The Centre for Audiovisual Arts and the Centre for Research on Children’s Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Teacher Education invite you to an invited lecture by Anna Wiśniewska-Grabarczyk and Paweł Grabarczyk titled Video Game Censorship in the Eastern Bloc, which will take place on 23 March 2026 at 10:30 a.m. in room II P-18 at the Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb.

Short Summary of the Lecture:

Existing scholarship on censorship has focused primarily on literature and film, rarely extending to newer media such as video games. Our talk builds on these established approaches and expands the field by offering a tentative map of research directions that may prove especially fruitful. We begin by examining cases of institutional censorship of video games in Eastern Europe, followed by Western examples of corporate censorship related to game localization, particularly in Japanese titles brought to the United States. One of the cases we discuss is the scandal related to the game Raid Over Moscow, which was considered for a ban in Finland. In the later part of the presentation, we move to more modern cases of censorship and analyze games censored in Germany in the 1990s and later. We then turn to less obvious forms of censorship, including restrictions on non-interactive uses of games (such as streaming or YouTube content) and the moderation of user-created content (such as game mods). Finally, we highlight forms of censorship unique to video games, including built-in mechanics that allow players to censor game content themselves—for example, options to disable blood or other graphic elements. We conclude with a comparison of censorship strategies in interactive media and other non-gaming media, such as literature and film. This presentation is the result of research conducted under the IDUB grant Censorship in New Media in the Philosophical and Literary Perspective. On the example of video-games from 1985-2022.

Speakers’ Biographies:

Anna Wiśniewska-Grabarczyk is a literary scholar, writer, and researcher of censorship. She is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Łódź, where she earned her PhD in literary studies with honors after studying Polish philology. Her academic research focuses on censorship practices in the Polish People’s Republic, and the issue of freedom of speech in Eastern Bloc. She is the head of the Eastern Bloc Censorship Research Group and has published extensively on these topics. She has served as the principal investigator on several research grants. Alongside her scholarly work, she is also a published writer. She is the author of, among others, Garnitur wydany przez grubego stylistę z zakładu pogrzebowego przy szpitalu (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2025) Porzeczkowy Josef (Anagram, 2018) the latter of which was nominated for the Witold Gombrowicz Literary Award. She shuttles between Trzcianka, Łódź, København and the rest of the world. More about her: https://anna-wisniewska-grabarczyk.eu

Paweł Grabarczyk is an analytic philosopher and game studies scholar. He is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he leads the Games Research Group at the Center for Digital Play. His research combines philosophy of language and mind with game ontology, representation, virtual environments, and the cultural history of digital play. He has published widely, primarily in English, in international journals and edited volumes, and has edited scholarly collections and issues devoted to video games and philosophy. In 2013, he received the Danuta and Henryk Hiż Prize from the Polish Semiotic Society for an essay on the philosophy of perception. Alongside his academic work, he has been actively engaged in popularizing philosophy; for his Kawiarnia Filozoficzna [Philosophical Café], a series of public debates held in Łódź, he was awarded the “Punkt dla Łodzi” prize in 2015.