I’ve been connected to the Sony gaming ecosystem for quite a while, and up until the PS4, they were fairly committed to backwards compatibility. As a result, I’ve had the good fortune of being able to revisit these older games when I want to play something but don’t have the funds to engage with something new. As such, the game is still fairly fresh in my mind, despite the fact that it is old enough to buy cigarettes in some municipalities.
Read MoreRereading it in preparation for the class, I was struck by a simple but surprisingly deep question: what does it mean for something to be haunted? Not on the surface, but as part of a deeper cultural question. What does it make sense to think of as being haunted?
Read MoreReplaying this game is, essentially, a reunion with the person I was when I first encountered it. The problem is that I don’t really care about who I was at that point in time. I can’t change the past, and I can’t regain any sort of meaning from hanging out with a fourth-grader. It’s not that returning to it is an unpleasant experience, it’s that I feel I’ve scraped just about everything out of this piece of media that I can get.
Read MoreLet us look at nostalgia itself, because nostalgia is what we’re taking aim at here. The pain of homecoming. Let us take a more medical or therapeutic approach. If we view being a Nostalgiac as a bad thing, what is the treatment for it? What is the plan of action for rehabilitation?
Read MoreThe things we make — the things you can just go down to the store and buy if you don’t have them — are made to fulfill a certain set of needs, solve a certain set of problems, and — ultimately — generate a certain set of changes on the mind. A lot of these changes are unconsidered.
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