Essay: the art of dwelling, or retro gaming and the sickness of nostalgia
Essay by Martha Latham
It's 2001. Your brother's friends are over: Garrett, Mono, and Aaron. They blow harshly into the bottom of a rectangular, grey Nintendo 64 game cartridge, moving it left and right in front of their mouths like a harmonica. You are as old as the Nintendo 64, down to the hour.
They turn the cartridge around and slam it down into the opening of the console with more force than common sense suggests you should for an expensive piece of electronics. They follow this up with a solid whack on top.
They begin unravelling the cables, tightly wound in a criss-cross pattern around the controllers, before plugging each one into the console with the large, thumb-like plug not too dissimilar from an XLR cable. Except, you do not know what an XLR cable is. You're 5.
You watch as the stunning 3D red Nintendo logo appears on your Cathode Ray Tube television (the ones with the huge arse) and begins to spin faster and faster. Thanks to the grain of the television the logo is unpixelated, with a genuine depth to it that feels like you could crawl right into the curved screen and touch it. This might be because the images in CRT TVs are produced by a particle gun firing millions of electrons that collide with phosphorus atoms, releasing photons with specific wavelengths that correspond to the intended colour of each pixel, which collectively create the image we eventually see. It might also be because you're 5, and the idea of playing a video game with your older brother is one of the best things you can imagine.
In sync with the sound of a car speeding towards you, the Nintendo logo fades and a new logo appears with bright blocky letters of blue, green and red. A high-pitched sing-song voice shouts:
"Mario Kart!"
It's 2023. You've just paid 36 USD and 1120 Nintendo™ gold points to access Nintendo's Retro Catalogue™ on your Nintendo Switch™. You are 26. Your blue and red Nintendo JoyCons™ connect wirelessly to the 221ppi Liquid Crystal Display screen with a satisfying bzzzzzzzz.
You select a highlighted square with a picture of a Nintendo 64 controller at its centre. The controller in the image is plain grey, unlike the one you remember from your youth which was purple and see-through. You cycle through the retro games on the menu. Games from your childhood whizz by as the UI makes a gentle clacking sound like you're thumbing through a Rolodex of old game cartridges.
Surprisingly, you don't select a game you remember from when you were a child. You click on Pokémon Snap, a game your neighbours owned. In Pokémon Snap you're locked on a track, able to look left and right, up and down, and zoom in. You take photos of different Pokémon and show them to Professor Oak for approval. You are given additional items, like a PokéFlute to encourage Pokémon to dance, or PokéFruit to throw at them.
As the game loads, you find that the controls are hard to navigate. The original Nintendo 64 controllers were these odd three-pronged creations with a trigger underneath, whereas the JoyCons are minimalist and half the size. It feels like driving a German-made Volkswagen, where the indicators are on the left-hand side of the wheel instead of the right, so you keep accidentally turning on your wipers. You persist.
Shockingly, the game doesn't look flat or polygonal. The cartoony animation style of the Pokémon is fitting with the rest of the world. It's funny how some people think that time will make things worse, yet no matter when you see Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son it will affect you the same way it affected a 19th century Spanish royal. The artistic style of something allows icons of an era to appear timeless. Sure, certain styles can become dated or tacky, but they can never be considered "worse" than modern offerings. But still, in the brief moments you catch sight of the only 3D-rendered person in the whole game (you), they appear to have angular hooves for hands and a cube for a head. You persist.
The game explains very little. Finding good instructions requires venturing into the settings or page 2 of Google search results. After a solid 34 minutes of gaming, you turn the game off and sleep. Sadly, when you return, you are reminded that an autosave feature had not been invented in 2001, and you have lost all your progress. You persist.
The game is hard. The simple act of taking photos of Pokémon has become a frustrating myriad of puzzles, precise joysticking and unclear metrics.
"The pose is so-so. 250 points," says Professor Oak.
"The size is okay. 460 points," says Professor Oak.
"Wow! That's Pikachu on a Stump! 2000 points," says Professor Oak.
You persist.
You pass all 9 levels in about 6 non-consecutive hours. Professor Oak tells you you've unlocked challenge mode, and you can now go back and try to get a perfect score on every level. You turn the game off and never return to it.
It's 2007. Your brother works at EB Games (digital distribution does not yet exist so this is very cool). He has an Xbox 360 in his bedroom (away from the prying eyes of the living room). You are able to enjoy the wealth of new CD-ROMs containing much more mature games. Gone are the days of colourful characters karting and jumping. Now some games have bloody violence, some games have nudity, and some even have a narrative.
Your brother brings home a new game every week, the special edition too. He tells you not to touch them as they'll be worth lots of money in the future. You slide your finger across their hard plastic cases and gaze at the cover art beneath the soft, clear plastic wrappings. The container opens with a satisfying clack.
