Notes on Nostalgia
When we examine the concept nostalgia, we see that it can be used in reference to warm, wistful feelings for an uncomplicated past; we find a desire to return one aspect of our lives to a previous, better state. We might isolate a single memory, focus on the positive impression it gives us, and then long to replicate it in some way. We are of course familiar with the cliche "rose-tinted glasses," that nostalgia clouds our judgment and the past wasn't all it's cracked up to be, but how exactly are we judging the object of a memory? You can't go back in time and wrangle up the memory that makes you feel good and thrust it back into the present any more than you can replicate the you of back then into now. The best you could do here is construct something that evokes further feelings of nostalgia, that romanticizes some aspect of the distant past.
Looking back can be a form of moving forward, though. When one looks upon the past with fondness, one can recognize what truly made the time remembered good, and keep that spirit in what one does in the present. The problems arise when this wistfulness verges into sentimentality, when we can't accurately focus on what we're finding agreeable about this past and we end up cursing God that things just aren't as good as they used to be. It's not that when looking back we're necessarily misrepresenting the past as better than it was, because obviously there was something good about it otherwise there wouldn't be these positive feelings, but it's a failure to objectively separate the elements of the memory to see what it is we like and what we're better off without. The memory's initial impression intoxicates us and we can't follow through on assessing what is making us feel this way.
You might remember something like your mother making breakfast for you when you were very young and have that overwhelming feeling of nostalgia, wishing that you could go back to that time. But what does this mean, exactly? If it means simply to relive these moments without modification, you wouldn't even remember that it happened outside of how it happened in the first place, i.e. from your perspective it would be as if nothing different occurred. In the same vein, It makes no sense to me when people say that they wish they could listen to this song, watch this movie, play this game, as if they had never experienced it before. How is that any different from just experiencing something new that you're reasonably sure is good (e.g. it got good reviews, good word of mouth)? Even if you had the knowledge that your pre-memory wipe self really loved it, wouldn't that potentially make the "re-experience" a let-down, considering you didn't go into it the first time with such expectations? Not to mention how different will be the other contexts in which your first impression was couched, like how your life was going at the time, who you spoke to and what you ate that day, and so on.
Now if our going back to a previous time scenario means to go back as you are now mentally, but younger, well, what would that entail? Are we simply to take your brain as it is and plop it into a time vortex that ends inside your young self's temporarily empty skull? Handwaving away the technical and biological aspects that would go into such an event, would you be able to live like that and give everything up that you have today? Perhaps if your life is particularly terrible now. Or maybe you don't want to live there forever, and just want to temporarily visit this time. With future advances in virtual reality and neuroscience we could perhaps mentally project just such a thing. It would be hard to resist, and really, why would we? There's nothing inherently wrong with indulging in a bit of reminiscence. It could even be therapeutic, forgoing having the therapist coax and coerce the subject to create a useful and productive description of past events.
I want to say that a lot of the choices I make in how to spend my free time are informed by nostalgia. Or more accurately, I'm inclined to believe that the video games I choose to play, in part, are a result of positive feelings I've had toward those or the same kinds of games I played as a child or teen. E.g., would I be as much of a Nintendo fan now if I had not played its games throughout my entire life? It's extremely difficult to say; to get anything approaching a reasonable answer I would have to reconstruct the events of my life from my formative years before I played video games regularly up until today substituting that activity with some other activity, adjusting whatever decisions I made in other areas of life to accommodate. I may as well be another person, and indeed I would be. This speaks to how much of an impact gaming and Nintendo in particular have had on me, but also to how much of an impact everything has (in other words, some). There's so much that goes into our lives as they are now, so many small and subtle details that occur over years and years, most of which we don't even remember, that weave the tapestry of our consciousnesses today. Christ, something as small as what I ate for lunch last wednesday, something I emphatically do not remember, alters in some way how I felt and what I did later on, and even the decisions that led up to it! Like I'm not just randomly going to eat a burger instead of sushi without first deciding to do so! And that decision had something lead up to it, and so on. Everything is connected, to make use of another cliche, and to change one thing means changing everything else. There is no getting around it for this question, anything you would come up with for an answer is pure invention. Not to say that such invention would be useless, it could indeed be quite stimulating to imagine scenarios like this. I want to say there is nothing descriptive, or even theoretical about it; it's more of an exercise.
