiction to which a studio directs its tax contributions (e.g., in the case of tax havens). More importantly, we may consider the nationalities and ethnic-cultural backgrounds of development team members (or company owners). There are also ambiguous cases where a studio has branch offices in other countries, has been acquired by a company from abroad, has outsourced all or part of the labour to a foreign company, or has collaborated with studios from different countries to create a game.

For example, GIANTS Software’s Farming Simulator franchise (2008-present) is often considered Switzerland’s commercially most successful game franchise (Berger, 2021). GIANTS Software was founded in Switzerland and has its headquarters in Zurich. However, it also has multiple branch offices in Germany, Poland and the US [8]. Is Farming Simulator still a “Swiss” or “Swiss-made” game if parts of it have not been made in Switzerland or by Swiss citizens? Building on this, we can ask: how much of a game has to be produced in a country for that game to be considered a product of said country? Already a decade ago Mark J. P. Wolf noted that LEGO-themed games were produced for a Danish company by a British subsidiary of a US-based company, and this subsidiary outsourced work to an Argentinian studio (Wolf, 2015b). Or take the example of South Africa: Rachel Lara van der Merwe (2021) writes that many game development teams there comprise young white individuals, who are not representative of the country’s diverse population (p 154). This invites the question of whether South African game studios produce “South African games.”

As Aphra Kerr (2017) argues, such issues of national identity in game production cannot be understood without considering the political economy of global production networks. Games are not simply cultural products tied to a single nation, but commodities produced through transnational flows of capital, labor and expertise. The organisation of the global games industry reflects existing hierarchies and uneven distributions of value and labour, due to which creative work and decision-making are often concentrated in high-income countries (“Global North”), while routine, technical, or supporting labor may be outsourced to regions with lower production costs.

In this way, games emerge from stratified labor and value chains that embed significant economic and cultural inequalities across countries. This perspective also helps illuminate cases of transnational ownership and investment, where national authorship is complicated by global corporate hierarchies and economic dependencies. For example, Techland, a studio founded in Poland but recently acquired by the Chinese company Tencent (Lyles, 2023), continues to produce games in Poland, but under foreign control.

Similarly, numerous large game companies have branch offices in different parts of the world. Insofar as these offices employ local workers and have ties with local companies, the form of their products may be related to particular national contexts. At the same time, those products are often instalments of global franchises (Wolf, 2015b). In parts of Central and Eastern Europe, integration into global production networks has been supported by highly skilled but comparatively low-cost workforce. Poland’s games industry now comprises over 800 active studios employing more than 14,500 specialists (Rutkowski, 2025), while the Czech sector employs thousands of developers (GDACZ, 2024); in both countries, the vast majority of output is exported, highlighting how local production is embedded in transnational value chains and shaped by global labour geographies.

3.3. Gameworld

The gameworld, or setting, is the second most frequently mentioned category in our material. There appears to be an implicit consensus that a game is national when set in a specific historical period that is important in that nation-state’s history, or in a territory that now belongs to a particular nation-state. On the one hand, this can include games that represent specific historical events, such as World War II depicted in the Czech point-and-click adventure game Attentat 1942 (Charles Games, 2017). On the other hand, many games engage with national history on a larger scale, as Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Warhorse Studios, 2018), the action of which is situated in the medieval Kingdom of Bohemia; The Medium (Bloober Team, 2021), unfolding in post-communist Poland; or Last Train Home (Ashborne Games, 2023), which follows a group of Czechoslovak Legionnaires during the Russian Civil War. In a similar vein, games can also be set in places that are based on real locations -- for example, Someday You’ll Return (CBE Software, 2020), a psychological horror set in Moravian forests, features real-world sites that can be found in the Chřiby mountains in the Czech Republic.

Yet there is an important incentive for developers not to focus on national settings: the hope that working with themes that are already globally recognised will make a game more attractive to international audiences and increase sales. This increase may be crucial for smaller developers and smaller game industries -- for example, van der Merwe (2021) elaborates on this in an analysis of the South African case. Two of the globally best-known and best-selling Czech games, Vietcong (Pterodon, Illusion Softworks, 2003) and Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven (Illusion Softworks, 2002), focus on significant moments in the history of the United States. In Vietcong, the player controls an American soldier fighting in the Vietnam War, while in Mafia, the action takes place in a fictitious city in the US in the 1930s. These examples highlight the dual status of the United States’ culture: on the one hand, it is nationally bound, but on the other hand, it functions as a universal and global setting for popular culture texts.

