Do nostalgic games trick us into loving them?
So I just read this article on Joystiq called 'How nostalgic JRPGs trick us into loving them' and about halfway though I realised you could replace "JRPGs" with "Point'n'Click Adventure Games" and you'd have the exact same story (only less marketable; see what I did there?).
So what to people think? Do you agree that "old games can take us to states of euphoria by triggering our memories of the past... which can convince us that they're superior experiences, even when today's games are leaps and bounds better" or are the older games the superior experiences and they just don't make them like they used to? In short, is the problem the games industry or is the problem us? Or is there not a problem at all?
So what to people think? Do you agree that "old games can take us to states of euphoria by triggering our memories of the past... which can convince us that they're superior experiences, even when today's games are leaps and bounds better" or are the older games the superior experiences and they just don't make them like they used to? In short, is the problem the games industry or is the problem us? Or is there not a problem at all?
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As a person with a review blog I have to watch out for any sort of nostalgic bias in the way I review things, it's sometimes difficult to pinpoint, but I manage.
"I do think that there actually was something special and unique about the games from the 80s and 90s... If you look at the teams who made the early [Monkey Island] and [Kings Quest]* [games], those were very small teams by today's standards. Design-by-committee rarely produces something as compelling as the vision of a single designer, and I think that small teams can produce better, more adventurous games. And when too much money gets involved in a game's development, I think that very often the design gets polluted by business needs."
*In the actual quote the games are Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, I just replaced them with classic adventure games for the sake of argument.
While nostalgia can be a big factor into someone's enjoyment of a game, I think they are generally aware enough to know whether a game is "good" or not on a technical level. For example, I love Sailor Moon, but on a standard viewing it's a pretty crappy anime overall.
When the people who most frequent these forums have not and will not play them, I'd say that's an indication of whether they think the games are good or not.
As one of the frequenters who have not (and maybe will not), I can say, at least for myself, that it has nothing to do with my perception of the games' quality, but rather my own lack of interest in revisiting that era of Sierra adventures.
I think Space Quest is a brilliant series, and I have fond memories of it, but I have no will to play it again for the foreseeable future. For the same reason, I don't see myself playing King's Quest past what little I've played either.
When I "like" something, and I wanna recommend it to people, I usually take a step back, and think of the reasons why I like it. If I can't come up with any reasons that hold water for a recommendation, (and it's pretty simple, from graphics to relatable charaters to compelling story to well-executed gameplay etc.) it's usually because the outweighing reason is nostalgia.
Once again, I have not played King's Quest, so I can't refer to your situation in particular, but I agree someone shouldn't berate someone from liking something that to someone else looks like crap, even if it's a majority's opinion, but at the same time I don't think people should berate others for disliking it either.
Again, Ratatouille does a good job in explaining this phenomenon. Quote: "The average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
I don't think anybody who hasn't played a certain game can say if it is good or bad and just because someone hasn't played something doesn't automatically make them think it is bad. The biggest excuse people seem to have for not playing the King's Quest games is that they didn't grow up with them and many of them seem to have it on their to do list. If I hadn't grown up with a mother who owns and played pretty much every adventure game from the golden age of the genre I probably wouldn't have played them either.
Lol, small world. I just quoted that speech in my Screen Criticism assignment which I handed in yesterday. It truly is an amazing monologue.
Sure sounded like it to me, tbh.
There are various specific things about KQ6 that I could outline as to why it is good without waxing nostalgic about it. If, however, you'd expect me to be objective about it, I might point out that everyone's opinion about things is inherently subjective as skewed by their own preferences, so even without nostalgia there will always be a certain level of bias in everyone's view of things.
Hell, I'm finally going back and doing everything in my power to finish Zelda II, and this is a game that has completely defeated me to the point of ragequitting twice, including the time that I tried cheating and still wasn't able to beat it. If I can get over my hangups on that game, I think I can push myself to get over my hangups with King's Quest. I had the same hangups over Maniac Mansion, and I got over them for that game, didn't I?
The new manga was pretty lackluster as well. I'm hoping it will get better though. It was filled with mistranslations that I'm hoping they will realise they need to do better.
Sometimes, graphical detail and gameplay feature can be overdone in modern games, and well... they kind of become less memorable as there is less to focus on.
I'd play Chrono Trigger over Final Fantasy XIII anyday.
Pfffffhahahahahahah! Good one. Almost dashingesque in its protest-producing presuppositions. Calm down, people can understand you! And I'll get to those KQ games one day.
There were hard games back then, which needed a lot of levelling, and then there were others which were easier to beat. In Final Fantasy VII, my 69 hours of playtime were enough to beat the game with all side-quests and have all characters on level 99. Final Fantasy Legend on the original GameBoy was considered a "long" game. You can beat it in just a few hours these days. In comparison, some RPGs today wear their expected gaming hours on the package like a badge. 150 hours to finish a game, where am I supposed to get that much time?! On average, I manage to set aside 3 to a maximum of 8 gaming hours a week, do the math and find out why such a game just doesn't sound like fun to me any more.
