The psychology of... Nostalgia

Do you remember Odysseus, the protagonist of Homer’s 2,800-year-old epic poem The Odyssey? Well, he’s more relevant than you might think to all these modern reboots of older franchises, such as XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition. As researcher Tim Wildschut and his colleagues note in Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions (published in the Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology), Odysseus’s ordeal is a good illustration of nostalgia as it was originally conceived. The word itself derives from the Greek words ‘nostos’, meaning ‘returning’, and ‘algos’, or ‘suffering’. Thus The Odyssey’s 10-year span can be seen as our hero experiencing a huge bout of nostalgia as he struggles to return to the way things were and get back to his wife in Ithaca.

Much later, in the 1600s, a few Swiss physicians and fans of neologism coined the term ‘nostalgia’ in reference to a certain kind of homesickness. They saw the condition as a mental illness caused by yearnings for familiar climes on the part of Swiss mercenaries soldiering for foreign kings. But while they did well to put their finger on nostalgia as a mental state, these proto-psychologists weren’t particularly good at figuring out the causes. For years they thought that nostalgia was caused by a variety of things, including little demons living in your head, changes in atmospheric pressure, or the incessant clamour of cow bells.

Fortunately, we’ve come a long way since then, and now appeals to nostalgia are everywhere, the subject being of particular interest to both psychologists and marketing professionals. Today, nostalgia is generally defined as a sentimental longing for the past, especially in reference to how things used to be better. And games have now been around for long enough that it’s not uncommon to encounter people thinking wistfully about the days of blowing the dust off cartridge contacts, fiddling about with himem.sys files, and covering their 28.8k modem with a pillow so that their parents couldn’t hear them ringing a friend to play some Doom deathmatch.

It’s a state of affairs that isn’t lost on developers and publishers. For every new gaming franchise that comes along, it seems there are two games that are remakes of properties that were popular when older gamers were kids. The trend isn’t confined to games, either, with a plethora of other nostalgia-inducing goods hitting the market of late, such as the PT Cruiser automobile, Throwback versions of Pepsi (featuring the original formula and packaging), a remake of Hawaii Five-O, and a movie based on, of all things, the Battleship board game.

This raises a question, though: why do we get so nostalgic about videogames and other media from our childhood? Were they really as good as we remember, or are we seeing them through rose-tinted glasses? Researchers in psychology and consumer behaviour have studied these questions, and what they’ve found suggests that gaming may have the potential to elicit more nostalgia than any other medium before it.

First, though, we need to consider the nature of the emotion in question. Nostalgia is often experienced as fond remembrance made bittersweet by regret about things we’ve lost to the passage of time, so the place many researchers have chosen to start is with one simple question: is nostalgia a good thing? According to Dr Filippo Cordaro of the University Of Cologne, who studies nostalgia and consumer decision-making, “Immersing ourselves in nostalgic experiences can have many benefits. Things like fun times with friends and family vacations we remember fondly are common examples. The positive and social nature of these experiences means they can fulfil a few important roles.”

The University Of Cologne's Dr Filippo Cordaro (left) and Columbia University's Dr Morris Holdbrook

Coping with stress and melancholy may be one of them. When Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides from the University Of Southampton had study participants think about meaningful memories and write down what kinds of experiences or states made them feel nostalgic, they found that sadness was the most frequently reported trigger. In fact, simply putting someone in a bad mood will mean they’re more sensitive to nostalgia-inducing stimuli, and also makes it easier to dredge up cherished memories about how things used to be. In this case, nostalgia seems to be acting as an antidote to sadness and feelings of loss, helping to elevate our mood. Meanwhile, other research has found that people who get nostalgic easily tend to have higher self-esteem, find it easy to trust others, and are less likely to suffer from depression.

So why does hearing the theme music of Super Mario Bros. or catching a whiff of something that smells like an old arcade help to bring us out of a funk and lift our spirits when we have no way to recapture the original experience? Well, it seems that nostalgia isn’t just about the place or the thing. “On a basic level, recalling these positive memories simply puts us in a more positive mood,” explains Cordaro. “On a more complex level, recalling these experiences makes us feel a stronger sense of social connectedness with others. We’ve done some research looking at what people usually describe as a ‘typical nostalgic experience’ and find that people typically think about positive experiences in which the self is the protagonist, but they are surrounded by and interacting with others.” 

Nostalgia and social connections go hand in hand, then. Thinking about the loss of social connections, as nostalgia often makes us do, primes us to think about repairing those connections, maintaining current ones, or  establishing replacements. Wildschut and his colleagues also found that when asked to describe nostalgic memories, most people recalled social contexts and good relationships with others. And research on the power of music has found that song lyrics emphasising social relationships, including friendship, love, and familial bonds, were the most likely to induce nostalgia in subjects.

We tend to star in our nostalgic memories, it seems, but we usually have a supporting cast. You may reminisce about playing the original StarCraft, but the chances are you’re most nostalgic thinking about throwing down with friends in multiplayer or at least bonding with them over the shared experience of discussing how you managed the campaign. For gamers, our most nostalgic memories probably revolve around sharing the hobby with others, making new friends, and enjoying a good couch co-op experience.