Why are We Chasing Nostalgia in Video Games?

As the remakes and remasters have a soaring popularity in the video game industry over the last years, the feeling of nostalgia is growing more and more relevant. Bowman and Wulf, in their article titled, “Nostalgia in Video Games”, argue that nostalgia is an important element for the players of video games as they grow older.

The researchers argue that one of the main reasons behind the growing attention to nostalgia is connected with the growing age of the players. As the players of video games grow old, they typically look back at games they have played in their childhood or youth and built connections with, and search for ways to recreate the feelings they had at their earlier age. An example of this is the popularity of Pokemon Go, a mobile game featuring many different Pokemon characters, to which many adult players of video games have already built emotional connections. According to the research, this popularity is connected to the nostalgic elements of interacting with familiar characters again in a different medium. This subject is connected to the intermedia changes of video game characters and franchises by the authors to highlight that such changes are also supported by nostalgia. Similar to Pokemon Go, World of Warcraft Classic’s popularity in 2019 has also been cited as a good example of this phenomena.

Another important source of nostalgia explored by the authors is the intergenerational nostalgia. The examples for this phenomena are the players of Super Mario Bros. on the NES Classic. Current players of the game on this specific console have been taken as two distinct groups, one is the players who had previous experiences with the game in their earlier lives, and others who have not played the game before. Even though people might not have played the game before in their lives, they still can find nostalgic connections and be affected by them. Perhaps the most striking example of this is a child of an older gamer finding his old game and using his father’s save file to play the game. With this example the researchers highlight an important connection between the intergenerational impact of nostalgia.

The authors of the article conclude that the nostalgia feeling is a positive aspect of video games that is not explored enough. They highlight that there are previous research and papers in this specific field however, they fail to completely capture the current scope of the effects of this emotional phenomena.

In their article, the authors, use surveys and previous research to provide striking evidence towards explaining the rising impact of nostalgia in the video game industry. Based on their findings it is possible to understand the way the video game industry is moving forward. With more and more rereleases, remakes and remasters of older games, chase for nostalgia seems to grow in the near future.

Source: Bowman, N.D. Wulf, T. (2023). “Nostalgia in Video Games”. Current Opinion in Psychology 2023. Vol: 49.

Picture: unsplash.com – Lorenzo Herrera

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