Video games have been around for decades, providing entertainment for millions of people, from children to adults alike. However, there are tons of people that have seen video games as a “moral panic” through the various decades for gore, violence, sexual themes, or other themes or scenes that are considered “immoral”. An example from today’s games is that many adults worry that first person shooting games are too violent for children and are the primary cause for school shootings and other violent behaviors. In her article, Coin-Operated Americans : Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade, Carly Kocurek briefly mentions that there was “worries about youth access to the [game] machines” (1) and that the game Death Race caused “the first video game moral panic” (1) because of its highly violent content. When video game cabinets were introduced in arcades in the 70’s and 80’s, adults were worried that the kids would become “corrupt” from video games. In another article by Kocurek called Night Trap: Moral Panic, Kocurek explains that the moral panic behind Death Race was specifically due to the violent nature of how the player controlled “pixelated cars striking pedestrians” (309). She also mentions that the game Night Trap brought about a moral panic because of its overall violence, as well as its “sexualized violence against women” (311). The game’s story and violence are based off thriller movies from that time period, such as Prom Night and The Slumber Party Massacre (312), which were quite popular at that time. Some people theorize that video games are often sources for moral panic because they were (and still are) relatively new technology with new content that is relatively accessible to children. Kocurek mentions that at the time that Night Trap was cited at a hearing, retailers such as Toys “R” Us and KB Toys regularly sold other games that were cited, such as Mortal Combat (314). Many adults are still worried today over the accessibility of violent video games for children. The debate over whether or not video games are too violent for kids started when they were first introduced about fifty years ago, and still continues on today.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing in entertainment. It’s easy to get people to buy “remasters” of old games and make them pay for it all over again.  It is rare to see remasters done with any kind of polish, and they are often simply ported to and slapped onto a modern console rather than the love letter they should be treated as. Separate from remasters, however, there are also entirely new games coming out with an old style.

Shovel Knight is, as pointed out by John Vanderhoef in the HTPVG chapter “Shovel Knight: Nostalgia” one of many games in a recent trend of intentionally using the older style graphics in an attempt to bring back some of that feel of the older games. These are interesting because they seem to thrive almost entirely on nostalgia. Not to say the games are poorly made, but they

I think of the Mega Man series. The first 6 games are all on the NES, and as thus they use the 8-bit engine that the NES is known for. In the transitions to Mega Man 7 and 8, which used the engines of the SNES and Saturn/PS1 respectively, something didn’t translate quite righ. The games felt slower, clunkier and less fluid. So, in 2008, Capcom had the idea to make Mega Man 9, and bring back the old 8-bit feel of the games. It was even marketed primarily towards the Nintendo Wii, a system where you could use the controller on its side to emulate an NES Controller. It was the perfect storm for a nostalgia trip.

And it worked. The game did very well, ended up being released on multiple systems (PSN, XBLA and Wii Shop) and single handedly returned interest to the Mega Man series. Sales of the older games on the Virtual Console even improved noticeably in the weeks following 9’s release. This also led to the release of Mega Man 10, which also had the same 8-bit style.

But eventually the nostalgia wasn’t working anymore.

For Mega Man 11, the developers would return to a more modern engine and graphical style. The implications of this decision are what is most interesting to me. Of course, it makes sense for them to return back to the 8-bit style for 9 & 10; what was going on before simply wasn’t working. 11, however, is seen simultaneously as a step forward and backwards. Forward in the sense that it is yet another attempt to push the series into modern times, but backwards in that it seemed to be the opposite of what the fans wanted.

Restorative Nostalgia was what ruled the fate of the Mega Man franchise. The series developers constantly fought between wanting to move forward and do new things and the wishes of the fans. The series ended up hitting a stalemate, and other than the recent releases of collections of the older titles, it is looking rather unlikely for a future for the Mega Man series.

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.

