Selling games by the kilo : using oral history to reconstruct informal economies of computer game distribution in the post-communist environment
Abstract
Building on a larger research of the early gaming cultures in the Czech Republic and Czechoslovakia, this paper describes the alternative distribution channels of computer game software in the post-communist environment and their relationship to gamer communities. Before 1990, there was virtually no computer software or hardware market in the former Czechoslovakia.
Copyright of digital works was rarely enforced or debated. Instead, informal distribution structures were forming, many of which survived well into the late 1990's.
The "shadow economy" worked on a number of levels.On top of that, there was a huge number of "mail order pirates", predominantly young gamers, who published their contact info in ad papers and copied games for money. Using archival material and oral history interviews, I will (1) describe the way informal distribution worked socially and economically, and (2) analyze the way distribution influenced the gaming culture in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.