SOCIOLOGIST | Nostalgia, Video Games, Social Pain
RICHY SRIRACHANIKORN
Nostalgia is never a singular, but a collective process.
Our recollections of the past (to inform where we are in the present) come from history books, the promises of political campaigns, and those who uphold the “good old days” for the future they wished they achieved.
But do these dominant nostalgic narratives leave space for smaller, grass-roots, and personal accounts of nostalgia? Who is excluded in the makings of these narratives? What do their nostalgia look like?
Below is a selection of notable works, or my notes on nostalgia. For a full list, please consult this page.
2024
Opening the NOSTAGAIN Network's Time in a Bottle Symposium at the 4TH SPACE, Concordia University, Richy discusses how the metaphor of the "time capsule" helps us think critically about the tensions between cultural and personal nostalgias.
Building on his talk at the Canadian Game Studies Association Conference in 2023, Richy unfurls his concept of Refractive Nostalgia with more examples. Richy also discusses the concept's link to scholarship on the social, and generative, potentials of nostalgia.
Richy's talk at the Canadian Game Studies Association Conference focuses on the culturally produced nostalgia of socially withdrawing people (also known as Hikikomori) in television, comics, and videogames. Richy contrasts this with a video game that could reveal the nuanced experience of living in social withdrawal. Inspired by Saito Tamaki's (1998) "structural ignorance" of Hikikomori as a social issue, Richy terms this playfully serious intervention, "structural empathy" (Srirachanikorn 2024).
Richy argues nostalgia embodies the sixth sense for 3 reasons: (i) It troubles the 5 we are used to, since we can be nostalgic for that which is amorphous, affectual, or ineffable. (ii) The body is nostalgic too; muscle memory -- or sensual sense -- like a life-time smoker on their deathbed 'holding' a ghost cigarette. (iii) Culturally produced nostalgia involves bio-social constructions -- the social sense -- that makes us nostalgic for things we never really experienced, that is to say, nostalgia exists beyond the 5 senses normally attributed to the human subject.
2023
Richy leading the final workshop of the LOST/AGAIN Symposium (2023) where participants stripped pieces of paper -- earlier with legible, coherent sentences of what they were nostalgic for -- to reveal the fragmented nature of nostalgia itself; it takes all of us to preserve, curate, and interpret what we long for!
Psychological research has shown that video games are effective conveyers of old and new nostalgia. Sociologically, can we utilize video games to make people feel nostalgic for the future?
Richy cites 3 games that successfully bring the idea of loss (in the past, or a projected future) to generate meaning, sociality, and potential collective action for its players in the present. Club Penguin, Minecraft, and Fallout 4 carry what Richy has termed as Refractive Nostalgia (Srirachanikorn 2024).
At Juan Miceli's INVERSE INTERFACE, Richy engages with other panelists on how we can 'make' the past with materials that are culturally made redundant. VHS, Juan's material in focus, features in this conversation on nostalgia, research creation, and the community around obsolete media.