However, it seems that the more established a developer or industry is, the more likely they are to choose national settings for their titles. Some possible reasons for such choices have been explained by Jan Kavan, who worked on design, writing, programming and music of Someday You’ll Return, and Dominika Stala, lead level designer of The Medium. They believed that physical access to local surroundings would allow them to create experiences and narratives that would be more authentic and believable, and that international audiences were attracted to local aesthetics, perceived as unique and exotic (Fousek Krobová et al., 2023). Developers can also have practical reasons, including easier access to local reference environments (Švelch and Houška, 2025). And even when local developers choose globally recognizable settings to appeal to international audiences, they may still incorporate depictions of real-world places from their own country -- sometimes covertly, as in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Released in 2014 by the Polish film studio The Astronauts, the game takes place in Wisconsin but uses a replica of the Karkonosze mountains as backdrop for its locations.

This tension between universalised and localised settings problematises the game’s nationality -- if a Czech developer creates a game with no discernible reference to Czech history or geography, should it be considered “less Czech?” This raises a broader point: history and geography are deeply intertwined with culture. They shape the narrative and the identity of a game. For instance, a number of games made by studios based in Cameroon and Nigeria cater to the growing population of African players. Apart from the settings with references to real-life locales, situations, or individuals, these games include typically African names, everyday items, myths and legends (Bayeck, 2019).

Building on these observations, a game may contain cultural references that are indirect but still recognisable, or it may engage directly with “history, ritual, stories, and rules” (Hammer et al., 2023, p. 52). Some locally set games created by local teams end up as showcases for national cultures, perpetuating cultural myths or positive self-stereotypes. These can be perfunctory, like in the game Crossbow Warrior -- The Legend of William Tell (2015), developed by a Swiss company MobyDick Games; the player controls the most famous Swiss hero, but the game does not recount his story. A more complex example is Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which takes place in the mediaeval Czech Kingdom. Although the protagonist and the story are fictional, the game contains historical characters and reflects many aspects of the medieval reality, not least through a “well-thought combat system that is the closest way of experiencing real fight (except VR)” (Neumann, 2019, p. 76).

However, the discourse of realism in video games can be highly problematic, particularly when it intersects with representations of national culture. As explained in a paper that examines the depiction of 17th-century Poland in Hellish Quart (Kubold, 2021), the discourse of realism has an “inherently political and ideological nature, [while] masquerading as neutral portrayal of reality” (Majkowski et al., 2023, p. 17). In this sense, debates about (historical) realism have surrounded Kingdom Come: Deliverance and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt Red, 2015), both criticised for their lack of non-white characters. While developers and some players defended these games with reference to historical sources, critics emphasised the impossibility of full historical accuracy and the need for greater inclusivity in terms of gender and ethnicity. As Majkowski (2018) observes, these discussions are frequently framed in a Western context and may overlook the cultural and historical specificities of Central and Eastern Europe. At the same time, claims of realism can be mobilised to justify exclusionary or nationalist tendencies, as seen in debates over the absence of women and non-white characters in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Its founder, Dan Vávra, a controversial public figure (Kaur, 2025), dismissed this critique of the lack of inclusivity as propaganda while citing fidelity to historical sources as his rationale (Batchelor, 2018).

Therefore, it can be stated that games aiming to represent a given culture are a way to reproduce national norms and values -- they can re-establish “nationalness” (e.g., “Czechness,” “Polishness” or “Swissness”). By setting their game in the early 15th century, the developers of Kingdom Come: Deliverance signal to players that this period is significant, thereby reinforcing its relevance in Czech history and contributing to the formation of national identity. Similarly, CD Projekt Red’s series The Witcher, which adapts the stories and characters established by the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, incorporates broader Slavic mythology as well as specific parts of Polish culture (e.g., selected 19th-century texts that are part of the national literary canon) into a fantasy world.

In all these cases, national qualification may seem straightforward. But we might also construe the nation as a space of criticism and conflict, and we might find those in other games that work with nationally important topics. The Medium deals with issues of communism or nationalism. Hobo: Tough Life (2017), made by the Czech developer Perun Creative, describes the life of a homeless person in a fictional Czech city. The Last Eichhof (Alpha Helix, 1993), produced by a handful of university students from Zurich, Switzerland, is a freeware shooter in which the player destroys bottles belonging to rival beer companies; it comments on the concentration of the Swiss beer market and the decline of smaller and independent breweries.

Some titles use extremely simplified negative stereotypes for the purpose of parody. The game Last Holiday (Boomer Games, 2023), which takes place in a Czech village in the 1990s, represents a flattened and vulgarised image of that time; however, it does not criticise the period itself but rather concentrates on the distorted memories in present Czech society. There are also games that have a very clear political message, like Pussywalk (Karel Vondra et al., 2014), a simulator that explicitly criticises the former Czech president Miloš Zeman.

