Jaroslav Švelch

Jaroslav Švelch is an associate professor at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018) and Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity (MIT Press, 2023). He has published work on history and theory of computer games, on humor in games and social media, and on the Grammar Nazi phenomenon. He is currently researching history, theory, and reception of monsters in games.

jaroslav.svelch[at]fsv.cuni.cz

http://svelch.com/

Vít Šisler

Vít Šisler is an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, Prague. He was a visiting Fulbright scholar at Northwestern University in Chicago. His research focuses on video games in the Middle East, game-based learning, and game design. He is a co-founder of the Charles Games studio and was the lead game designer of the critically-acclaimed games: Attentat 1942 (Apple Design Award Nominee, 2021) and Svoboda 1945: Liberation (Grand Jury Award, IndieCade, 2022).

vit.sisler[at]ff.cuni.cz

Tereza Fousek Krobová

Tereza Fousek Krobová is a game studies scholar at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on issues related to gender and representation in the media, especially in video games. She works as administrator for European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) and as a programmer for Czech Television, the public service broadcaster in the Czech Republic. She teaches feminism, cultural studies and game studies at several Czech universities. She works also as a freelance journalist.

tereza.krobova[at]fsv.cuni.cz

Jan Švelch

Jan Švelch is a game production studies scholar at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University. His research interests include game production studies, video game voice acting, monetization, paratextuality, and Magic: The Gathering. In 2018-2020, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies at Tampere University. Besides research, he has more than ten years of experience as a freelance journalist covering video games and music for various Czech magazines, including the Metacritic-aggregated Level.

honza[at]svelch.com

Jan Houška

Jan Houška is a PhD student at Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences. His Master thesis explored the representation of antagonists in first-person shooter games using postcolonialism theory and the concept of othering. His main interests are monstrosity in games, selective representation of conflict and ethnic and national stereotypes in war-themed games. He was an Erasmus exchange student at Tampere University in 2019. He is currently studying the experiences of expats in the Czech video game industry.

jan.houska[at]fsv.cuni.cz

Daniel Nielsen

Daniel Nielsen is a PhD student at Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences. His two Master theses explored (1) fan-production of game modifications and (2) the recent monetization model of microtransactions. His main interests are audience studies and the political economy of digital labor in the creative industries. He holds an MA degree in Media and Communication from Malmö University, Sweden. He is currently studying a number of online fan practices associated with digital games, to explore the distinct economies that either limit or facilitate this form of creative digital labor.

daniel.nielsen[at]fsv.cuni.cz

Štěpán Šanda

Štěpán Šanda is a PhD student at Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. His first master thesis focused on a backlash some Czech journalists faced while covering video games from a cultural perspective. In the second one, he analyzed autoreferential games using theoretical model proposed by T. De La Hera for advertorial games. He was also involved in organization and analysis of Czech citizen parliament on democracy and media as a part of a research MeDeMAP. He is currently exploring video game representation of Czech landscape as his dissertation project.

stepan.sanda[at]fsv.cuni.cz

Leonid Moyzhes

Leonid Moyzhes is a PhD student at Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences. His background is in Religious Studies, with a master’s thesis on the sacralisation of technology. Later he shifted to the research of the representation of religion in games, with research on religion in role-playing games, both digital and analog, being his main focus. His other interests include the construction of romance and sexuality in videogames and the history of game design. He is a tabletop RPG designer, primarily interested in role-playing games as a form of identity experimentation, and approaches his game design projects as practical applications of his research.

leonid.moyzhes[at]fsv.cuni.cz

Cullan Bendig

Cullan Bendig is a PhD student at Charles University in the Faculty of Social Sciences. He holds an MA in Slavic and Eurasian Studies and Master of Global Policy Studies from the University of Texas at Austin where he explored how global audiences access local sites of memory through digital play that affords heritage-like experiences. His research interests include games as a historical medium, digital humanities, and digital game production. He is currently studying how Southern European developers produce local places and spaces in digital games, with an emphasis on the role of culture policy regimes.

cullan.james.bendig[at]fsv.cuni.cz

Anika Falkenberg

Anika Falkenberg is a PhD student at Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences. She previously studied at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands for her Bachelor and Master. Her Master’s thesis explored the representation of the different representations of time travel in video games, ranging from occasional mentions to integrated into the narrative and gameplay. Her main interests are cultural representation in video games, gender in video games and the intersection between video games, culture and marginalised communities through the use of game narratological and ludological analysis. She is currently studying cultural representation of Southeast Asia in video games.

anika.yang.caixin.catherina.falkenberg[at]fsv.cuni.cz

Radim Hladík

Radim Hladík is a sociologist interested in computational approaches to science, culture, knowledge, and communication. His recent work employs topic models and other text vectorization techniques to shed light on subjects such as classification of scientific knowledge or styles of writing in sociology. He has gained international experience as a visiting scholar at academic institutions in the US, Japan, or France. In his role as a research software developer, he is building Requal, an application for computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, and supports the making of the GAMEINDEX database.

Radim.Hladik[at]fulbrightmail.org