The main topic for this week was the idea of nostalgia in games history; for me I feel nostalgic with games when I would revisit old titles that I played when I was younger. Remembering the old times when life was simpler and I didn’t have a care in the world. When we talked about the Bioshock example of how we like to put  rose tinted views of the past, I thought that was really interesting because now that I think about it a lot of games I loved back then weren’t the best objectively. I can think of so many older game series where if I go back now and play them I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I did in the past, I refrain from playing those games to maintain the good memories and not change my perspective of the series. Also there was nostalgia that when I revisited the series it revitalized my love of the franchise. For example, I played the Pokemon series for the majority of my life (since I was 5) and new game after new game came out; all of it got numbing after a while. Once I went back and played the old games, and I saw how far the series has come, my appreciation and passion for the series spiked back up. 

When we talked about the rise and fall of the arcades, it brought me back, when I was younger I would always go to the local arcade near my school and have a good time with my friends. The discussion about both arcade and nostalgia brought up this memory, the fact that arcades are a dying concept at this point in time doesn’t surprise me. I found it interesting that the potential reason for earlier opposition to video games was because when the age of arcades marketed towards a younger audience was prominent, there was a history I didn’t know about; how originally arcade machines were more of a thing used in bars and targeted towards an older audience. That idea seems like a nice way to explain the initial agenda against games in its early days, but this hasn’t changed to this day games are still being blamed for issues that the industry has nothing to do with. In the beginning it could have been that since games were a generally newer thing that it could be seen as dangerous, people are wired to fear the unknown. On the other hand the issue of the game industry being targeted for mistakes an individual makes at this point seems really ridiculous. Even when studies are showing that there is not correlation between one’s violent tendencies to them playing violent video games. The potential reason why for this could be a generational gap, the older generation is not as informed about the games we have today, and the idea of the unknown can be scary for them. But I feel that the main reason for the game industry being targeted is because it’s easy for society to blame, rather than looking at themselves to blame.