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Nowadays, companies are going after the market for nostalgic gaming.
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“In our research we found that people who have social nostalgia memories – memories of playing games with friends in the past – they feel connected to themselves and their friends in the past, and they also feel connected in the present.”
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Return to this past life, play through it, and reconnect with yourself, literally. Those things can be particularly powerful for short-term stress release. You’re replaying a game from a positive childhood memory. “…With nostalgia you get sort of a bonus relatedness because you get to connect to yourself. “We already know that games are a source of psychological wellbeing,” says Bowman. We played Mario tennis with our friends, or racing games with our dads. For many people, games are intimately tied to social networks. “And then a couple of people found it and put it back together.” Reconnecting with your past selfīowman’s research shows how powerful the nostalgia from playing old video games can be. “Think about all the cultural capital that was tied up in cartridges and power cables that our parents threw away,” says Bowman. Playing them was only possible thanks to a handful of dedicated individuals, often anonymous, who remade or ported them to work on current systems. For years our favourite games were inaccessible because they were non-interoperable: the cartridges didn’t work on other devices, and old computer games wouldn’t run on newer operating systems. While music and literature has long been well-preserved, and constantly re-released, games weren’t like this. Return to this past life, play through it, and reconnect with yourself Nick Bowman, Texas Tech We played using handheld consoles, while the games themselves were on cartridges – the kind you pulled out and blew out the dust from if it wasn’t working.Īs kids we spent hours immersed in gaming worlds, but when our devices were lost, broken or superseded, the game likely was too. Like me, he grew up in a time when video games were intimately tied to a physical device. Bowman, an associate professor of journalism and creative media industries at Texas Tech University, has a vast collection of consoles and hundreds of cartridges and discs.