 

Gaming has always had some sort of gendering as a means for companies to profit off a target audience. Previously as seen within arcades, games were marketed towards adults, but it was normally males. Brought up by Kocurek, gendering had a foundation in arcades as businesses began using the themes of violence and sports, which were considered a male activity. Then as the arcade business began pursuing a change in marketing towards toys, video games had to be gendered more between boys and girls like soldiers and dolls. So, pink games were what girls were given. Eventually pink games died out, but it was quite evident that in magazines like Nintendo Power, males were targeted much more heavily than females. Imagine how games would have progressed if they were only marketed towards girls. Would games be themed differently?

Pink games had barbies and bright colors, which is what we see in Kirby minus the barbies. Character customization might have been all the rage, while violence and sports would have been ignored. However, maybe video games towards females would have failed horribly, due to these restrictions. Like any industry, they would have to branch out towards different topics to get more viewers. It would be impossible to stick with only females and their stereotypes and that is why we find more games trying to be inclusive and diverse today.

Most multiplayer games have some type of female character that can be played, which reminds me of the ever controversial playable female characters in Battlefield V. The argument was that it was not historically accurate to have females fighting in WWII. They didn’t take them out, regardless of the backlash. This does bring up a topic that we have mentioned before in class. It’s the topic of pandering, but I don’t know if we specifically used that word. For example, when Overwatch’s face of the game, Tracer, was pronounced gay through a comic, a lot of people were upset, but mostly because of the whole pushing the agenda of diversity and ruining games in the process conspiracy. It was evident that maybe Tracer wasn’t originally homosexual during the planning of the game and actually was made that way for publicity and expanding their profits into the lgbtq community. Doing this isn’t inherently horrible, but it does just look like companies want a quick cash grab. Going back to the original arcade industry, it seems that it was all about a cash grab. Isn’t that what industry is all about? Money. They want to make the consumer happy, but they have to make profit doing so.

Overall, the act of gendering things might appear convenient at first, but it could be less profitable. It’s much easier to market towards a key audience and age and gender is probably the easiest and broadest demographic to use. It doesn’t completely explain why we see companies branching out. I assume that once they have a solid fan base then they can focus on other groups because there is only so much a fan can give after they bought the game. Even if it is considered pandering, it does satisfy the needs of this modern day and age. There is always a need for representation, but if it’s bad representation, maybe we don’t need it so much.

Works Cited

Cote, Amanda C. “Writing ‘Gamers’: The Gendered Construction of Gamer Identity in Nintendo Power (1994–1999).” Games and Culture, vol. 13, no. 5, July 2018, pp. 479–503, doi:10.1177/1555412015624742.

Kocurek, Carly A.. Coin-Operated Americans : Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade, University of Minnesota Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=4391801.

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.

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. 

Nostalgia is the longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. Many gamers seek to play games from their childhood to relive the experience of playing and to reminisce about simpler times. It is the reason why you would want to hook up an older console to your television and replay that poorly designed movie licensed game again (Chicken Little on PS2 is unironically one of my favorite games growing up). In John Vanderhoef’s Nostalgia, he defines nostalgia as “[the] wishes to recover the lost paradise of the past and reconstruct it in the present. In its zealous efforts, 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.” It is this restorative nostalgia that causes players to keep coming back for more. Players experiencing restorative nostalgia views the games through a lens that doesn’t let them see the faults and problems that could potentially be present in the game. The game could have poor game design but it will always be good to them because they have fond memories of playing it in their past. 

One of the more recent moments where I experienced restorative nostalgia was earlier in February playing the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX demo. This new Pokemon game is a remake of the 2005 video games Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red and Blue Rescue Team. I had played Red Rescue Team on the GameBoy Advance when it first came out and had incredibly fond moments with it growing up. Sitting down and playing the demo of the 2020 remake, I experienced restorative nostalgia head on. Starting up the game, I was inadvertently taken back to my childhood for a brief moment. In the intro cinematic before the menu, I was shown a brief overhead shot of the main poke-town hub that looked exactly like it did in 2007 when I played it. The music is just as it used to be except remastered with a more modern arrangement which set the tone for the rest of the game. All the Pokemon NPCs were present in beautiful 3D models and the activities you could do were streamlined for the modern day audience. 

