Some thoughts on video games and nostalgia
This morning, while doing my daily LinkedIn job application trawl I had YouTube video essays playing in the background when I came across this video from TheBackgroundNPC called "Switch 2 is the last straw... I'm done with Nintendo." She makes a lot of excellent points about the current state of Nintendo and how the video game industry at large have turned her off of wanting to keep buying new Nintendo games and systems - namely pricing, gating features behind subscriptions and especially Nintendo's anti-consumer practices and heavy litigation, particularly the Gary Bowser case (which I highly recommend reading about).
But the thing about this video that really got me was TheBackgroundNPC's use of language to describe her relationship with Nintendo as a corporate entity via the lens of nostalgia. And I don't want to single her out, since many other Youtubers, games writers and particularly social media gaming pages use extremely similar writing and language to talk about their experiences with nostalgia and video games, but hearing phrases used to describe a company such as "childhood defining," "magic" "making something that mattered" and my personal favorite "maybe not the company I thought they were" kinda sat weird with me. It's almost like we need better ways to talk about video games as an art form as opposed to a product to buy and sell, and how companies can influence nostalgia and fandom for their own interests.
I like to play and collect retro video games. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have nostalgia for the video games I played with my friends as a child - hell I wrote a whole blog post about it last year. I mostly stopped buying because the prices of everything got so insane, particularly Nintendo stuff. I knew this problem would persist when I saw an Instagram video recently of a guy working a flea market and a woman comes up to him and asks if he had any GameCube. He did, and the woman responded with a big smile and said "I'm buying back my childhood."
The concept of "buying back your childhood" is what keeps companies like Nintendo and Disney afloat. I'm 31 years old now, and some of my friends and peers are starting to have families and children of their own. Maybe they want to introduce their kids to the games of their youth. Or maybe, kids or not, you just want to dive into a familiar game to escape the horrors of our increasingly fascistic world. During the pandemic, tons of people I know that weren't gamers bought Nintendo Switches to keep themselves occupied during scary times, and I have to imagine most of them are collecting dust right now (like mine).
I do think video games are an art form and games themselves are a medium that can tell excellent stories and impact people, but they're also an art form that is far too ingrained in capitalism in most instances. It's why the industry feels so dire these days - we're rapidly reaching a point where AAA games are becoming too expensive to produce and games themselves are becoming too expensive for most people to purchase.
I think a combination of these things is why I've been falling off of video games recently. I've been picking at my backlog little by little and working on my Street Fighter 6 rank when I'm in the mood but I've just been playing way less video games while unemployed. Maybe it's all those years of FFXIV catching up too. Instead I've been reading a ton and exercising more. But constant remakes, nostalgia bait and expensive new games haven't been encouraging me to keep up with games.
Curious to see what happens to the industry in the coming years. Indies will probably continue to pop off at least, but I think AAA isn't in a great spot. Until then I'll keep playing PS1 games I suppose.