There are more reasons why the gameworld is not a foolproof clue about a game’s nationality. First, certain game elements are not easy to qualify: is This War of Mine (11bit studios, 2014) partly about the Warsaw Uprising or not? Second, if a game is developed in a given country, can it be considered its national product even though it only has little recognisably national content, or none such content at all? Third, some titles with local content are created by teams from other countries. For example, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016) was developed by the Canadian studio Eidos-Montréal, but it mostly takes place in a dark-future Czech Republic. And Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion (2009), produced by the Japanese studio Bandai Namco, contains a stage called “Hidden Retreat” set atop a hill in a sheep-populated meadow that strongly resembles sceneries from the Swiss Alps. Both these locations are likely supposed to provide more original and attractive experiences for the global audience. Furthermore, external representations of a national culture (history, geography, etc.) may be rejected by insiders, or at least some insiders -- something that postcolonial scholars know all too well.

3.4. Language and Localisation

In academic overviews of video games produced in particular countries, references to language and localisation are rare. Nevertheless, we can link these two topics to the question of game nationality by combining those references with parallel localisation literature.

A game’s success -- and a game studio’s survival -- often depends on international sales. Because of this, English becomes the writing language of many games even when it is neither the developers’ native tongue nor the language of the country in which their studio is located. In a study of 172 video games available in Spanish, Zorrakin-Goikoetxea (2022) found that while over 80 percent were originally written in English, only about one-fourth of these games had English as the primary language of the developing studio or the screenwriter.

Some locally made games are not even made available in local languages upon release. Examining the accessibility of translations in various Eastern European languages, Mária Koscelníková (2021) points to the underrepresentation of Croatian, Serbian, Slovak and Slovenian versions compared to the Czech one. The author observes that “most games developed by Slovak video game studios lack Slovak language support [as the studios] are most likely interested in attracting a wider and mostly international audience” (p. 8). Games produced abroad are not always accessible in local languages either: Dawid Czech (2013) notes that “[t]hroughout the years, Polish game users were accustomed to very scarce localizing or no localizing at all, absorbing and familiarizing the English game terminology they were exposed to... Hence, many foreign lexical items have been incorporated into the gamer slang and popularized by internet communities” (p. 20).

In this situation, the choice of a national non-English language for a game can correlate with its themes and the identity of the people responsible for its development [9]. At the same time, when a game text is written originally in a national language and then translated to other languages, certain cultural references can be lost in the process. Piotr Maziarz and Debora Onik (2019) make this point with regard to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, even if they generally praise the game’s Polish-to-English translation for its accuracy.

It seems, then, that the more a national language is used in a game
-- in the original writing process and then in the final product -- the more likely it is that the game will be qualified as national. And sometimes players themselves may add their language to a game. This has been the case with Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which was first released in English, without a Czech dubbing. It was produced later after a successful crowdfunding campaign orchestrated by the game’s fans. Czech subtitles were already available at launch, but in the countries where local subtitles have become the norm, it may take dubbing to make a nationality statement -- especially given the fact that many games come with multiple language versions of subtitles anyway.

3.5. Target Audience and Marketing

The perception of a game’s nationality depends partly on the audience which the developer and publisher are targeting. There is little focus on that in the publications we have studied; moreover, in this article we have already mentioned the role of international markets, and the fact that local specificity can sometimes -- just sometimes -- be attractive to the global audience. One of the possible ways to achieve this attractiveness is to combine internationally understandable themes with national tropes and topics, as in Someday You'll Return and The Medium (Fousek Krobová et al., 2023).

Still, sometimes national references are used to market a game to a national audience. One of the most medial examples of this is a multiplayer first-person shooter game America’s Army which was released in 2002 by the United States Army to inform and recruit new soldiers, explicitly targeting US nationals (Allen, 2017). One of the largest retailers in Switzerland, Migros, worked with the Swiss studio Gbanga to create Migros Merge (2022), a merge-puzzle game that served as a long-term owned media channel to advertise its products and raise brand awareness in Swiss customers. Furthermore, a political propaganda game called Wachhund Willy (English: “Guard Dog Willy”) was made in 2015 for the Swiss People's Party (SVP), a national conservative, right-wing populist party in Switzerland. In the game, SVP’s mascot, a Bernese Mountain Dog named Willy, must defend his bone by barking at various vermin to drive them away (Blick.ch, 2015).

