On the Cost of Nostalgia

I’m always made to feel like I’m some old man shaking his fist at the sky. I spend a lot of time lamenting the way things used to be. Not life, really; I think most of that comfort is rooted in ignorance.

But the experience. The experience of it all.

At this moment, we’re at the endgame of all of the small changes that eventually changed the landscape of everything we’d experienced in our childhoods, teenage, and younger adult years. We learned to chat on yahoo. Find games to play for free, Pogo comes to mind. But beyond that, we’d still buy games. And we’d still buy CDs. When Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa were the word of the day, we were still often downloading entire albums.

There was a physicality that we were used to. Sure, you might have had a massive collection of mp3s that you’d use with Winamp (which really whipped the llama’s ass), but when portable players came out, you were still attached to full albums. They were events. You would certainly buy a CD because you wanted a song you’d heard on the radio, and maybe that’d be the first song you listened to when you put it in the CD player in your car, or your discman. But you’d discover the rest of that album. A painting in musical form— something the artist expected you to unfold as you spent time with it.

Games followed a similar trajectory. I remember purchasing games and perusing the manuals for all of the game’s secrets on the way home. Or even when I was home, hoping that the manual would reveal the secrets of how to be successful immediately when I first booted the game. The quality of the game itself was a question that could only be answered by playing it, so a great number of us American gamers were rental kids. The excitement for those games was palpable.

And now, like streaming a movie, you pick it and you buy it. Or maybe you subscribe to a Playstation, Xbox, or Nintendo premium service that offers games for play. Nintendo’s collection is certainly the most egregious, I think. A subscription is necessary to play some of the games, a premium tier is required for most others, and a whole new console is required to play the meager Gamecube collection.

And movies. Remember when movies would release on Fridays? People would rush to stores to pick up VHS, DVD, and then eventually blu-ray copies. Sometimes movies don’t even get physical releases anymore. I recall the days when rentals gave great metrics in the way of interest, and purchases meant permanence. And now we’ve been inundated by movies that fail at the box office because of Hollywood’s resistance to evolution. Every few days, you’re certain to come across an article about how a movie that failed to resonate with the theater crowd and how it’s getting a second life on streaming services. And you know what? I don’t believe a word of it. I believe it’s just marketing to generate any sort of interest at all.

Generation Alpha doesn’t consume media the way we did. They’re used to 30 second clips of music defining trends. They watch “brain rot” content on youtube that pretty literally is just background noise. I’ve noticed a trend of shorts presenting incorrect facts simply to enrage people into engage with the content in the form of correction, further pushing the videos up in the algorithm because advertisers have completely changed the landscape of what it means to have a video become successful. Real “content” is now supported by paid ads and patreon accounts.

The generation of the successful youtuber is over. It’s a grind. Attention is gained through appealing to the mass markets. As a person who follows a lot of retro gaming channels, it’s not difficult to find the “Resident Evil” phase where they cover the games and regurgitate the same history story— The Doki Doki Panic story is a wonderful parallel to this. No new information has been introduced, just the creator noticing the bump in views and engagement and following that trend.

It wouldn’t be hard to surmise that I’m the type of person who collects retro consoles, or even vinyl records. In my mind, it’s a special thing to be in a space where you don’t have the easy ability to change the game with a couple of clicks of convenient buttons. Listening to a vinyl really means listening to what the artist had in mind for you to experience. My imagination often runs wild with those concepts.

Recently, I laid on my couch and put on my second favorite Peter Gabriel record “Melt” and just listened. I didn’t just, I just… consumed it. I felt connected to the person who first purchased it. I could put myself in their shoes. I imagined them excited, removing the plastic covering and dropping the stylus on the edge of the record ready to discover what Gabriel might have had in mind. Maybe they wore headphones to get the full experience. Did they love it they way I do?

The album is undoubtedly a curated set of stories. What was it like for them to listen without the Internet to tell them how to interpret the words and melodies? What was it like playing obtuse games without the guidance of something like Gamefaqs to hold your hand along the way, or Youtube to simply show you how to play it? What was it like to have to learn through wrought persistence? What was it like to develop your own opinions about a piece of media without some angry Internet critic to tell you how much you should hate something and how to demand change without any real influence?

People my age remember those days. We had to stand by idly while focus groups guided the abandonment of the very things we loved about franchises like Deus Ex. It’s not like those things don’t matter, obviously capitalism drives a lot of what we do and how we expect things to perform. But that same calculated decision-making meant that we now have to pay extra for the console that has the blu-ray drive. Nintendo now sells cartridges that contain nothing but the license that play the game. What does that mean to you? Try playing Mario Maker on the WiiU.

I’m not saying the games were better back then. I may be a curmudgeon; a real Scrooge. The games weren’t necessarily better (though we received some real masterpieces) but the experience made everything more important. It made those things worth showing up for and now that everything is available all the time, often piecemeal, what makes these things special? Where is your commitment to your entertainment?

Are you being force fed?