The Madeleine in Eight Bits
In Pixar’s Ratatouille, the triumphant dish that brings a fearsome restaurant critic to his knees does so by evoking a childhood memory. Watching that scene I remember thinking it wasn’t truly fair— a kind of cheating, really, to bowl someone over with such a direct appeal to his nostalgia. We all know those early memories often occupy a strange and protected place in the heart, and that this can give rise to much subsequent irrationality. If you played Chrono Trigger soon after it came out in 1995 and recall it fondly, you might have felt a pang of emotion upon seeing the advertisements for the 2008 re-release: “Good morning, Crono!” in that old pixelated font, on a field of black.
Odd things stay with you over the years. Those combos in Double Dragon at the arcade, or sitting in front of the family computer with King’s Quest, or the particularly fuzzy way a square wave sounded on a Sega Genesis. People join the game industry with stars in their eyes; you know there was something— the hot summer nights spent deep in EverQuest, or the afternoons when the computer lab was taken over by Doom II before the teachers knew to supervise what took place there, or an intense and dramatic player-versus-player match in some MUD that one learned to Telnet to in college— some specific moment that compels us backwards, trying to recapture it.
Video games may have been an escape, or a respite, or a memory of fun and intense competition, but whatever they are to the people who play them and make them, the medium of games feels nostalgic like no other. Coy indie artists use the visible pixel as a point of pride; Mega Man 9 recently came out deliberately masquerading as something created for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Along with its introspective text and music, Braid availed itself the imagery and mechanics of Super Mario Brothers to make its emotional impact. No video game music concert is complete without something Koji Kondo wrote over twenty years ago; that tug at our sentimentality never fails. Even the recent teenage heavy-metal wet-dream titles, like Gears of War or God of War, feature at their emotional cores the sense of a better and more innocent past, now lost.
Modern adult life is probably supposed to be more than just a series of futile attempts to recapture one’s lost youth, or at least what we imagine our youth to have been. But the medium of games entices us because it allows us to try. Games are works of make-believe, and we play cops and robbers or house or God with them; we want to be taken to that magical place, the one where potential and possibility still rule, where everything we’re challenged with seems achievable. People revert when playing games— responsible men with good jobs and families transform into ten-year-olds with controllers in their hands. You could see this positively— a rejuvenation of someone worn down by the grindstone of banality— or it might be horrifying.
That is the real reason non-gamers don’t really trust video games. They sense intuitively that they don’t help us grow up. Instead, they help us postpone the end of childhood. People who continue to play games in their adult life are fooling themselves, in a way; games and toys are acceptable for children because they are models of conflict and other systems that represent situations they will soon encounter in the real world. But what business does a mature and sensible adult, who actually lives in the world, have playing games? By continuing to immerse ourselves in them, we turn our back and chase the magical place at the expense of dealing with reality. And that regressive inertia is why video games will always loop back upon themselves in fits of wistful nostalgia.
Commentary | March 15, 2009
Reader Comments (17)
Braid sticks out to me from your list of examples because while it does reference older games, it avoids being retrogressive, and the surrounding context suggests a layer of adult understanding beneath the simpler veneer.
That's actually a good model for the new breed of thoughtful, retro-tinged indie games: it's not that we're trying to retreat into the naive simplicity of the past, we're just acknowledging that it's back there, comforting and familiar, as we navigate the murky future of our more complex adult lives.
There's also the fact that it's usually a lot easier to design a compelling game when you're keeping things retro-simple.
On that note though, here's a recent post by David Jaffe that relates to this:http://criminalcrackdown.blogspot.com/2009/03/who-wants-to-live-forever.html
But I do think it's important to remember that wistful nostalgia isn't just limited to the immature man-children who still play video games.
How many people still pine over Pretty in Pink? You say that games exist to teach us about the conflicts that we will one day have to endure. But Pretty in Pink exists to help people deal with the problems of adolescence. That doesn't stop people from loving it once they've grown up.
Yes games help us stay in touch with our inner child but so do movies, music, clothes or any other objects of our youth. I'm not fully convinced that games are a more nostalgic past time then say music. Or that a full grown retro gamer is any less adult then the thirty year old women that go out to 80’s nights to shake their tail feather to Kenny Loggins.
To add my 2 cents, I would ask:
Is the life of the adult really more complex than that of a child?
I recall as a child being dazzled, bewildered and frightened with new things every day. Unexpected challenges came in an endless stream. I feel that my adult life has been substantially safer and more placid in comparison. In fact I would argue that this is part of the reason that adult years seem to pass that much faster: There is less 'meat' in them.
