Personally, nostalgia is a big part of the reason why I feel so emotionally attached to certain games.  I feel that I can relate to both restorative and reflective nostalgia when it comes to certain video games.  Restorative nostalgia “wishes to recover the lost paradise of the past and reconstruct it in the present…restorative nostalgia is uncritical of past mistakes or failures and instead relies on romanticizing and recreating, brick by brick, the monuments and moments lost to time” (318).  There are so many games that I wish I could go back to and play just as they were with not even the slightest difference.  When 343 Industries came out with Halo 2 anniversary, I was skeptical on if it would live up to the same feeling the original game had given me years prior. Within the campaign there is an option to switch between the old graphics and new ones. 343 Industries was smart to appeal to the restorative nostalgia that many of their players would have for the game.  When playing, I found myself often staying in the original graphics and trying to experience the game exactly how I did the first time I played it.  I agree that there is much more to experiencing a game than just the graphics or controls.  When I first played Halo, I was sitting right beside my older brother, in the same room, with split screen on.  I was much younger than I am now and my perspective and how I went about playing the game was so much more different than it was when I went back to it all those years later.  I did feel the initial excitement and nostalgia, but it still never quite felt the same.  I feel like the nostalgia arguable comes less from the game itself and more from the situation and time period that surrounds the game.  Sure, a game can represent a certain moment in someone’s life or a certain time period, but it will never truly bring the player back to that situation, time, and mindset.  To me it seems like restorative nostalgia is a grasp of a past that we can never return to, but one that we romanticize and tell ourselves that it is possible by striving to recreate the games themselves perfectly.

This connects to reflective nostalgia which “does not seek to reconstruct the past in the present; instead, it is nostalgia consumed with the act of longing itself, a nostalgia that wallows in the irrecoverable ruins of the past” (318).  I find myself relating more to restorative nostalgia because even though I know that I can never recreate the past experience of playing a game, I still always try to.  One game that I experience reflective nostalgia is Burnout Paradise.  The reason for this is because I always use to play this game with a particular person.  Even if the game got remastered, I choose to not play it because I know it will never live up to the memories I had of it when playing with that person all those years ago.

Works Cited

Payne, Matthew Thomas, and Nina Huntemann. How to Play Video Games. New York University Press, 2019.