You've grown, and you think you know yourself. You think you know the kinds of games you enjoy: low skill level, story-driven, and genre-focused (namely sci-fi and fantasy).
You think these games let you build a character who is different to yourself, and you think you enjoy playing out different lives.
And yet, you always play as a woman, and you always call her Martha.
"I'd rather stare at a woman's arse for a whole game," you tell your friends when they ask why you play as a girl. This is not the real reason. You do not know the real reason yet.
You gently close the door to your brother's room with a silent but solid click. You press the eject button on the Xbox and as the disk tray slides out the little motor makes a soft vvvt noise.
You load in a CD for a game called Mass Effect. It's set in the distant future; humanity has accepted its destiny as interplanetary colonisers and you play as a space marine. One of the game's major selling points is that you can have sex with an alien. This alien looks suspiciously like a human but with blue skin and some small tendrils instead of hair. This alien comes from a species who are all female and all hot. This alien wears a skin-tight suit and has natural eyeliner.
The game is remarkably well-written. It challenges your beliefs and your ideas. It asks you questions about whether scientific data that was unethically collected should still be used, whether class and historical background affect personal responsibility, and whether all decisions can be demarcated as right or wrong. It makes you feel smart. You are 11. It does make you smarter.
It’s 1688. You are devoutly religious. You are 19.
You are finishing up your studies by trying to locate the source of a new disease that is most prevalent in Swiss mercenaries. The symptoms are complicated. Sometimes it's simply lethargy, other times it’s vomiting, depression, an inability to eat, and, in the worst cases, suicide.
You hear tales of a soldier who managed to recover. You seek him out to gather data on how the disease starts, and potentially locate the source of the demonic power. The mercenary is nothing like you had hypothesised. Like you, he is 19. Like you, he is a devout Catholic. Unlike you, he can explain the source of the disease.
After 6 years of warring for different countries and militaries, he was feeling an insatiable heartache for home. A longing that seemed to burn within him until it reached a point where he could not focus his mind away from the thoughts of his youth, his parents and his homeland.
You decide then to try and emulate the sensation of home. You remove the Swiss from their mottled battalions that have mercenaries from a diverse range of origins and create a united Swiss battalion. You surround the ill with fellow countrymen who can wax about the glory of Switzerland and the disease only seems to get worse.
You encourage Swiss cultural activity in the trenches. You encourage nightly performances of Swiss milking songs, tales of rolling green meadows and charcoal drawings of snow-capped mountains. You encourage communal artistry, with the mercenaries working together on a single picture to create a united image of home. The disease only seems to get worse.
You meticulously gather the names and villages of every mercenary at the camp and send riders off to collect letters written from home. The riders take 27 days but return with letters and gifts for almost every mercenary. You hear that the man who recovered has become sick again. You hear that the man who recovered has been found dead, holding a childhood toy in his hand.
You decide then that the cure is much simpler than expected. The mercenaries must be sent home. These trinkets of home only make the longing much worse. The only possible cure is the exact thing the mercenaries crave, and nothing less.
You write your dissertation on the disease. You are not the first person to notice and attempt to cure it, but you are the first person to name it:
Nostalgia.
It comes from Greek, and its literal translation is the same as its English loanword:
Homesickness.
It’s 2013/2016/2020/2022. You are 16/18/22/25.
You reload Skyrim onto your PS3/Laptop/PS4/Gaming PC and boot it up. You spend about an hour building a character with an interesting backstory. She's a Wood Elf/Nord/Khajiit/Imperial who's come to Skyrim to hunt big game/see her family in Helgen/join the companions/start a merchant empire, and she's named Martha/Martha/Martha/Martha.
You enjoy Skyrim. You like the open world and the many quests it offers you. You like the ability to create your own story in your head and play it out in the world of the game. You enjoy solving the relationship struggles of village people. You enjoy sneaking up on someone and shooting them with an arrow from a distance for triple damage. You enjoy when merchants endlessly repeat the phrase “Some might call this junk. Me? I call it treeassuuurrreeeeeeee”.
You enjoy the complicated political struggles of the state and the ongoing civil war ignited by the Stormcloaks against the Imperials. The Imperials are an obviously expansionist colonial monarchy funded by a wealthy foreign country, and the only faction with enough political savvy and military power to stave off invasions from the fascist Thalmor. The Stormcloaks are a nationalist rebellion that wants to see Skyrim become an independent state run by the Nordic king, a man with overt racist tendencies. You side with the Stormcloaks/Imperials/Neither/anarcho-primitivist Forsworn as they most closely align with your personal values.
