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.
2025
Love & Loss opens with an ominous warning: "Roses are Dead, Violence is Due...". In his opening talk, Richy poses the question: If nostalgia is essentially loving what is lost, then what exactly are we chasing? Is nostalgia just the love for an object that is no longer -- or doesn't have to be -- there?
If so, who profits and suffers from this? The confusion can lead to frustration in online communities, media and fan circles, and politics. Richy provides 5 kinds of nostalgias to get us thinking about this predicament.
Premature Encapsulation is a series of paper-made signs and letters that contain serious messages of loss: you have 6 months left to live, you're fired, I'm sorry we lost touch, etc.
But what happens when these messages are conveyed with mediums we loved in childhood? The infamous Banned message from Club Penguin, an arts and craft pre-school piece, the legal pad some of us used in college to take notes before iPads?
Do we still love and miss these conveyers of childhood when they cover adulthood losses?
The NOSTAGAIN Network team reflects on three years of symposium and workshop planning. Centered around these academic-art spaces is the goal to further what they call the meaningful method.
All attendees -- people and objects -- carry memory that is autobiographical and cultural. In our symposia, how did we design to parse and connect these bonds together? We reflect on 3 years of technical, creative, logistics, conceptual, and promotional challenges.
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.
Bot-told Up Time is a material art piece involving small plastic petri dishes and glass bottles with air-tight tips. Set at the Time in a Bottle Symposium, Richy's piece explores the idea of containing time with objects that may be nostalgic for its author, but unremarkable for the audience.
The translation work involves a non-verbal dialogue between three interpreters: the viewer, the object, and the container. Like scientists holding specimen in a jar or petri dish, our results are influenced by the methods, materials, and ideas we use in the examination process. Richy interviews Richy here.
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
All They Wanted Was Just the Tip is a nostalgic poem based on the "Iceberg" room in the shut-down online game Club Penguin (2005-2017).
Across its tenure, the "Iceberg" room saw very few changes. Yet, players tried their best to animate the static room - they equipped their hard hats, pressed 'D' to Dance, and tried to 'Tip the Iceberg'.
Richy's poem assumes the Iceberg's perspective on this decade-long relationship with its players; the good, the sad, and the nostalgic.
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.