What was Old is New Again: Nostalgia in Gaming

Nostalgia is a loaded word. I hesitated even using it in the article. When you say “nostalgia”, you’re picking a fight. “You don’t like this because it was good,” the argument goes. “You like it because you were six or ten or thirteen or sixteen when you first played it. You’re just blinded by your nostalgia, a sense of things being better when you were young.” So it was a tough decision to include it here. Understand this: When I say “nostalgia”, I’m not dismissing the games of bygone years as somehow only worthwhile in retrospect, or that people can’t like these things for their own sake. I’m talking about a movement – the Old School Movement – that seems to be grounded in a return to a world that was better, before now, a world where new things have “messed up” the sanctity of old ideas. And yes, of course I’m talking about edition wars.

Let’s face facts. RPGs are an increasingly marginalized industry. White Wolf and Wizards of the Coast were once considered the big dogs in that particular pound. Now, Wizards struggles to piece together a new edition, even as 4th had been around less than 5 years. White Wolf has been floundering for longer, and while their recent release schedule and Gen-Con announcements were encouraging (new books! more books! yay!), there is a tinge of marginalization there too. White Wolf – perhaps now more rightly referred to as Onyx Path – has decided that PDF, POD, and Kickstarter are the future of gaming. Their opinion on how to reach new players? Well, they’re working on that. They aren’t sure yet. Almost as a kind of afterthought.

What both Wizards and Onyx/WW are doing here is turning back the clock. D&D Next, the latest installment in Dungeons and Dragons, seeks to capture the simplicity of earlier days while winning over lapsed fans from the great 3rd edition/4th edition fallout. The playtest as of right now looks and plays like an odd duck, with bits of modern design and terminology dashed into a bowl of old ideas. The folks over at White Wolf have been resurrecting their old licenses over the last year, now writing new material for games that were retired almost a decade ago. So what gives? What’s going on here?

Anyone who has visited a forum dedicated to RPGs, probably ever, knows one of the core elements in any such community is the constant bickering over edition preferences. The great edition wars. “I like magic to work this way but not that way”, “this new edition totally ruined this idiosyncratic portion of the old edition”, and so forth. And I can’t blame them. RPGs are strange creatures. They aren’t videogames. You aren’t obligated to buy new ones if you want to stay on the cutting edge because, unlike videogames, there’s no measurable way to determine quality from one thing to the next. I can look at a videogame and say, “this came is prettier than this game. All things being equal, I’ll take the prettier game.” But the enjoyment of an RPG is pretty much only impacted by the play experience – the experience unique to each table, fueled by the books, props, and systems of each game. If I like a game I purchased in 1981, it will continue to be fun until I grow tired of it. And since all the content the game uses is user generated, and potentially infinite, it might take me a long, long time to get tired of it.

Which leads me to my next point. I am not an edition warrior, not really. I get sad when people won’t give new games a fair shake, but I don’t like to condemn old games either. Mostly, I feel like we have enough D&D. I feel like we have all the material we’ll ever need to run a Vampire game (Masquerade or Requiem). I don’t pine for a resurrection of that material because I like the material I have. “Give us more Masquerade!”, yell the fans. “Give us back 3rd edition/2nd edition/etc!” I have a pile of Masquerade books that [i]I don’t even use[/i]. I have more mechanical widgets that I would ever need and more setting elements than most comic book series will ever see. So why do publishers keep making this stuff? More succinctly, why do people keep asking for more?

Because people have found the game they want, they don’t ever want to leave that world they fell in love with, and because they are always willing to spend more money to feel like that world is still alive.

Here’s my proposal. It’s risky, so it’s bound to be unpopular. Instead of releasing and re-releasing the same basic ideas over and over again, do something truly new. Not just sorta new, something truly new. I can hear some of you out there. You say, “Indie game makers are doing this! Look to them!” And you’re right. I want to see new ideas presented by these big companies, and more importantly, I want to support them. They probably won’t have the runaway success of the old games, but that’s okay. They don’t have to stop publishing money-makers too. I have to ask myself: When D&D was first released, it was kind of a whacky idea. Would any gaming company around today take a risk on it if it wasn’t already established? Would anyone release Vampire today, or Mage, if it wasn’t already established?

As a final note: This lingering issue of new blood, new players. Everyone in the industry acknowledges that things are changing. As we move more towards PoD and PDF publishing models, we’re leaving behind the browser, the kid who finds the book in a bookstore, falls in love with the art, and becomes an RPG advocate for life. That kid isn’t an afterthought, he’s the key to the survival of the hobby. As we cater more and more to the demands of aging gamers – myself included – we are leaving behind an entire generation of potential gamers who have never pitched a stake in an edition war. And we have to accept that the game that those kids want may not even be published yet, never even thought of before.

~ by aatramor on August 17, 2012.