Dig Dug and the Lie of Nostalgia

Just back from a week's vacation in New Hampshire, where I connected with beloved family members I see too rarely.

One day all but one of the male family members took a road trip to Funspot in Laconia, which is indeed a fun spot and which houses the American Classic Arcade Museum, which sounds awfully classy. Thankfully, it's not. Said "museum" is actually an old-school arcade. There are some informational plaques about various games (and I actually longed for more of this, as I found the ones that were there very interesting), but it's mostly a collection of classic arcade games that you can play for a quarter. Or actually less, since I got 100 tokens for 20 bucks.  Bargain!

We stayed there for 2 hours, and at first, I was in heaven, walking around and seeing all the games I used to play with my pal Eric at Aladdin's Castle in the Beechmont Mall back in the 80's (and yes, okay, the late 70's). I walked around and marveled at the fact that they had not just the expected Pac Man, Space Invaders, and Donkey Kong, but also Red Baron (the only game I was ever any good at!), Xevious, Gorf (the Gorf being is tired!), both Tron games, Rampage...well, you get the idea. 

And then I touched base with the boy, with whom I had split my 100 tokens, and he said to me, "So, did these games always suck this bad?"

By this point, I was getting screen fatigue and had not managed to get through many of my tokens.  "Yeah," I reluctantly admitted, "they did."

Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed the 2 hours we spent there.  And it was fun for me to see the artifacts of my childhood and adolescence still standing. My childhood home was destroyed years ago, and my high school has been remodeled beyond recognition, so it was comforting to see that not all physical evidence of the time in which I grew up has vanished.

But yeah, the games suck. And they always sucked.  Because these games were created with the aim of sucking as many quarters out of you as possible in as short a time as possible.  So they are really hard and not particularly satisyfing.  The boy and I had some success at Rampage, but after about 3 levels, it became clear that it was going to be pretty much the same thing over and over again.  The scenery changed in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the gameplay was dull. The games that have aged the best are actually the pinball games, where the designers simply can't manage your gameplay and which therefore still feel consistently surprising in a way the video games that killed them don't. (Gauntlet II was also decent--dumb but actually fairly decent because there are so many ways to deal with what you encounter. I like Smash TV for the same reason.)

It was an unusual and, I think, lucky experience to have the nostalgic glow of delight followed so quickly by the disappointment of actuallly getting to experience the object of nostalgia again.

I'm already at an age where I feel nostalgia for the past at least as often as excitement for the future, and I think this visit was a good reminder for me that nostalgia is always a lie.  Some things from the past were aweseome, and some things from the past totally sucked. Nostalgia is the lie that enhances the awesome and glosses over the suck.  So whenever anybody says that anything--games, music, sports, music, education, politics, whatever--used to be better, remember that they're lying to you.  And perhaps have a little compassion for them because they are lying to themselves.