Will There Be Gaming Nostalgia For This Decade? – A VR To Novabug

A waffle on a question Novabug is asking us about nostalgia. Here’s my two cents.

Here’s a link to the original video:

I believe every generation will have the need for looking back and nostalgia. The 1st generation of gamers might have a larger feel of nostalgia because of the fact that we got introduced to it for the first time and it was really special. Today’s generations grow up in a situation where games and gaming are just as normal as the furniture in your house. Why be nostalgic about that?

We went from being bored, playing board and card games to video games, where for the younger generations it is actually quite hard to be bored. Going back to our old games is easy, they don’t rely on any external factors – if you have the console and the game and a telly that is capable of displaying the image we’re good to go. For the younger generations to go back to their old games might be more difficult as the systems are relying more and more on external factors (servers and Internet etc) which will have been shut down. So no way to go back at all for the later generations.

So every generation will have it’s own sense of nostalgia. It’s part of human nature for sure. I reckon for my generation the things I am nostalgic about are tangible and accessible even now. For future generations or even current generations the things to be nostalgic about in the future will be less accessible due to DRM, servers being shut down, licenses running out.

A kid saving up for a PlayStation 4 now might indeed be nostalgic about the PS4 in the future, just as nostalgic as we are about the C64, Vectrex, Videopac or what have you. It’ll be a different generation doing things their own way – our nostalgia will be just as alien to them as our grandparents’s sense of nostalgia. We love our physical media – they may not. I reckon accessibility of nostalgic things is harder when it’s a digital thing instead of a physical thing. That’s something that will be a thing for the most nostalgic future nostalgics. Experiencing the nostalgia might be very different. We do it buy acquiring the old systems and playing the games but future nostalgics might very much experience it totally different. Perhaps they will do so in a VR or holodeck setting, being totally immersed where we as 80 year old geezers are still clutching the old atari 2600 controllers staring at flat screen TVs and being frowned upon by the new generation of nostalgics.

The generational cleft – and experiencing it – is something that is quite human as well. I reckon being 30-40 something will activate that somehow.

History repeating! Totally.