Nostalgia
“Tomorrow I remember yesterday” — The Chameleons “Nostalgia”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about nostalgia. It makes sense that many of us as we age look back upon our youth and long for times or experiences we had then, having filtered out much of the bad aspects from our memories.
I first started thinking about this because I’d been rereading the Dark Phoenix storyline from the Chris Claremont era X-Men comics as well as the storylines in his New Mutants work, and missing the feeling of reading them when I was a young teen. As an adult, they are still amazing. To some extent I feel like every time I look for a new series in comics I’m still chasing the dragon of that era, and no, I don’t mean Lockheed, I mean the feeling of wonderment from when I initially read those comics.
There have been many great comic series since. It’s probable that my reaction to them says as much about me at the time I read them as it does about the quality of the comics. I was in my early teens when I first started reading the Claremont stories, and was practically a blank slate and very open to these seemingly new ideas. I thought the DC/Vertigo line from the 1990s were similarly creative and interesting, but they were also edgier, perfect for a college aged reader. More recently I think Fable attained a high level of showing something different and fantastic, but it also felt sadder, older, wiser, but so much more somber. I think that much of what I’m reading from Ahoy Comics, particularly The Wrong Earth, is a perfect mixture of this nostalgia and meta sensibility one gets looking back at what one has read before and wanting to read something new that still feels rooted in the best of the past.
Nostalgia in my hobbies doesn’t just apply to comics.
Stranger Things is an amazing show in general, but for me and people of my age group there is an incredible sense of nostalgia. I remember being able to spend entire days gaming and spending entire weekends with friends. The scene, I think it’s in the second season, where they’re using character pieces from Marvel’s Super Heroes as D&D pieces because they don’t have a ton of minis, is exactly something we did. That feeling of nostalgia is wonderful, but like most nostalgia it’s not something that’s entirely attainable. For one thing, the show brilliantly points out the angst and uncertainty of being that age, and yet it’s still the freedom and friendship that I think about when I watch it.
My favorite all time gaming memory is from when I was in high school. I’m pretty sure it was during the summer. We got together and made characters for Champions and then we went to lunch. We came back and played Champions until dinner. Then after dinner we started a game of Advanced Civilization. At just after 7 a.m. we finished and I went home and slept until noon. Great day. But I need to know I’m never going to experience that again, and if I did, I wouldn’t enjoy it. For one thing, I rarely stay up past 10 p.m. anymore. For another, the odds of doing anything for more than a couple hours without some of life’s befucklery requiring attention are long. So in gaming now I have to feel like four hours at a time is the best I can hope for and generally try to find ways to get good snippets of gaming in. It’s important to get in the things we enjoy even if the experience won’t live up to our memories of the imagined past.
I also think it’s important to recognize that games have evolved. D&D has a lot of throwbacks to the old days, but we don’t have to contend with THACO anymore. In general games have found ways to streamline things to make them more approachable. Part of me misses the old Avalon Hill boardgames, or would really like to play some year long game of World In Flames, but I recognize that in addition to not having the time, the rules and difficulty of playing such a thing would feel intolerable now. These days we have games like Mansions of Madness where an app runs the rules for you while you play. RPGs have virtual table tops which allow you to play with your friends from anywhere in the world, and also handle many of the rules for you. There’s a moment in this video where Matt Colville of MCDM is discussing their new game, Draw Steel, that I think addresses this quite well. He’s discussing a chart they’re planning to put in for damage and momentarily remembers the Critical Tables from RoleMaster. I loved those tables. They brought so much visceral joy to the experience, but I don’t think I’d like to spend the time leafing through those tables in today’s age, and it’s funny because Matt has the same realization that what they’re talking about is something much simpler. (Incidentally, I’m really looking forward to the Draw Steel!, because I think it will meld this feeling of nostalgia and modern gaming quite well. Certainly I haven’t looked forward as much to a new pen and paper RPG since back in the day.)
I think nostalgia has its place. Anything that helps inspire us is worthy. But it’s important to see where it has its limits. If I dwell too much on the things I read growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I won’t write anything truly new. If I strive for the sort of gaming I had when I had that kind of free time, I’ll always fail.
I think it’s important to recognize nostalgia and draw inspiration from it. I just also need to be wary of where I’m relying on something that isn’t realistic in the present.
