On Nostalgia

If you read my previous post, it will come as no surprise that I am highly susceptible to feeling nostalgic. I am by no stretch of the imagination alone in this; it is a universal human trait to feel longing for the past in the face of the present, to reach for the known in reaction to the unknown, replacing some of the complexities of life with elements from a simpler time. This is mostly going to be a diatribe about the ways that nostalgia has been an active participant in my adult life and has tailored my taste, but as this is also a part of my series about developing a video game, towards the end we will deftly manoeuvre the topic back towards something I teased in the last blog - what's the game going to be about.

On being hardcore

I have mused with a friend who has been climbing about as long as I have (both having started in our mid-teens) that we sometimes miss what climbing was 10 years ago. The bouldering gym that used to run in my town had true grit; every breathe you got a lung-full of chalk, the pads were dusty, the holds were small, the moves hard, and everyone was so damn nice. As a teenager, climbing was my own micro-rebellion, a sport for hardcore folk who loved shredding their hands and going against the grain¹. That side of the sport definitely still exists, but in the post-pandemic, post-Tokyo Olympics climbing goldrush the sport has lost a bit of its edge and become more mainstream.

Before I start sounding like "old man yells at cloud", let me say this: climbing becoming popular is awesome. In London I was spoiled for choice of climbing gym, most with incredible facilities and route-setting, and proper ventilation. And while I do have the impression that people are less likely these days to want to lean into the social aspect of the sport at big city gyms - going with friends, rather than going to make friends² - over the past few years I have made a lot of connections and amazing friends through climbing, and got to introduce lots of new people to the sport. There is a public consciousness around climbing that simply didn't exist when I started, and loads of money sloshing around for facilities and access to keep improving. It would be categorically selfish of me to sit around and say "kindly fuck off, this sport is not meant for you, you posers"³.

Sure, I still feel that natural pang of nostalgia for the "good old days". The paradoxical double-think that helps me come to terms with those feelings is this: some things never change, and yet all things must change. There is an immutable gnarly core at the heart of climbing that I don't think is going anyway, and as with any hobby or interest there will always a community within the community that seeks the same intensity that you do⁴. On the other hand, along with the sport itself, my relationship to climbing has changed. It is no longer my rebellious teenage obsession, where the mark of a good session was how many hard boulders I climbed, or how paper-thin the skin on my fingertips was. Now I long to climb outdoors and connect with friends and nature more than anything. I've learnt that moving fluidly, trying hard and failing can be just as fulfilling as sending⁵. Also that finger-bleeding attitude I once had just isn't feasible anymore, as I'm not getting any younger and will never be as robust and spongy as my 15 year-old self.

The gist I want to reach is that had I rolled my eyes and scoffed at the modern climbing scene, rather than throwing myself into all the new things the community had to offer, I wouldn't have the same connection to and enjoyment for the sport that I have, and I would have been a sadder, more jaded person for it.

Nostalgia is a powerful force that can draw us back into hobbies and interests from our past, but returning with fresh eyes and a lack of cynicism can allow us to find new joys we may have been in the wrong place or time to appreciate. I'll touch on two notable ways that I have experienced this pipeline of nostalgia to new appreciation over the past few years, both of which brand me firmly with the Scarlet N of Nerd. Deep breathe, everyone. I have an extensive Pokémon card collection, and I am obsessed with a 25 year-old medieval-themed point-and-click role-playing game⁶.

Gotta catch 'em all!

In the summer of 2019, my brother and I went to the Manga Exhibition at the British Museum. Towards the end they had a couple of Pokémon cards on display illustrating how the artwork had changed over the years, and fuelled by curiosity I picked up a pair of booster packs in the gift shop. As I ripped them open in the restaurant afterwards, I was taken back to being 8 years-old again, spending my hard-saved pocket money on a single pack from the card stand in town, and gleefully searching for a shiny bit of cardboard.

Those would not be the last packs I bought, but it wasn't just the nostalgic pull of opening what are, frankly, slot-machines for kids that kept me engaged with the hobby of collecting, but more so the emergent community and history that comes with an almost 30 year-old franchise. Seeing enthusiastic people talk about their passion is a unique pleasure, and there is a rich community of fanatics, for example on elitefourum.com, who love the hobby just for the art of collecting and learning about the history of the cards' production. I think that's neat.

If that isn't enough, the space is not without its spicy drama to keep things interesting - earlier this year evidence came to light that high-end collectors had been scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars with faked prototype cards (cards allegedly created during the development of the TCG in early 1996). The way that the forgeries were discovered is actually incredible and is its own topic worth delving into, and involves something called printer steganography.

Besides all that, for me the simple act of spending an afternoon organising my binders is very therapeutic, which was especially welcome during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. I am sure that humans have an innate primal urge to collect things, and Pokémon cards are how I lean into that impulse. There is something just inherently satisfying about having everything in a set, or working towards a collection goal over a number of years⁷. There is a part of my interest in the cards that is just plain old nostalgia - I've had a small stack of cards from the 2000 set Neo Revelation on my desk for a few weeks and looking through the delightful watercolour artwork zips me back to being a kid - but most of my contemporary appreciation comes from aspects that go beyond just plain sentimentality⁸. Or maybe I'm just a consumerist cuck!

Gotta scape them runes

A similar story happened with RuneScape - happenstance threw me down another rabbit hole into the past and I have yet been unable to pull myself out of it (and I'm having fun, leave me alone down here!). I had hardly given this game any thought for the best part of 20 years, when a 12 hour video appeared on my Youtube homepage, wherein a man slowly tortures himself by locking his RuneScape account to a small area of the game, and never interacts with other players for thousands of hours. It is pure cinema.