And what does it mean for my decisions to be informed by nostalgia? Well, am I playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past again after having not played it in years because I genuinely think it's a great game and would like to re-experience it? Or am I just coasting on a nostalgic feeling that I'm hoping playing the game will replicate? Should we separate these, conceptually? Yes: when I replay a game because I think that it's good, the reasons for my thinking so can (not necessarily will) be enumerated in the form of a criticism. Within a system of judging a game's overall quality I can dissect aspects of the game itself, such as the art, the difficulty curve, how fast Link moves and swings his sword and so on, and make objective comparisons with aspects of other similar games, imagining how they could be different, etc. In other words, I would have an appreciation for the game. A nostalgic feeling may have compelled me to seek it out again, but whether or not I enjoy the game itself is dependent on the ability to do this (not necessarily my ability). We could say that if I'm playing a game out of sheer nostalgia, then it isn't the game I'm enjoying, but the feelings that it conjures up, and that if I were to criticize the objective aspects of the game, I would perhaps find that it doesn't hold up, and it is from this that I could deduce that if I had not played the game when I was younger I would probably not have the positive feelings it gives me in the present. And nostalgia certainly isn't the only possible external reason to play a game absent an appreciation of its own qualities. Finally, there would be nothing controversial in an ordinary context to say you like something when, strictly speaking, you mostly just enjoy the nostalgic feeling it gives.
When I say that my game choices are often made based on nostalgic feelings, I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. If something is harmless, doesn't take up too much of my time, and gives me recreational pleasure, there's no sense in saying it's bad. But a little too often I find myself sticking with a game that I know in my heart of hearts I don't really want to play because of some external factor, namely nostalgia. But now when I think about it again, I'm actually wrong: the external factor dictating my game choice isn't really nostalgia most of the time, it's usually something else, quite often in fact it's the hype over a new game that I get from other people on the internet, which can actually sustain a playthrough quite easily; having other likeminded folks experiencing the same new cool thing as you at the same time is a very powerful motivator and it can add a lot of fun to playing a new game, but in the absence of that it's often something like I've declared I'm going to play such-and-such game on a forum and I feel like I have to follow through, or even worse, I spent a lot of money on a game and thus I feel like I have to get my money's worth. Silly, but often true nonetheless.
Though now that I think of it again, nostalgia, for me, plays a strange part, and it's an approach to the concept I've become very interested in as of late: I often long for the time when I was a child when I couldn't just buy a new game whenever I wanted. I had what I had until my parents bought me something else, and so I ended up playing and replaying the same games over and over, and I sought to kind of replicate this feeling by not buying any new games this year. Granted, I have an absolute assload of games that I've never even opened and thus have an incredible variety of basically new games at my fingertips, but it's a weird conception of value of a game, once again dependent on external factors not related to the game itself, but to the idea that I don't have to spend money or add to my already gigantic backlog to performatively perform the activity of Enjoying a Video Game. It ends up becoming this meta activity where I don't really care about the games, but the externally visible act of gaming, or being a gamer. I'm nostalgic for a time when I was bored. But none of this stupid shit invaded my thinking as a child selecting a new game to buy; I saw commercials for games that made me want to try them, I saw reviews in magazines and got super stoked to even just see it in action, I saw Kirby on the box inhaling the sky and was like "fuck yeah, that!" There is indeed more than a little bit of nostalgia involved in remembering times like looking at shelves of game boxes as a kid and considering what to buy (I still get a little charge out of seeing images online of the kind of box art with that thin red bordered NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM text at the top), but I need to recognize what is good about this: that most of the time I went with what I instinctively thought looked cool. This is the attitude I should return to with the games of today and my greatly increased freedom and bankroll, not the attitude where I feel obligated to spend more time with a game than I really want to just because it's what I have. Life is too short to voluntarily do things I don't want to do with my free time.
In sum, we could say what separates the feeling of nostalgia from some other generically good feeling is that it deals with objects from the distant past, and the positive feelings are derived from a memory of positive feelings in conjunction with the objects of the memory as opposed to being derived from any features of the objects themselves; to conflate the fondness of your memory of fondness with a fondness of the things themselves is what it means to be "blinded by nostalgia" or to "wear rose-tinted glasses," though these terms generally aren't used when we turn out to be accidentally correct about the goodness of the thing or things. With this can come the recognition that we once thought of the objects of the memory fondly in a direct sense, and with some thought we can discern whether or not we could or should in whatever way do the same in the present.