It's certainly true that back then, reading huge manuals, trying, trying and retrying and lastly running a lot through seriously empty environments was "part of the game". These things are less common today with the advent of the "casual gamer" (a species which as of yet lacks a proper definition). But I tend to think that one remembers those games most fondly which kept a certain balance. Those games you beat exactly about a minute before you threw your keyboard at the wall out of frustration. Those which tried those very first steps of storytelling.
Hell yeah! But then again, the 30 minutes of FF XIII I played were already enough for life.
I'm old enough to have played a lot of the old adventure games when they were still new. And a lot of them were pretty bad. The bad ones aren't around anymore, and no one talks about them.
The ones everyone still talks about are the ones that were good enough to captivate. And it gives modern adventure games a tough standard for comparison.
Compare a modern game to one of the best of the past, and the modern game doesn't look so good. Compare it to an "average" game of the past, and it doesn't look so bad.
First of all, Nostalgia definitely plays a part in clouding our judgement, making us look at games (and other things) with rose-tinted glasses. We played these games in our childhood, and they were the best we had. Of course we remember them fondly - we hadn't developed our cynicism glands yet!
But on the other hand, things genuinely were different back in the day. There was more imagination, more passion behind things. There was a lot of variation and it resulted in a much more interesting range of products. We're talking about games, so I'll focus on them, but this applies to other things as well - TV and films, for instance, or music.
Games could be about any number of things, and they were better for it. Nowadays we get big money machines that churn out high-budget, gritty urban shootathons, but back in the day we could get cutesy platformers and games with a genuine sense of humour about them.
You'll note that I didn't say things were 'better', just different. And that's because some games aren't great. Some have been bettered. But that doesn't mean that old games are always good or bad. It depends on the game itself.
Do I think King's Quest is a good game? No. I tried it and found the mechanics very dated. But that doesn't mean others don't love it. And I'm not telling them they're wrong to like a game. I may argue about things about the game not working in modern titles, but if you genuinely like a game and are able to provide valid reasons for doing so, I'll hold my hands up and say something like 'agree to disagree'.
Everyone's different. I may love Albion, for example, but I know that's through rose-tinted glasses. And I don't care. It may try to trick me into loving it*, but I love it anyway - not for what I remember it, but for what I KNOW it is.
And that, for me, is real nostalgia.
*Bet you thought I wouldn't work the thread title into this, did you.
I just felt that was relevant to the topic at hand. Also, 1,000th post!!!!!!! Finally, I am a man! :cool:
All the other older games I like, I didn't start playing until the last six years or so and most of those even more recently than that. So I don't really think nostalgia's really been much of a factor because I have very little to be nostalgic about.
"More imagination, more passion, more interesting" on the nostalgia side, and "high-budget, gritty urban shootathons" as the modern way, that also speaks a clear language.
I believe that there are still very creative game designers out there, and I believe that there are even more than yesterday. But making games has become much harder for those young companies.
If I look at yesteryear, companies with 6-9 designers/programmers could make games, they just had to find a publisher. But the combination of both programmer as well as designer/artist did not normally yield an especially great result. "Pixel artists" today make much better art than was seen yesterday, while bugs were as common as today despite the fact that programs were decidedly less complex. Also, designers could not draw on extensive knowledge of "what works", so a lot of past design choices were hit-or-miss. Maybe the best games were those of yesterday, but I assure you: The worst can also be found back then. It's just that they are long-buried in the trash and no one remembers them any more.
I said that these early game making heroes could be quite creative, but having experienced that time first hand, they normally weren't. Pixelated blood was as popular then as the high-res version is today. I was playing "Moonstone" on my Amiga, which was gore abound. The only reason I wasn't playing first person shooters was because that machine was too slow. But I envied those PC players for "Doom". Really creative stuff had as hard a time to get sold just like today.
Looking back and comparing brings up even more similarities with the past. You might have been successful with those 9 designers/programmers, but then again, you might really fail also. The game budgets of today and yesterday are virtually incomparable, but the rule still stands: The more money was in those games, the more successful they were.
Piracy was even more of a problem yesterday. The makers of extremely popular games went bankrupt while the game cracking community demanded recognition and were thought of as heroes. There's really no nostalgia for me there. It was a shitty time when I as a teenager contributed to the ruin of an entire gaming platform.
The nostalgia article is really right to assume that we look upon these older games without thinking that much about the bad side. Games today partly suffer from the very same illnesses, while those illnesses that were a real pest in old games are replaced with new and different illnesses. Game makers have to think about making money to survive, always, yesterday as well as today, and these decisions are not always creative or player-friendly, whatever the decade. But there's good stuff in gaming also, whatever decade you look at, that much is certain.