Some of my business cards carry the title, ‘Time Lord’. While I don’t own a tardis and only possess one heart, I do travel through space and time, to help people to solve problems. Cultural problems, that they need to resolve in order to succeed in their vocation. And then they pay me, which is important when you’re not actually from Galifrey.

I’m able to be a Time Lord because I’m a historian. However, my vocation is made both more meaningful and more possible by the dramatic shift in the very fabric of cultural history over the past couple of decades. Part of this transformation in the place-time continuum is characterised by the nostalgia cascade.

To understand the nostalgia cascade, we first need to look back at what nostalgia used to be, when time was simpler. Nostalgia used to concern events and places associated with the personal past of the sufferer. It was treated as an illness in military hospitals, where the definition was directly related to homesickness. So nostalgia concerns the past, and it concerns the sense of home.

However, the world we live in today has altered our notions of place and time. Nostalgia is not simply an individually felt longing for an earlier point in the timeline. It exists in universal, archetypical, virtual spaces, on a timeline that has been flattened into an all-encompassing present.

An example of the nostalgia cascade can be seen in Sega’s 2000 RPG, Skies of Arcadia, which I have been studying closely for my master’s thesis. Here’s an extract:

Skies of Arcadia was designed to feel nostalgic. Gamasutra's Kurt Kalata pointed out in his review that the game was released in the same year as Final Fantasy IX, which was also designed to play on the nostalgia of fans. In his view, while the latter attempted to use the heritage of the game franchise to evoke nostalgia, but failed to create a meaningful game world, Skies of Arcadia works because it doesn't rely on fans' memories of previous games. Rather, the world itself is nostalgic, layered with historical signs.

The word ‘nostalgic’ came up frequently at the end of my interview with Shuntaro Tanaka and Toshiyuki Mukaiyama, as together we looked at concept drawings from the early design stages of the game. They were talking about their own sense of nostalgia for the fun they had developing the game. The nostalgic theme of the game design itself was reflected back in the developers' memories of its production.

This fractalisation of nostalgia is not just an isolated incident, but an example of a much larger phenomenon that affects most RPGs. Layers upon layers of nostalgia collapse upon one another, created by memories of things that are themselves composed of historical memory.

The worlds of dungeons and dragons and the roleplaying games that followed it are almost always historical. By representing adventures in these archaic worlds using numeric systems, the implication may be that the old world was simple and mechanical in a way the new world is not. Role-playing games with contemporary settings are not as popular. This implication of a simpler, mechanical time before the complications of the modern world system is reflected in the use of steam- and clock-punk imagery in many games, including Skies of Arcadia in the form of cogged wheels and brass instruments. There is a transparency to the mechanical and magical systems represented in role-playing games. They can be seen, known and understood, because they are uncomplicated and archaic.

A few years after a game’s release it becomes the subject of nostalgia. This is then capitalised upon through porting and limited edition re-releases, as well as quotation in other games. All digital RPGs reference older RPGs, both digital and paper-based. They construct a lived memory not just of the history referenced, but of the references and simulations themselves. Meanwhile, novel features introduced to game mechanics often stimulate a discussion about the good old days, when the programming was simpler and the pace was slower, reflecting nostalgia for the historical periods referenced in the setting of the games.

The Dreamcast itself is an object of nostalgia for gamers because its life was so short yet so full of promise for the future. Game developer Will Luton said in an email correspondence: <em>I think that the Dreamcast offered a short glimpse of an alternate path, a history that never was […] it was wholesome and naive in an age when the industry was beginning to open it’s eyes to sin and adult pleasures, to real violence and hatefulness. This was embodied by the Grand Theft Auto series and symbiosis between lad and club culture and the Playstation. That’s not to say it was childlike, just ephemeral and otherworldly whilst the industry was masculine and sneery.

Had it [have] been our history and prevailed it wouldn’t feel as romantic and tragically neglected. The Dreamcast’s short life is akin to Curt Kobain where it is a self-contained legend unable to speak for itself and answer questions of it’s own untimely death or how it could have been averted.</em>

The tragic memory of the Dreamcast is made all the more romantic because its games are perceived by Luton to be so naive and innocent. Nostalgia for the Dreamcast resembles the very nostalgia for high modernism evoked in its minimalist packaging and in the sixth civilisation of Skies of Arcadia. Layer upon layer of nostalgia piles upon games like Skies of Arcadia, some of it present by design, some of it an accident of history. In turn, lived historical memory itself reflects the design strategies of Arcadia and the Dreamcast itself.