CfP: Nostalgia for the Future Book
- Richy Srirachanikorn
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 13 hours ago
Due: November 3, 2025.
Link: Use the submission form here, but please read the CfP below before submitting.
EARTH TO VIDEO GAME SCHOLARS, WRITERS, DEVS, ARTISTS, and ENTHUSIASTS:
Hello! My name is Richy Srirachanikorn, a sociologist studying at Concordia University, Montréal. I am doing my PhD on how people are using "nostalgia for the future".
I am looking for your ideas, lived experiences, observations, expertise, research, or annotated narration of compiled works, which are translatable into a book chapter. I have spoken with Play Story Press and Psychgeist, and they are keen to receive a proposal of our combined chapters!
My goal is to gather thinking that challenges what, how, and where we find "nostalgia". Instead of a past-based, passive, and individualized emotion; how can nostalgia galvanize us to be generative, active, and collective? Nostalgia... for the future.
For information about submission instructions, timeline, and contact, scroll to the bottom.
Why a book on "Nostalgia for the Future"?
Most edited books on nostalgia tend to compile writers across disciplines, each depositing a chapter about how nostalgia is measured or thought about from their respective fields and methods. This is helpful, especially for PhD students like me, to get the lay of the land.
But we can do more: deeper into the making and studying of games, and further into what happens after people stay with, revisit, or retrieve their nostalgia. What is generated? New ways of looking at the old, new communities, new insights, new critiques?
"Games and Nostalgia for the Future" will showcase new ways of thinking about nostalgia, specifically with games, gaming encounters, and play objects, as the boundary object.
I am reminded by Boym's wisdom, that...
One is nostalgic not for the past the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been. It is this past perfect that one strives to realize in the future.
The Future of Nostalgia (2001:351)
How do video games relate to this?
In 2017, Club Penguin finally shut down. After a decade of entertaining millions of children players, this cherished cultural home faded into nostalgia. But less than a week later, numerous Club Penguin servers emerged from the dark. Ah -- I can now scratch my nostalgia itch!
Alas, these servers looked like the game I knew and loved, but it did not feel like it. Marc Lajeunesse calls this "nostalgic disjuncture"; ostensibly, I was back in the collective house, but I did not feel at home. Why was this the case?
Former players-turned-devs had different ideas about which period of Club Penguin should be restored. Some servers only preserved the game's assets from 2007-2009, citing its "golden years", back when the site was hosted on miniclip. Other servers preserved 2010s-2015; its most visited years, but made the choice to allow swearing in-game to reflect the age of the returning players. The profanity only led to more bitterness inside an already bittersweet game. And then, there were those servers that hosted 2005 all the way to 2017... and "continued the nostalgia". They created new parties, rooms, mascots, and ended up rewriting the cannon for what Club Penguin was and could have become.
These examples show how nostalgia is not a passive, past-based, and individual emotion.
What results from this is a nostalgia that does not sit still. It is not a passive or lonesome glance to the past; it demands active, collective, and future-making actions to find a place for -- to define -- to do something with this nostalgia... for the future.
Where else can we find this?
Potential topics for chapters...
Designers who draw on past play memories can shape play expectations in the present. But they can also break this expectation to generate something for the future;
Players of Braid, an homage to Mario Bros., are denied the happy ending of "saving the princess", when the final stage reveals that YOU were the villain all along (Sloan 2016).
Games like UFO 50 don't just hand younger players something that 'looks' like games from the 80s-90s... it also denies them the comforts of modern gaming -- stages are unpredictably difficult, mastery is the only way, mimicking the 'feel' of what it meant to play games that we now call "retro" (Cartlidge 2025).
Games that cloak past aesthetics into its design, yet older players who lived through these pasts now feel that this representation doesn't feel right;
Minecraft sports an inferior blocky look to its gaming counterparts (think Uncharted 3!) in 2011, prompting some younger players to feel a counterfactual nostalgia, or a yearning for the past based on a false assumption that pre-2000s looked like this... even if it did not.... (Juul 2014)
8-bit art, PS2 graphics, Silly Symphony cartoons... what do these retrotyped aesthetics (Pickering and Keightley 2014) do to nurture or inhibit our understanding of the past for the way it was?
