Are Old Games Good?
Are the games we grew up with really the beacons of gaming perfection that we think they are? Can we trust nostalgia?
Are games from our youth better than current games? I’m sure what I find amazing now will be laughably archaic in your future 2078 home, which certainly contains at least one room dedicated to dismissively laughing at relics from the past. And if your future home doesn’t have such a room, well, then I don’t know why we’re putting all this money into stocks, and don’t you dare tell me that money went toward your kids’ college education. College isn’t necessary in the future. College is the exact type of past relic at which you’d better be laughing from your future Dismiss-O-Room (™).
What I’m really talking about is nostalgia. If we assume videogames, at least here in the US, weren’t really commonplace until the late 70s at the earliest but more likely the early- to mid-eighties, that means people like current me, in their 30s and 40s, are the first generation of people to have videogames as a nostalgic referent. That means we’re the first people to be able to claim that videogames were way better when we were young, meaning we–the “1up generation”–need to keep one very important thing in mind…videogames were not way better when we were young.
Nostalgia, by definition, is lie.
According to Alan R. Hirsch in his report, “Nostalgia: A Neuropsychiatric Understanding,” nostalgia is
“a longing for a sanitized impression of the past […] not a true recreation of the past, but rather a combination of many different memories, all integrated together, and in the process all negative emotions filtered out.”
In other words: a lie.
Nostalgia does good work for humans, mainly by highlighting positive moments of our youth. It’s bittersweet sure, as we can be tricked into thinking things will never be as good as they once were, but the net effect is that life feels more meaningful and, by proxy, death feels less frightening. Nostalgia smooths over the rough parts of childhood, so we aren’t emotionally weighed down by how awkward we were as kids.
The problem with nostalgia is that it is powerful. Very powerful. I will both probably defend the old game Top Gun on the NES even though it’s probably objectively not good. My question is, does the degree of that power change as the amount of time increases between me and the nostalgic referent, and as the number of possible replacements for that referent inevitably increases?
Half of me thinks, yes, I hope I do remain ignorantly nostalgic. I don’t want future Me to decide, as I sit surrounded by all types of future gaming innovations and ubiquitous mechanics-expanding peripherals, that Super Metroid sucks. Present Me loves Super Metroid. It’s the best game ever.
The other half of me thinks that my connection to a game, and any judgement passed on that game, will diminish as time passes. And the greater my breadth of experience–vis-a-vis the number of additional games I’ve played–increases the possibility of finding better games to drown out the old, not actually good, games. Otherwise, what does that say about the innovation of the video game medium? That it’s stagnant? I don’t want that.
So I’m saying two things here:
- I want to believe in a world where a quarter-of-a-century old game isn’t the peak of my experience, but…
- I also don’t want that experience, and all of the emotional energy I’ve invested in it over the years, to be false.
I understand it’s not binary. I can discover a new favorite game while still considering Super Metroid a great game. So perhaps that’s the simple resolution to this situation. “Good” works on a spectrum. But even if I accept that, I’m still interested in whether or not the power of nostalgia can be affected by increased temporal distance and a deeper experience pool.
Happily, I think this question can be tested. Unlike event-based nostalgic referents like schoolyard games, birthdays, and lighting dams on fire, videogames and other forms of media, are able to be relived and re-examined objectively. The context could never be recreated, of course, but the artifact itself, as it existed back then, exists today.
Am I ready for this though? Am I really willing to accept that these games, which I remember as wonderful games, actually suck? Am I okay to be confronted by proof that these pillars upon which I built my childhood are cracked?
Video Sources
- Nostalgia: a Neuropsychiatric Understanding
- What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows
- Fire image By Petty Officer 2nd Class Rachel McMarr – https://www.dvidshub.net/image/121499, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39450119
- “2 Hours Later” clip from Spongebob Squarepants (Nickelodeon)
- Arcade images
- Crying Birthday
The following are YouTube videos licensed under CC BY 3.0
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCXNXGvYfVk
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzsctHHb-JQ
Music Credits
- 8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
