In Jon Vanderhoef’s chapter on nostalgia in How to Play Videogames, there is a very pronounced difference between restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. To me, restorative nostalgia feels wrong. Nothing is ever going to be the exact same as it was before, and it was probably never perfect in the first place. To recreate something flawless is inherently impossible, because life and reality has always been rife with imperfections. And I feel like that is what makes life good – nothing will ever be perfect, nothing will ever be complete. What’s the challenge and the motivation if there was never anything to improve in the first place? Reflective nostalgia, however, is more coming to terms with the past, acknowledging it for what it was, that while it might have been good, it never was truly perfect.

The indie game Gone Home is filled with reflective nostalgia. When you play Gone Home, you are walking through a house that is not your own, finding correspondence and interactions that aren’t your own. This story is not about you, the player, so why would Gone Home be demonstrative of reflective nostalgia? It is not your own personal experience, after all. It’s because you are tasked with finding things that someone else has left behind. You are finding past interactions between two people who are no longer there for you to meet, to talk to. It would be like finding someone’s diary in a yard sale or a secondhand store; an entire life that was lived that you will never get to fully know. You get to know the lives of Sam Greenbriar and her girlfriend Lonnie through notes and stories and bags of chips and Ouija boards left behind. You get to see that they spent days finding secret tunnels and making zines and being together. While Sam and Lonnie did get to enjoy their time together, you also see that there were bad times too – they got bullied at school, nasty words got written on Sam’s locker and Lonnie got detention for retaliating against the perpetrators, and when Sam’s parents finally found out that she was gay, they grounded her, and dismissed her feelings by telling her that it was only a phase. And that’s the reality of it all. That’s where reflective nostalgia separates from restorative nostalgia, in that you don’t look at the past through rose tinted glasses, you didn’t pretend that things were always good and there were no faults. Instead, you use reflective nostalgia to see both the bad and the good in the past. While Sam and Lonnie got to have great experiences and were together in the house that you are exploring, that didn’t mean that it wasn’t layered with pain, that they didn’t have to hide their feelings from their parents and everybody else for fear of retaliation. The experience of playing Gone Home is an act of reflective nostalgia. You are separated from the action of the story, you are only seeing the events second hand, and that allows you to look upon the past of these individuals while truly feeling for them and their problems. The history that the game references, such as the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” laws, are all real life events that had affected so many queer people, and the general intolerance of the LGBT community in the nineties is and was real. Maybe Gone Home is someone’s real life story, because this game is not far from the truth at all, and the act of playing it feels like reading a stranger’s diary; sad, hopeful, and just a touch nostalgic.

Works Cited

Gone Home, 2013, The Fullbright Company

Vanderhoef, John. “Shovel Knight; Nostalgia.” How to Play Video Games, by Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina Huntemann, New York University Press, 2019, pp. 317–323.