The cultural debate of "retro games", specifically: what goes into determining the nostalgic worth of a console, a title, a franchise, a game character? Who profits in the dominant remembering? Who -- and what -- is forgotten in this process?
Remakes and remasters leaving nostalgic players to do something about it;
Satisfied remakes may leave players with something new; a part of FF7's town with posters that were too pixelated in the original to make out, has now become legible in its remake. Some remakes are so well-received, such as Resident Evil 4, that younger and older players forge new bonds and communities from this shared nostalgia.
Disappointing remakes may leave some players to take matter into their own hands. Players-turned-devs may launch their own remake of the remakes, channeling their unrealized nostalgia into a collaborative project that actualizes the "past for the way it could have been" (Srirachanikorn 2024).
Modding communities that resist the temporal demands associated with the game industry's relationship with 'progress';
Games are the newest form of storytelling but the quickest to become obsolete (Makai 2018); how often do you see a 'new' game be valued and tied to its console, graphics, 'generation' of technology, instead of the game's content and story itself?
E.g., Users on Minecraft forums and popular YouTube channels 'regress' to Alpha/Beta versions to resist the latest 'advancements' in modern Minecraft by Mojang/Microsoft. Jacobsen (2022): consumers selectively pursue nostalgic things not to return to the past, but to achieve a sense of control in the present.
Emulation culture as a creative and collective method of revision and critiques;
Lost and Found, or games generating things from grief;
Developers who makes games to revisit an event tied to personal loss, offering something to be found for themselves and their players (Yan 2025).
Games and consoles that allow for creative ways to re-engage and find things from 'the past'.
Players who uses games to recreate the past not for "the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been" (Boym) -- The Sims, SecondLife, VR Chat, roleplaying online games
Players who end up finding something after losing a part of their game community or the game itself.
Apps that help us 'play' with the past to find new things
E.g., iOS app Casette allows users to give access to their old videos. The app will then play back the least watched media stored on their phones or the Cloud, blanketed in a home-video style; reviewers expressed a shock in how impactful this was to them -- to refind and reconsider the value of their memories
Theories! Hauntology, ghosts, simulacra, historicity, utopia, vaporware, retrotopia... and what it can give us (critiques, methods, problematics) for the future of nostalgia (as an idea, cultural emotion, marketing strategy etc.) in relation to video games
Insights into the pain of procuring nostalgic game experiences (the algos in nostalgia!)
The technical complexities of MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator), the time-consuming search for obscure retro title/consoles, the costly endeavour to procure or make a game assemblage that is 'faithful' to the 'original' set up -- what does this effort tell us about nostalgia?
What digital/analogue games can offer us in a time of digital storage and capture, AI's reimagination of the past, and the unprecedented 'unprecedentedness' of the world;
E.g., board game cafés opening up and the age of clienteles reflect their desires to go back to this life
E.g., adults who meet to play "retro" games, like the Tamagotchi meets in Toronto and Montreal (2024)
By the way, *games can mean more than titles and consoles. This can include board games, miniatures, TTRPGs, LARPs, DIY-console or modding culture, indie games, MAME or emulator culture, game aesthetics, "playing" with technologies and objects of the past, or even non-digital games like Tag!
This is a working list. You are invited to go around, above, into, or beyond this. Please feel free to write if you are unsure -- my email is at the bottom of the post.
Submission Instructions and Dates
Please fill in this form before November 3, 2025.
(In case hyperlink fails, paste this onto your search bar: https://forms.gle/DFFUVEE2WAjuAwBt6)
What to submit:
Your proposed chapter title
Short abstract of the chapter (750 words max.)
Keywords for the chapter (5 max.)
Supplemental resources (citations, link, links to your work, media)
Your information and contact
What to expect:
November 3, 2025- CfPs for chapters close.
Mid November - Editor communicates decision via email.
Late November - Confirmed chapters are compiled as a pitch to Play Story Press.
January 2026 - Writing begins.
(Accepted proposals will turn into chapters ranging from 3000-7000 words)
Early Spring to Summer - Round of revisions.
Summer 2026 - Final round of revisions, notes, and proofs.
September 2026 - Expected publication date.
Who to contact:
As the sole editor, I am currently juggling research, teaching, and other nostalgia projects; please be patient if you do not immediately hear back from me!
Questions? srirachanikorn [at] gmail [dot] com
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