Playing with nostalgia goggles definitely heightened my experience with the new remake of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. Afterall, it was exactly as I remembered it when I was young. Although I genuinely enjoyed my experience, my nostalgia did not allow me to see faults in the game. Outside of the narrative and memorable characters, truthfully, the gameplay loop is somewhat repetitive. While exploring dungeons, the main part of gameplay, you are placed in randomly generated dungeon rooms full of enemy Pokemon with one set of stairs that allow progression to the next level. The turn-based combat encounters can be concluded quickly when fighting weaker Pokemon by just mashing the A button and having your character do it’s most powerful move against it. This leads to moments where you are just speeding through the dungeon trying to find the staircase that leads you to the next floor to complete the dungeon. This becomes tedious in later stages of the game where you could be exploring dungeons with up to 99 floors in them.

From the time of ancient civilizations to the centuries of modern advancements, we have grown far in expanding both literary works and scientific achievements. Yet one aspect remains the same, whether neglected or simply ignored, the persistence of misogynist attitudes in our culture continue to hinder ongoing possibilities of the future.

Now you might ask, why do such thoughts continue to occur? Are we not settled into an era of historically remarkable changes? Movements that we would have never regarded to come true before? Well, to begin with, the issue of misogyny has been deeply rooted in the history of our culture. Early stories and depictions widely regarded women as nothing more than objects of affection or, crudely speaking, “trophies” of a culture determined to highlight masculinity. Being the “fragile creatures” that they were, the only expectations of them were to master the duties of housekeeping and child rearing.

It was deemed as the “natural balance” of a “harmonious society” and, as such, women interested in working and competing along with their male counterparts endured much ridicule and mockery. But times have changed and intellectuals have extended to include both genders. Women are able to work and are allowed the same rights as men, so then what’s wrong? The problem with this disposition is that “gender equality” is only a term written on paper; a means to pacify the growing population who wanted change.

In fact, upon closer inspection we continue to see offensive treatment towards women in not only a profession working environment but in the online networking world as well. Robert Yang, author of the piece “On ‘FeministWhorePurna’ and the Ludo-material Politics of Gendered Damage Power-ups in Open-World RPG Video Games”, shares “Deep Silver’s 2011 open-world zombie game Dead Island…in light of its ‘Feminist Whore’ scandal…outlets reported in a data file…containing the text string ‘FeministWhorePurna’…referring to a player skill power-up for a woman named Purna (pg 97)”.

In response to this news coverage, developers of the game excused themselves by explaining that “The line in question was something a programmer considered as a private joke. The skill naturally has a completely different in-game name… (pg 98)”. Rather than take immediate action to properly renounce this very same programmer (whose ‘jokes’ and morality should be taken into deep consideration when hired), the company merely made a apologetic statement. Their sales did not go down; it promoted the game to a greater degree which onlookers bought out of curiosity and entertainment through the scandal.

The absurdity does not stop there. In the article “Code is Political” written by Julianne Tveten, states “a number of ‘esoteric’ languages…surfaced, infusing blithe humor into computer code to create subcultural jokes,” with one founder being 4chan, who “created an anti-feminist language called C+= (C Plus Equality); its code include functions like “CheckPrivilege()” and “yell(‘RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE!!!!!’)””. How anyone finds this to be simply a joke is beyond baffling. How no one thought this to be a serious issue is even more perplexing. Then is the nature of “men” just savages, or the communal impact that makes them so?

Politics and political movements have been a huge part of everyone’s life. Whether you like it or not, no one can escape the grasp of politics. Last week in class, we explored how political games and coding in general can be. I was fascinated to learn that there have been many programming languages created as more of a political statement rather than for more practical uses. In addition to this, it was interesting to explore how some elements of games also have more of a political aspect to them.

One of the articles that was discussed during class was a Vice article by Julianne Tveten called “Code is Political.” In the article, Tveten goes over several codes that were created for an ulterior motive. One of the more obvious example that the author used was TrumpScript a “satirical Python-based programming language targeting the eponymous presidential candidate” (Tveten). I also thought programming languages all had more of a practical purpose but I was clearly wrong. Unlike most programming languages, TrumpScript doesn’t run in China and Mexico and have several other quirks. Surprisingly, TrumpScript isn’t the only programming language made for a more political purpose. In fact, a number of “esoteric” languages exist such as LOLCODE and the 4Chan anti-feminist language C+=.

