Nostalgia

What is nostalgia? We hear the term thrown around all the time, particularly when making comparisons between newer games and older ones, but what exactly is it? The Greek origins of the word are a combination of "homecoming" and "ache," which implies a sense of longing. The "nostalgic" feeling we get when we play older games stems from a desire to return to the state of existence when we first played them; back when 16-bit RPGs were innovative, Nintendo was king, and multiplayer games were fun and interesting.  But is this a good thing for us to experience?  Is it healthy for us on a psychological level, and does it conflict with our ability to hold logical discussion significantly?  Why do video games evoke this feeling so strongly?

In order: it can be in controlled doses, no comment, yes, and...well, we'll explore the last one throughout the article.  Also, those statements I made right before those questions are all bullshit.  Don't believe me?  Well, read on.

Because saying it's bullshit makes us edgy!

 Nostalgia is something that game companies are quite aware of and will actively exploit to promote sales of a game.  Think of the numerous classic Final Fantasy game remakes, the "retro" levels in newer Mario games, and clone/rehash games in general.  As Nassim touched upon in his blog post, fanboys gobble this up without hesitation, and while loyalty can be cited as one reason, nostalgia is most certainly its complement.  I am guilty of it myself; as someone who started playing video games with Super Mario Land at age six, I have played nearly every iteration of Mario-centric platformer since then.  However, I am not so jaded as to be unaware of some recycling and similarity between the games.  But is this bad?

Well, that's not really a black-and-white question.  Even clones and rehashes can be excused depending on the situation.  For instance, re-releasing Final Fantasy 4 and 6 on handheld consoles was a great way for Square-Enix to sell the games to players too young to have played the originals; however, it could be argued that putting FF4 on both the GBA and the DS was a bit excessive (in fact, I'll argue that myself).

3 iterations later and he's still the most useless character in the series.

Certain elements of games can also feel copied and pasted from previous entries.  Mario games are certainly very guilty of this, as are Legend of Zelda games with enemies, Castlevania with bosses, Metroid with items, and Final Fantasy games with certain enemies and allies.  A man named Cid has been in just about every Final Fantasy game in some form or other, for instance.  However, these instances are far more excusable than the previous case, as they work to establish a sense of what makes that game belong to its series.  Metroid requires you to get missiles and the ice beam, Final Fantasy will involve an airship of some sort, and Legend of Zelda games will have dungeons full of Keese and Wallmasters.

The overall effect is to instill in the mind of the player a sense of what it means to play that game.  This leads to gamers using this game and its franchise as a standard for other games; if someone described Banjo-Kazooie as "Super Mario 64 but with a bird on your back," they'd be guilty of a gross generalization, but they would also indirectly be promoting the originality of Super Mario 64 and implying its place at the root of a new brand of games, of which Banjo-Kazooie would be one installment.  This grants power to the series.  This, combined with the aforementioned fact that nostalgia drives game sales, is one reason that companies probably won't stop doing this anytime soon.

But I've been rambling, and you still want to know if this is a bad thing.  In short, not really.  To elaborate, it is not a bad thing as long as it doesn't compromise the integrity of the game.  If the game is a weak entry in the series due to the developers just phoning it in and relying on nostalgia to sell it, then it's a bad thing.

Because everyone wants to go back to 20-year-old mechanics, right?  ...Right?

It's not something that would affect our ability to have rational discussion though, right?  Wrong.  Even ignoring any forum discussion about hot topics like which Final Fantasy game is the best, it's still easy to pick out fallacies that are easy to accept without close examination but that fall apart under scrutiny.  Let's take a look at the claims made in the opening paragraph again.

Were 16-bit RPGs innovative?  In some regards, yes, they truly were; Final Fantasy 4 was the first game in which a party member could leave your team and actually die, and Final Fantasy 6 started the trend of deeper character backstories throughout the series.  Beyond that, though, the "golden age of RPGs" isn't quite as glorious as we make it out to be.  Pretty much every one of them fell into one of two categories for combat: turn-based and active time bar (ATB) based.  Player-controlled units would move for their attack animations, but enemies frequently made much smaller movements (if they didn't just flash briefly instead) for their attacks, and the general structure of the games varied very little between the entries of the day.  Chrono Trigger's position-dependent combat system and Earthbound's rolling health bar were quite original, but RPGs today continue to innovate and redefine the genre.  The Tales series has the SS-LiMBS system which allows the player to switch between a 3-D free-running battlefield and a 2-D, targeted field.  The Mario RPG and Paper Mario series have mechanics that allow skilled players to completely avoid damage.  Games like Mass Effect even blend genres between shooters and RPGs.  The 16-bit era certainly laid a solid foundation for games to come, but it was by no means immensely more innovative than current games.  Developers must continue to create new, original mechanics and ideas for the games in order to sell; that has not changed since the 90s.

Was Nintendo king?  Hell no.  Maybe in the NES era, but that quickly ended.  Since then, Nintendo has ranged from being on good footing to struggling to keep up with the industry leaders.  With the impending release of Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES, Nintendo delayed the release of the SNES long enough to allow the Sega Genesis to hit the market first.  This started the major console war between Nintendo and Sega, which Nassim already touched upon.  This would not be Nintendo's first blunder in this regard; Sony's Playstation was created after Nintendo turned down their proposal for a CD-drive add-on for the N64, choosing to go with the Phillips CD-i instead.  The Gamecube lagged behind its competitors for the duration of its life cycle, and the less said about the Virtual Boy, the better.  The Wii has allowed Nintendo to put these hard times behind itself, but it did not make it this far by coasting the whole way.

Even angsty, spiky-haired pretty boys would be better than this.

Lastly, were multiplayer games really fun and interesting?  It would be pretentious to say no, but they certainly weren't as magical as we make them out to be.  Games like Super Smash Bros. and Goldeneye had balancing issues that centered around broken characters or mechanics, Mario Kart and Mario Party were more luck-based than skill-based, and Madden games let your opponent see what play you planned to make before you made it.  These games are still fun to go back and visit now that we're in college, but the realization of these flaws can cause them to lose a bit of that retro luster.

Now, for the real question...why do games invoke these feelings?  Why do we get so nostalgic about video games?  The key point of nostalgia is that it involves a longing for an earlier time.  Many gamers got started at a young age, likely between five and ten.  At this age, games were highly social within groups of previously-established friends; sleepovers would be filled with Super Smash Bros. and Goldeneye, and playing with a friend was part of the draw for Pokemon.  There was certainly a competitive aspect to it, but we look upon those experiences with the same fondness of any pleasant childhood memory.  This was a time of less responsibility, of less awareness of the bitterness of the world, and of greater social freedom.  We become nostalgic toward these games because in the process of being reminded of the older games, we are reminded of our younger selves that first played them.

Pokemon: Awakening your inner eight-year-old since 1997

So what should we take from this?  Well, the most important thing concerning new releases is to make sure that the nostalgia factor doesn't compromise the quality of the game.  New games need to be able to stand on their own two feet.  Next, gamers must be self-aware when discussing topics capable of invoking strong nostalgia, as strong biases can easily slip into the conversation.  Lastly, nostalgia is not an innately bad thing.  It is not a wholly sad thing, but rather a sort of "warm melancholy" that creates a sense of longing but leaves the player with a soft, meaningful smile.  See that image of Oak's lab up there?  If that doesn't do it for you, look up the original Pallet Town theme on YouTube.  I still get misty-eyed whenever I hear it.

To sum it up, Nostalgia can be a very enjoyable sensation for any experienced gamer...just don't abuse it.