Finally, there are hyperlocal games (Švelch, 2021a), developed by young individuals and set in strictly local places (towns, houses, schools). They are designed for members of the community (friends, colleagues, families) and feature inside jokes, local environments and a local iconography. An example is Züri (Gressly et al., 1994), which shows easily recognizable environments from Zurich and features jokes and dialogues which only locals understand. There is also Backpacker (TATI Mixedia & Aniware AB, 1995), a travel game that was very successful in Sweden but not internationally, perhaps because backpacking had not yet been popularised outside of Scandinavia (Konzack, 2015).

4. Conclusions

Players, game scholars, game industry experts, journalists and government officials are now talking about national video games much more than before. However, there are too few discussions of what a national game is. We have distinguished four categories that we hope will be helpful in a more detailed conversation: developer; gameworld; language and localisation; target audience and marketing. At present, game industry awards seem to include only the first category, while game scholars and government officials also include the second. The third and fourth are largely left undiscussed. Moreover, most scholarship on national games (with notable exceptions) has yet to fully address the complexity of any of the four categories.

We do not aim to offer one ultimate definition of national video games. Different definitions will be useful for different social groups; government officials are not preoccupied with the same questions as journalists. One and the same person can face different definitional challenges in different roles. And even among academics, different definitions may be needed for different research projects. Further, Jonne Arjoranta (2019) notes that academics must keep updating their definitions to match the changes in games, game practices and the broader cultural context. We can add that the nation, the nation-state and national discourses also change in time, and scholarly definitions of national games should change accordingly. In fact, they may need to be different in different regions as well. To illustrate: the role of language in Europe, where nation-states are often traditionally bound to distinct languages, is surely much larger than in the multiple Spanish-speaking countries of Ibero-America.

Our study can be continued in various ways. To begin, our four-part framework is inductive, derived from the categories used in game databases and scholarly publications. One could propose other categorisations based on a deductive application of existing theories and models, including those that correspond to at least one part of our framework, like the production of culture perspective (Peterson & Anand, 2004), or those that concentrate on matters outside our framework, such as the relationship between media producers and media users (e.g. Hall, 1980). A deeper engagement with nation theory and the work done in other disciplines (especially film studies) would also be beneficial. To illustrate, Ernest Gellner has remarked on how nationalists impose unified national culture on local folk cultures while believing that they actually nurture them (Gellner, 1983, p. 57); by way of analogy, it might be suggested that the appreciation of the local in game scholarship too often stops at the national level while occluding that which happens lower on the spatial scale, in cities or even districts (this may also be a limitation of the present article). Besides that, further research could be conducted on gameplay and technical matters, such as the connection between fighting mechanics in Hellish Quart and the role of the sabre in today’s national imaginings of 17th-century Poland (Majkowski et al., 2023), or the tradition of using original game engines in Central and Eastern Europe (Vanderhoef, 2021).

It would also be interesting to know how particular groups and institutions define national games and for what purpose; there is a reason why Baldur’s Gate 3 has been called a Belgian game in such sources as “The Brussels Times” (Chini, 2023), but not necessarily abroad. It is important as well to ask what definitional conflicts occur and who has more power to determine the outcomes. Another issue to be emphasised is that not everybody can be heard in those conflicts -- one is less likely to be involved in the discussion if their country’s game industry is emulating conventions from dominant game cultures so much that it barely has any discourse on national games at all. Lastly, more research is needed into the ostensible universalism of video games produced in the United States, which are almost never referred to as “American games” or “US games.” The hegemony of the US video game industry is apparently such that we reflexively think about its products as global rather than national. The research done in the last several years in American studies (Razzi & Romanzi, 2025) may be helpful in unpacking the local aspects of these games. One should also remember that globally used production technologies (e.g., Unity [10] and Unreal engines) as well as distribution platforms (e.g., Steam and Google Play) are primarily US-based, too.

Defining nationality is a political process and this also has an impact on our own work. As game scholars who are also compiling lists of national video games in publicly funded projects, we face some of the same challenges that René Glas and Jasper van Vught (2019) faced in the Netherlands. We need to consider the position of our projects in relation to other cataloguing or canonisation attempts, undertaken by grassroots enthusiasts and more recently also by state institutions. We must entertain the possibility of critical comments on the contents of public-facing databases, and we have to take into account the problematic aspects of our double status as game scholars and creators of game databases. In fact, after an analysis of academic publications, it is perhaps time for a systematic study of how national video games are defined by game preservation enthusiasts and institutions. They may have been asking themselves similar questions.

