Thus, mediated nostalgia for a youth filled with video games becomes a minefield for the enthusiast and a gold mine for canny producers ( McFerran 2018). Emulators and recreations of obsolete hardware are murky territory again, as many of the games in need of resuscitation by amateur aficionados are still legally copyrighted, and coin-operated cabinets might not be exhibited if tax agencies catch a whiff of someone trying to make money without a licence. Many video games that once graced cartridges can no longer be played as consoles fail to start up, ROM chips, floppies and CDs suffer data or disc rot, codes for games disappear, MMO servers go permanently offline, and just like that-another game is lost in the deep, dark dungeons of time. Even when their cabinets are restored, old arcade machines no longer run on the same hardware as in the heydays of the 1970s and 80s, when every inch of their bulky frames was jam-packed with circuit boards, wires, and CRT monitors that dominated the shop floor of the arcades. Video games are paradoxical objects in the sense that they are the newest medium of storytelling, but also the quickest to become obsolete. Even so, the juxtaposition of period media and dystopic rampages or difficult levels critically comment upon the futility of nostalgia. Far from ruining video games, nostalgia nonetheless exploits the associations the players have with certain historical eras, including earlier eras of video gaming. This paper investigates the design of games to examine how nostalgia is used to manipulate affect and player experience, and how it contributes to the themes that these computer games explore. ![]() Noire, to the resurrection of old art styles in 80 Days, Firewatch or Cuphead all speak of the extent to which computer gaming is suffused with a longing for pasts that never were but might have been. From historical recreations of major cities in the Assassin’s Creed series and L. ![]() At the same time, major AAA titles have become so photorealistic and full of cinematic ambition that video games can also serve as vehicles for nostalgia by “faithfully” recreating the past. ![]() Nostalgia for simpler times is evident in the aesthetic choices game designers make: pixelated graphics, 8-bit music, and frustratingly hard levels are all reminiscent of arcade-style and third-generation console games that have been etched into the memory of Generation X. Since the 1970s, a generation of video gamers have grown up and as they began to have children of their own, video games have become objects evoking fond memories of the past. Barely 50 years old, video games are among the newest media today, and still a source of fascination and a site of anxiety for cultural critics and parents.
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