Evolution Knows You Aren’t Going to Play the New Assassin’s Creed on Launch Day

In defense of nostalgia: It’s okay, really…you don’t need to do everything right now.

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I recently started playing an Assassin’s Creed game, my first ever. Odyssey, the one with Sokrates and Spartans and the magical eagle. This game was released in 2018. I’m having a great time with it. So, have I missed out on 5 years of happiness?

When I told a friend about my newfound happiness, he admitted to enjoying that game when it was released, but quickly dismissed his appreciation as “nostalgia,” as in, the game isn’t actually good, but I loved it in the past. His apology confused me. Ignore for a moment that our referent is only five years old; it was the general implication that confused me, that nostalgia—though real and powerful—isn’t a valid metric of quality. Logically, I agree with my friend’s assumption that nostalgia is untrustworthy. But why, then, did my friend’s casual dismissal confuse me?

Though I play many not-new games, for some unknown reason during this particular Assassin’s Creed Odessey play session I was struck by just how happy I felt. Then, in light of my friend’s dismissal, confusion set it. We played the same game. The only difference is how long ago we played it.

According to Alan R. Hirsch in his report, “Nostalgia: A Neuropsychiatric Understanding,” nostalgia is:

“a longing for a sanitized impression of the past [...] not a true recreation of the past, but rather a combination of many different memories, all integrated together, and in the process all negative emotions filtered out.”

The human brain has an incredible ability to focus on the future. The past’s peaks are sharpened while the valleys are filled in and forgotten. 

According to research (warning: paywall) nostalgia does a lot of great things for humans by highlighting positive moments of our youth. It’s bittersweet sure, as we can be tricked into thinking things will never be as good as they once were, but the net effect is that life feels more meaningful and death less frightening. Nostalgia smooths over the rough parts of childhood, so we aren’t emotionally weighed down by how awkward we were as kids or how mean we were to other kids or how many bad video games we played (and how few good games we played).

So, when I play an old, good game for the first time—like Assassin’s Creed Odessey—the happiness that game brings doesn’t highlight an unfulfilled life; rather, it simply fulfills a life. That’s awesome! Nostalgia is great.

But I remain confused, nonetheless.

Also confused by this floating donkey

Nostalgia is complex. My mere human brain presents only so much understandable logic to the surface, “user interface” level of my consciousness. The brain is a computer, like that. I can double-click to open Microsoft Word, but I don’t need to know about the 1s and 0s that allow for the double-click to open a program. Same with nostalgia. I can think deep about its output, but hell if I understand the mechanisms that drive it.

This all forces my acceptance of nostalgia’s power. But it doesn’t keep me from trying desperately—perhaps futily—to figure out the barriers of its power. For one, does nostalgia’s power decrease as time increases between me and the nostalgic referent (and as the number of possible replacements for that referent inevitably increases)?

Probably, right? While I don’t want future me to decide, as I sit surrounded by all types of future gaming innovations and incredible mechanics-expanding peripherals, that Super Metroid sucks, I have to accept that, logically, Super Metroid can’t forever exemplify pinnacle gaming, as the concept of pinnacle gaming should, I hope, be forever changing. I want to trust that a quarter-of-a-century old game isn’t the peak of my gaming experience, but I also want that experience—and all of the emotional energy I’ve invested in it over the years—to be true.

Peek gaming.

The truth is, I cannot use logic to loosen the grip of nostalgia. I simply have to accept that the peaks will be sharpened, and the valleys will be filled in. And I have to trust that process is a net positive. And if nostalgia colors our perception of the world, then how can we so easily dismiss it as a metric of quality, like my friend did? Afterall, there’s a reason we remember some games from our childhood so fondly. Aren’t those games the peaks that time has sharpened?

Here’s my proposal: instead of using nostalgia as a tool for dismissal, trust it as an indicator of quality. Rather than, “I probably only think that game is good because of nostalgia,” say, “nostalgia tells me that is probably a good game.” Then, when playing that old game again, though your modern-critical lens, look for the good, look for those peaks that were sharpened, not for the valleys that time has filled in. Trust that your childhood feelings are valid.

This post contains bits from my video Are Old (Retro) Games Better than Modern Games? | Hey Future Caleb