The game feels unique/repetitive/repetitive/repetitive. After building your character you play for 3 months/3 weeks/2 hours/40 minutes before trying something new.
You try modding: a process where amateur software developers create add-ons for already existing games. Sometimes, this is as simple as changing what things look like, and other times it's as complex as completely rewriting some of the original game’s systems. There are so many of these bashed-together mods that some people create additional mods that stop different mods from causing issues with each other. Other people have created entire applications that download, manage, and patch a whole suite of up to 250 mods into your game.
You try modding Skyrim in an attempt to recreate some of the original joy of your first play-through. You download a mod that enhances the civil war questline by adding new quests, a mod that upgrades the textures to be more in line with modern offerings and a mod that adds realistic physics for horse cocks. You find the process has a steep learning curve/is easier than last time/only requires a single click/is actively supported by the publishing company.
No matter how many different mods you add, Skyrim never feels as fresh and exciting as it did the first time you played it.
Despite this, you persist. Trying again and again and again to find that sense of joy. You wonder whether it was the memory of joy that keeps you coming back. Like doom scrolling, perhaps it’s the constant search, the rapid-fire bursts of dopamine, and the need to fill the time that makes you persist. Maybe it's not the home you’re craving, but the sickness?
Your fingers wrap tightly around the fragile form of a boy.
You are ageless. You have always existed. You do not know the sensation of nothingness, of silence, of death.
You stare into the eyes of your son.
You see in them a deep sense of fear. You suspect your son is looking for something in your own eyes; guilt, fear, rage. You know he sees nothing. In some ways, it might feel like looking into the future, at a vision of your older, more weathered self.
You raise the boy to your lips.
You think to yourself that foretellings often bring more harm than good. Mortals have permanent access to the past. They can perceive it, imperfectly, through their memories and their stories. What do they do with this gift? They dwell.
You are a god of time. You have seen all that was and all that will be. You perceive it all like a memory. You know that devouring your son cannot change the future, and rather, this devouring is the very act that will lead to your demise. But you can make no change to your actions. You are trapped to perform, live and relive these moments like a puppet. Worse yet, a puppet that can see the strings.
You place his torso on your teeth and, adding pressure, you feel his ribs begin to break.
There is no joy in your life. No emotion at all. That is what life is for Saturn. Where can there be joy where all is known and agency is none?
You bite down, never loosening your grip. Your teeth are not those of a wolf or bear, they are not designed to tear flesh. Like biting a nail, you use your teeth to grip and your hand to pull. His body tears like fabric, a rip starting at one side and making its way across. The final strings of sinew are the hardest, requiring the most effort to snap.
Finally, you are chewing. You have lived this moment many, many times before. You have become numb to what you are doing. Though others may look at you in disgust and horror, you feel only boredom.
You wonder if you could not perceive time at all, no future or past, would it feel much the same?
Perhaps that is the reason why humans dwell; so they don't end up like you.
You are 26. You download a game called The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild onto your Switch. It is not the kind of game you usually like. You don't get to create a character and call her Martha, but that is okay. You are called Martha. There are no philosophically challenging questions that make you smarter in this game, but that is okay. You are smart.
There are lots and lots of side quests. There is lots and lots of exploration. The world is big, and fun to roam around in without any greater purpose. You don't care about the story or the characters, you just love seeing a mountain in the distance and walking over to it. Searching every nook and cranny, solving the myriad of puzzles that offer little in the way of reward beyond the satisfaction of solving them. Every village has a musical theme that increases and decreases in volume depending on how far away you are from the village centre. Each theme has both a day and a night version. Sometimes, you will just sit and listen.
The game teaches you so much. It teaches you to think less, it teaches you to look closer and it teaches you to dwell in the moments you love. You spend months playing the game. You play it over and over until you know every location, every story beat and every action by heart. You play it till it bores you. You begin looking for something new. Something exciting and fresh. Something that felt like the first time you played Skyrim.
You re-download Skyrim. This time, you skip past the character creation, playing as the default man. You name him “Man”. You leap into the game and you ignore the civil war and the relationship struggles of the village people. You explore. You trudge through the forests and admire the old, dead trees. You pick flowers and herbs. You watch fish swim upstream. You enter every cave you find and climb every mountain you see.
Sometimes, you stop playing the game altogether. You let the controller lay motionless in your hand. You sit and stare at the screen. You stare at Man. The puppet blankly stares back. Unlike you, Man lives these moments over and over again without feeling anguish. Poor Man.
You think about downloading Zelda again.
Collages by Ceridwen Bush
Martha Latham hates art and thinks it should be defunded. She also thinks Myki inspectors should have guns. We really didn’t want her but we needed to hit our gender equity quotas. Find out which of those things are true @sad_goldfish.
This essay was generously donated by Martha.
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