Like many I wasn't even aware that this game I used to play on miniclip.com even still existed. But something about this game had clearly wedged itself in my subconscious, and as it turned out I was about to come out of a four year relationship, so I leapt at a new (or old, I suppose) outlet for nostalgic escapism, and made a new account⁹.

Now, buckle in for a brief but important history lesson - there are two versions of RuneScape. The version of the game from my childhood continued to evolve and update over the years into a state that is almost unrecognisable, with HD graphics, overly complicated combat, and full of micro-transactions. This is now called RuneScape 3 (RS3). In 2013, so many players were disillusioned with what the game had become that they petitioned Jagex, the creators of RuneScape, to bring back servers running a version of the game that existed in 2007, and thus Old School RuneScape (OSRS) was born. OSRS is now 12 years old and has received constant updates to the point that it is a far cry from RuneScape in 2007, except it still has all the same mechanics and mostly looks the same. And people LOVE it. It is one of the most popular MMOs; at time of writing (8pm BST on a Sunday) there are 146,286 players logged in, an order of magnitude more than RS3.

So why do people (and I) love this ancient-looking game so much? A lot of people who play OSRS were drawn to it for exactly the same reason that I was; they felt nostalgic for this simpler time from their childhood. But nostalgia alone is not enough to keep you coming back, and plenty of folk are playing it for the first time in 2025. When I played in 2006 all I knew was click tree, get log, repeat, but the game has so much more depth in its lore, humour, and game mechanics than a 12 year-old could have appreciated¹⁰. High-level combat in OSRS is surprisingly complicated and engaging given that it only involves clicking, plus the developers pour a lot of love into updating the game every week. And just like climbing, and Pokémon, and probably all hobbies, there is a community, and talented creators making entertaining content about the game. Beyond all that, RuneScape is a sandbox game, and I think the Youtuber WildMudkip sums up quite eloquently why that appeals to people:

the beautiful thing about RuneScape is that there's no right or wrong answers: what you want out of the game doesn't have to be what someone else want to the get out of the game. RuneScape has always been about setting your own goals and doing what's enjoyable to you [...] you can always log in and make a bit of progress knowing that you're working towards a goal that you set for yourself. [...] I think a big reason why the game is so appealing psychologically to so many people is that you can't really fail your goals [...] [and] humans by nature don't like failure. I think that's why this game is so comforting.

I'm not going to keep on playing OSRS because of the nostalgia that brought me back to it - I would say about 1% of the content I have enjoyed in the game is stuff I remember from the '06 days - but because it brings me pleasure, and, to use Mudkip's word, comfort.

still no rs gf in 2025 :( source

On nostalgia and Welshness

We are getting so close to that pivot back to the game, I promise.

I am Welsh, but my relationship to Wales feels mildly complicated¹¹. There is a Welsh word, hiraeth; Google images it and you will see a bunch of Live, Laugh, Love -styled images, with definitions something like this:

a longing/homesickness/yearning for a home/place/person that no longer (or never) existed

It is this kind of spiritual, nebulous, vibe-y feeling, that is like nostalgia but with some extra bits attached. Welsh folk often use it directly in relation to Wales, and I think its probably a natural feeling for any non-independent nation to have, or just a feeling you might experience when you're a long way from home.

I think its a really beautiful concept, and I would say I have often felt hiraeth. For me its something akin to mourning. Whether we like it or not, we all mourn the lives we never got to lead, sometimes on a life-changing scale, sometimes on the minute day-to-day scale. When we go through a break-up, do we not mourn the loss of the non-existent, imagined futures we might have had with that partner? It can be a torturous feeling. Or when we wake from a dream in which we were living a life that felt so real and enduring, only to have its reality snatched away by the alarm clock. I would also say I experience some kind of hiraeth when reaching the end of an engaging film or book; for me Studio Ghibli films like A Whisper from the Heart and Princess Mononoke sometimes feel hard to rewatch because I know my heart will feel the pulling of hiraeth when they're over.

Then, there is the homesickness aspect. I grew up in the Welsh mountains, and have moved back for a few months while I take some time off work. Whenever I spoke about my upbringing here, I would always speak fondly of the Wales of my youth, enjoying the countryside and hills, and how lucky I was to get to grow up where I did. I am proud to be Welsh. Wales is not England and I will correct you. But it was kind of a fantastical image I painted for myself - I was hardly off frolicking in the woods and up the mountain after school every day. I have had the privilege to travel widely and engage with nature all over the world, and always spoke so highly of my own backyard, but never really engaged with the Welsh land with the same passion. This story I told was a kind of hiraeth coming out, a longing for a childhood I didn't quite lead. Whenever I came home from university, or visited from London, I would always revert to teenager mode, grateful for a place to turn-off, sleep-in and not leave the house. The funny thing is that staying here as an adult without any of the pressures of school or work, I have truly been living my best Welsh life, and regularly frolic in the hills like an Austrian nun.

This feeling - nostalgia, hiraeth, longing for something no longer there - is so potent to me. I want to try to tell a story about it, and so that is what the game will be. Its a story about someone who returns to the forest of their childhood, only to find that what they remembered is gone, and in its place is a sick wood whose magic is fading. And perhaps it can't be returned to the home it once was, but maybe something just as good can be born from the ashes. And the game is called hiraeth¹².

P.S.

One last thing about nostalgia that I couldn't really fit anywhere else but I think about often when reminiscing and catch myself focussing only on the positives - I like to remind myself of this quote from Bojack Horseman:

You know it's funny... when you look at someone through rose-coloured glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.