Masturbatory Nostalgia
Ernest Cline’s near-pulp pop culture novel Ready Player One, published in 2011 (three months before Skyrim, in fact), primarily consists of a state of mind I like to think of as “masturbatory nostalgia.” And I write that sentence having enjoyed the novel very much. The reason for this? There’s a period in the novel during which his protagonist, “Parzival” (a pseudonym), spends most of his name escaping into a reality from the distant past, but which — due to the power of technology — has been almost perfectly preserved in a virtual realm. The book demonstrates this hyperfocus in many