Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games

1. Playing the Past: An Introduction

1 1 Playing the Past An Introduction Laurie N. Taylor and Zach Whalen Outbreaks of nostalgia often follow revolutions. —Svetlana Boym (2001) In late 2006, Sony’s PlayStation 3 console and Nintendo’s Wii (codenamed “The Revolution”) promised to usher in a new era of gaming with powerful graphics and innovative approaches to play. Joining the Xbox 360, these game systems complete the seventh console generation, and already (as of 2007) speculation is growing over the eighth. At the same time that gamers were lining up to pay over $700 for the PlayStation 3’s highdefinition capabilities, many other game enthusiasts were drawn to the moderately priced Wii—not for its graphics or even its motion-based input , but rather for the ease with which it allows players to reexperience classic games like Super Mario Brothers (1985) and Donkey Kong (1985) through its Virtual Console. Nintendo’s branding has always emphasized its franchise characters like Mario and Yoshi; with the Wii, that nostalgic branding is fully realized in the form of a commodity—downloadable emulations of the actual games many of us grew up playing. In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, game publisher Kuma Reality Games released a free downloadable game mission that allowed players to reenact the then-controversial Swift Boat patrol on which candidate John Kerry earned his Silver Star. (Completing the mission is not that easy, it turns out, and one may conclude that Kerry’s actions were deserving of the medal he received.) At the same time that media outlets were running hotly-contested stories about the Swift Boat patrol, Call of Duty was one of the best-selling PC games of 2003, and it was recognized both with a Game Developers Choice Award and as the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Game of the Year. 2 Playing the Past Call of Duty is an intense first-person shooter (FPS) set during World War II. Its impressive visuals are frequently celebrated for their “cine­ matic” quality. As one reviewer observed, the game “shamelessly [re-­ creates] scenes from such recent films as Band of Brothers and Enemy at the Gates … I’ve never played a game that captures the feel of Hollywood’s version [of] World War II like Call of Duty. It really is like being in a war movie” (GamesFirst). This displacement of the documentary function of games—those ostensibly based on “actual” events—toward a Hollywood or pop-media measure of their realism suggests that something more is going on than the straightforward reenactment of history. In all of these examples (Nintendo’s Virtual Console, John Kerry’s Silver Star, and Call of Duty), video games operate with a clear—and a clearly mediated—relationship to the past. As video games have become more complex and expressive, real world history has found an interesting place on the video game shelf among the fantasy, science fiction, and sports settings many games offer. As Call of Duty and the Swift Boat game demonstrate, games can use history for the purposes of politics, education, historical revision, or entertainment, but in all of these instances, a sense of nostalgia establishes the relationship between the real present and a virtual past. Similarly, the Nintendo Wii counts on its players’ nostalgia for their experiences of old Nintendo games; its Virtual Console, like any emulator, reproduces a more or less faithful repetition of an actual, personally historical experience with gaming. Games are finding their way into more and more aspects of our lives— in homes, cars, workplaces, and museums, and can even be found on city streets and crossing areas by way of mobile platforms like PDAs, mobile phones, GPS systems, handheld dedicated game systems, and more. As such, video games are playing an increasing role in communicating complex ideas—real world history, media ecologies, and gaming histories. In all of these instances, a playful intimacy grounded in nostalgia becomes an important element in how games express these ideas. The essays in this collection join a growing field of video game scholarship to explore the role of nostalgia as it configures playing in, of, and with the past. As editors, we have found surprising and interesting connections among the approaches to history gathered within this volume. Moreover, a personal dimension of nostalgia has allowed us to recall our own histories with games. We have been lucky enough to see a cultural gaming literacy develop along with the creation and evolution of game studies as a nascent discipline...