Most adult conflicts do not threaten you with physical pain, and you are better equipped to deal with emotional pain by having more insight into your feelings.
To sum up, childhood is a time of excitement and challenge like no other. It's no wonder we keep trying to relive some of its moments later on.
You appear to disagree, but to me DLB was quite solidly the latter - it used a low res and a limited color palette, but its soundtrack used real instrumentation, its pacing was very different from a standard 8-bit platformer, and its overall atmosphere and idea are very unlike something one would have played on the C64 or NES back in the day. And I realized I liked it in part because of that. The 10 year old me wouldn't have known what to make of it.
Using chunky pixels is to our medium what shooting something on Super-8 is to film. Pixels and to a lesser extent square/sine/saw waves are the raw stuff of which videogames are made, and I think we'll be better off the more clear the retro / lo-fi divergence becomes.
Let's face it: the world is a pretty messed-up place. Those people who tell you to stop playing games and live in the real world can only afford to do so because they wear rose-tinted protective glasses. Without those, their eyes would probably burn out pretty damn quick.
So games and other "childish" fantasies serve two crucial functions. One, they remind us that the world could be better in some way, that if we maintain the status quo we are the de facto oppressors of anyone who ends up crushed under the heel of the system. Two, they remind us that, in this or any other world, it's possible to do something about it. In short, the best games leave us dissatisfied with the emptiness of the modern consumerist society (it is a great irony, of course, that most of them are consumer goods as well - but then so are hardbound volumes of great literature, or recordings of classical music). Where television invites passive acceptance and books invite detached analysis, games enjoin the player to passionate action.
I don't want to say too much, but in regards to the previous paragraph, suffice it to say that I'm putting my money where my mouth is.
And then, of course, there's that tired old quote that must invariably get trotted out in situations like these:
"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis
I play games because I like to think and be challenged, and games allow me to do that, plain and simple.
Many people do enjoy the nostalgic part of games, but not all gamers are drawn to them; as people of all ages play tabletop and sports games for many reasons, so are the reasons for video games.
My point being, this tactic transcends mediums, it's just that there are other films that cater to desires outside of that. I think games are slowly getting to the point where there is more of an alternative. Will it be as prominent as film? Probably not. I think the growth of the videogame medium more closely resembles that of comic books than anything else. To this day the market is flooded with childhood power fantasies (with all the characters you used to love stuck in time!), but there is good stuff if you choose to look for it.
Look at the domestic dog. A dog is a neotonous wolf. Their playfulness and lack of agression (for the most part) are key in why we keep them around, as well as obediance and ability to learn. These are puppy traits. In non-neotonous animals, the ability to learn ends with adulthood. Adult wild animals can never adapt as well to unfamiliar situations, and can react only with fear.
In the same way, childish traits amongst humans may actually be useful things to retain and help us progress as a species. Play may be key to our future evolution and survival.
Can't you say the same thing about playing poker, watching sports, going to strip club, chess club, going to church, going to Star Trek convention or for that sake, any hobby we decided to adopt?
There are so many ways to keep oneself from dealing with reality.. it could be sex, (over)eating, drugs. Some of the stuff we do to escape reality are quite healthy.. like reading, and listening to music. Some people even make that non-reality into a career by becoming a musician, writer or game designer.
It sounds like whoever wrote the article is bitter about their adulthood.. Just because you are an adult it doesn't mean you have to deal with adult BS all the time.. and you are free to be whoever you want to be in our private life..in fact we need those outlets to function properly as human beings.
We shouldn't be ashamed of the kid we have in us.. there is nothing wrong is collecting legos or going to star trek convention or be a die hard fan of a sports team, or playing video games. I thought the important thing about our generation is learning to accept that we are all diffferent and not judge according to our limited world-view. To me that's what living in a post-modern world is about, diversity and acceptance.
Besides, why should the writer care about whether I or anyone else he's never met is playing video games at home? Did we do anything to hurt him/her? and what gives him/her the right to pass judgement on us, or gamers in general, when he/she has no clue as to what we are like.
There are plenty of people who live meaningful/successful life playing video games, and they are responsible adults too.
This site is for my personal opinions, and my intention was not to make an argument "against" video games so much as to describe how I feel about them. Suffused with nostalgia is one of those ways.
As it says on the front page of the site, I am a professional writer and video game designer, so in a sense I am one of those people who have indeed made "that non-reality into a career," as you suggest.
thanks,matthew