Nostalgia in Games

Far from being a simple desire to rewind the clock, nostalgia is part of a subtle constellation of attitudes towards the past and fictional worlds.  Attitudes that can certainly be reactionary but which can also be fiercely progressive and even revolutionary.

Consider, for example, the nostalgia of the Fallout series of games.  Ostensibly set in a post-apocalyptic United States, the prelapsarian culture revealed amidst the wreckage of the games’ wastelands is both more technologically advanced than that of contemporary America and more culturally regressive.  Fallout‘s Antebellum America is a world of robots and plasma rifles as well as 1950s aesthetics and attitudes.  By making the player comb through the ruins in search of better weapons and equipment, the Fallout franchise makes us — as characters in the game — yearn for the material wealth and sophistication of this vanished past while also encouraging us — as players of the game — to laugh at the ridiculous patriotism, sentimentality and arrogance of 1950s Americana.  The Fallout franchise is a game in which ironic detachment and nostalgic yearning co-exist in perfect harmony.

This artful cognitive dissonance is beautifully expressed in the Tranquillity Lane mission in Fallout 3 (2008).  Tranquillity Lane is an idealised version of a 1950s American community; just how idealised a version is never made clear, but the implication is that even by the standards of the Fallout franchise’s setting, Tranquillity Lane is something of a utopia.