Tsardom 3.10.

2024 – …
Virtual Photography
Game Boy Camera
128 × 112 cm

Tsardom 3.10. reuses Prokudin-Gorsky’s three-colour method and a Game Boy Camera to look back at Russian video games about war and the state. The project traces how missions, interfaces and battle scenes train players to see heroism, violence and history in predetermined ways, and how this optical tool can be turned around — not towards the “enemy” on screen, but towards the game itself and the ways it frames war and the state.

Tsardom 3.10. is a project by Maxim Zmeyev that uses in-game photography to examine how imperial and state narratives are constructed within Russian video games. Pixelated images are captured with a Game Boy Camera and then turned into colour using red, green and blue filters – a technique that echoes Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s early twentieth-century tricolour experiments. In Tsardom 3.10., this method is shifted into the videogame realm, bringing together early colour technology and the low-resolution aesthetics of pixel graphics.

Recent geopolitical events have intensified the relevance of this field. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, major international developers and publishers withdrew from the Russian market, while the Russian state began to promote laws around “traditional Russian values” and to fund games that offer a “correct” version of national and world history. Despite the long development cycles of large-scale titles, games that take these expectations into account are already starting to appear.

The parallel with Prokudin-Gorsky makes this optical shift more concrete. In the early twentieth century he travelled across the vast, multi-ethnic territories of the Russian Empire, photographing peasants, workers, architecture and landscapes for a Tsar who could not physically visit all his domains. Tricolour photography became a tool through which the imperial centre could “survey” its subjects and lands. In Tsardom 3.10., a logic rooted in that history is taken up by an individual player and turned back toward the state and its digital mythologies. In this context, the pixelated images of Tsardom 3.10. can be read as small report-like stills of how the game assembles the “proper” heroic picture of the world.

The photographs themselves are filled with recognisable motifs: aircraft marked with red stars over snow-covered battlefields, squads of soldiers seen from above as if through infrared or aerial footage, watchtowers and prison fences, a handgun laid across a topographic map, skeletons sitting around a stylised bomb, monumental sculptural groups with red flags, urban façades and churches overshadowed by gigantic figures. Low resolution does not soften these scenes; instead, it makes them resemble a mixture of videogame screenshot, degraded archival document and fragments of aerial or surveillance imagery.

The title Tsardom 3.10. refers to the distant kingdoms of Slavic folklore – otherworldly realms where the hero must leave home, cross a boundary, face trials and return transformed. Following Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the folktale, the story is organised around this departure, passage through the forest or threshold, and return with “what was lacking”. In video games, levels, maps, checkpoints and invisible borders take over the function of the forest and the liminal zone through which the character moves.

In Tsardom 3.10., this structure is translated into the language of shooters and strategy games: the player is cast as a hero who defends the homeland, carries out orders and sets history back on its “proper” course. The videogame medium is approached here as a tool through which power proposes desirable ways of seeing and acting – from the normalisation of violence to consent to a single authorised version of the past. The series slows these images down and materialises them, allowing their construction, repetition and integration into everyday play to be closely observed.