On a final note, the current interest in national games neither only comes from the fact that some national video game industries have grown, nor only from how larger games with local ties have been produced beyond the United States and Japan. It also comes from a broader shift in the perception of the relationship between the national and the global. At the turn of the millennium, heralded by Francis Fukuyama (1989) and championed by Jürgen Habermas (1998/2000), an idea gained root that nation-states and national ideas would lose a large part of their importance to the global liberal order. This idea, present also in game research -- for instance, in the application of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s idea of Empire (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009) -- has been receding since the 2010s. The global financial crisis of 2008 was a big blow to the faith in the liberal order, and later events, such as Brexit and Donald Trump’s electoral victories, have marked the renewed visibility of the nation. Influential social theorists now emphasise that nationality and globality should be seen as intertwined forces rather than simple opposites (Billig, 2023). And regarding the digital world, there is a growing popular belief that its leading technologies are only superficially global, in fact serving mainly the interests of US-based companies, and that other nation-states must work for their own technological sovereignty (Morozov, 2015).

This context affects how video games are perceived and discussed by players, professionals, officials and researchers. Some scholars have already thematised the relation between the national and the global in game production (Kerr, 2017) and in game localisation (Mandiberg, 2021) at an abstract level, looking beyond individual countries. Now we need to examine video games themselves in this way, drawing from a significant body of national-level scholarship. In doing so, we should be mindful of the political ambiguity of the discourses which merge video games with national identity: such discourses can be liberating when they highlight underrecognised games or game industries, but they can also be oppressive when they reinforce exclusionary trends in game cultures and national cultures. We thus hope that continued scholarly work will encourage reflection not only on the definitions of national games but also on when and why we call games Czech, Polish, Swiss or otherwise.

Acknowledgements

The research involved in the preparation of this article was supported by the grant NPRH/DN/SP/495779/2021/10 from the National Program for the Development of Humanities, by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic (NAKI III programme, project “Comprehensive Solutions for Cultural Heritage Preservation in Gaming Applications”) and by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) [209248] (https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/209248).

Endnotes

[1] However, see van der Merwe (2021), for a general comparison of national print culture, national cinema and national video games in a paper otherwise devoted to South Africa.

[2] The location-based terms bear a certain affinity to the notions of Black games (Grace, 2021) and Jewish games (Hammer, Rabinowitz & Bisogno, 2023) -- notions that could perhaps be called “ethnic-cultural.”

[3] France offers tax exemption to video game companies that fulfil similar criteria, but this programme is not called a cultural test.

[4] This limitation can be understood in light of the EU’s regulations which stipulate that Member States may not grant more than €300,000 in de minimis aid to a single undertaking over any period of three fiscal years. The term “undertaking” refers to the enterprise receiving the aid together with all linked enterprises, as defined in Commission Regulation (EU, 2023/283). This means that aid granted to any subsidiary, parent company, or otherwise connected company counts toward the same €300,000 ceiling, ensuring that the total support does not exceed the limit for the economic entity as a whole.

[5] The “Swissness” criteria is explained through the following link by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO: https://www.kmu.admin.ch/kmu/en/home/concrete-know-how/sme-management/labeling/swissness.html.

[6] The “Swissness” calculator used by the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property is available through the following link: https://www.ige.ch/en/protecting-your-ip/indications-of-source/indications-of-source-basics/criteria-for-determining-origin/industrial-products/swissness-calculator.

[7] The Swiss Game Awards submission guidelines are available through the following link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf2EF8WPGVYTLTSCxY-BN8WzSZMSqyt9wFInfcOPrOLARRxLA/viewform.

[8] Giant’s Software’s headquarters and branch offices are listed on Giants Software’s Website (2024), linked here for reference: https://www.giants-software.com/contact.php.

[9] Notable examples of this come from outside of the three countries that constitute the basis of this article. Most notably, Kisima Ingitchuna (Upper One Game, 2014), which is based on the traditional Iñupiaq tale and strives to bring the Innuit culture to broader audiences, is narrated entirely in the Iñupiaq language, with subtitles in 16 other languages. In a similar manner, a political-themed game MENSKBand (Gildur, Forion & Morfin, 1998) uses the old name of the Belarusian capital, “Mensk,” rather than the newer “Minsk,” which has ties to foreign hegemony. MENSKBand has been described as “the only significant, memorable and replayable video game created primarily in Belarusian language” (Serada, 2023, p. 10).

[10] Although Unity Technologies was founded in Denmark as Over the Edge Entertainment (OTEE), it was later relocated to San Francisco. This further complicates distinctions between the “global” and the “American” in the context of game production.

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