When it comes to programming languages, I never realized anglocentric most of them are. I was surprised to learn that major programming languages a lot of them are written in American English. In the same Vice article, Tveten talks about the programming language Alb which is entirely written in Arabic in 2013 by Lebanese computer scientist Ramsey Nasser (Tveten). The goal of this programming language was to begin the conversation of why there aren’t programming languages in other languages.

In addition to politics in programming languages, politics also exists in the many video games. One of the more extreme examples of this was explored in class when we discussed the “Feminist Whore Purna” chapter by Robert Yang. In the game Dead Island, an open world zombie shooter, there was a scandal over a development error. On September 8, 2011 players of Dead Island were surprised to find that a data file in the game contained a skill power named FeministWhorePurna (Yang 97). This skill was unique to one of the female character Purna. The skill allowed Purna to “increase [her] damage when killing an enemy of the opposite sex” (Yang 97). The developer quickly released a statement addressing the inappropriate character skill but this still lead to a huge scandal. Many people wondered why the file was named that way as well as comments about how this shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

It’s obvious that politics and political statements will be part of every aspect of our lives. Despite how scary this may sound; it is interesting to see how these statements are made. To me, I feel like it’s a double edged sword. On one hand, it can lead to meaningful discussions such as with the programming language Alb. On the other hand, it can lead to hurtful or harmful messages such as the Dead Island incident. No matter what, the way these political statements are made are all “works of art.”

Works Cited

Ruberg, B., et al. Queer Game Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Tveten, Julianne. “Code Is Political.” Vice, 1 Mar. 2016, http://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3dak5w/code-is-political.

In the past several years, politics has been on the rise of daily conversation. Almost every topic has been turned into a political issue. With topics being more political, this has transferred into code that developers have created. For many developers however, they can choose to bring their own personal ideas into their work. This is most prevalent with the game Dead Island. Within the game the character Purna gets a boost from killing male characters. This trait for Purna “… has no developed conversation simulation like Fallout or other open-world RPG simulation games, so “unique dialogue options” for a gendered power-up are not relevant. Instead, the Feminist Whore or “Gender Wars” power-up for Purna players confers solely a damage bonus against hostile NPCs gendered as men. The power-up is unique to the Purna character and not available for the other female character, Xian Mei, and “misogynist” power-up equivalents do not exist for male player characters.” (100, Yang On “FeministWhorePurna”) Compared to games like Red Dead Redemption, where these sexists acts are coded into the games, you are still given the choice within those games. Yang arguers that for Dead Island, Purna isn’t given that choice and is simply given the ability which is hard coded into her character.

As coders, we are taught to code ethically and take into account the customer. For example, if we are designing a website, are there any accessibility issues with it? Say the colors of the site, could a color blind person view the site fine? These are things that codes should be taking into account when programming any application. This also goes for checking code to make sure any bugs don’t exist and no errors will occur when the user runs. Again Yang states that “The credits of Dead Island for the Windows platform list thirty-two programmers, not including any engine or tools engineers, and zero game-design roles (which is unusual practice within the industry), but eight level designers and seven writers and thirty-four quality assurance staff. All development staff would have had to validate their changes against the rest of the file; if there was even a single errant line anywhere, it might have caused a parsing error in the game and the script file could be rendered inoperable. Testing staff might have even encountered the “Feminist Whore” text string within the game interface itself, before it was replaced for the public retail version.” (106, Yang On “FeministWhorePurna”) Even with a full staff of developers looking over the code, no one cared to point out this flaw in the code. In many professional companies, code that is developed is reviewed by other developers which is known as a code review. By doing a code review, it not only checks for minor errors in code but any style choices that not in line with the company guidelines. While code reviews can be long and lengthy they are an integral part of keeping each programmer in check with the code they right and to not allow bugs to go through.

Tech companies in the past several years have been making strives to include and hire more women. But what deters many is the fact that it is such a male dominated field. While for some it doesn’t stop them, there is still a “boys club” mentality that lurks within tech companies. This mentality can be harmful in trying to get more women to join the tech work field.