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 ways. The movies Parzival watches, music he listens to, and ideas and concepts he discusses daily all center around the brief time an iconoclastic programmer who revolutionized the world named James Halliday was coming of age — basically the 1980’s. But I’m not here to type out another polemic to pile on the massive digital library of disrespect that has been accumulated to denigrate Ready Player One for being so retrograde and dysfunctional. I’m here to talk about how such attitudes bore poisonous fruit in my personal life, and indulge in a little “masturbatory nostalgia” myself.
Parzival lives in deep poverty in a “25th Century Trailer Park,” along with thousands of his destitute neighbors. “The Stacks,” as Cline rather uncreatively dubs them, are basically an innumerable collection of mobile homes which have been piled atop each other in a vertical, almost skyscraper-like configuration. Suffering from addiction and desperation, his mother views him as a nuisance and spends most of her time chasing transitory sexual and emotional fulfillment through a never-ending parade of abusive boyfriends who have little interest in Parzival other than to insult him or take advantage of him.
However, Parzival has a unique way of coping with this abuse. He escapes into a world of retro video games. Stashed in small cubbyholes all throughout The Stacks (ostensibly to keep the boyfriend brigade from seizing them and pawning them), he has a collection of low-end laptops that are so technologically advanced they contain emulated copies of almost every video game from the past twenty years. When I read that, I was stricken. Is that what I’m trying to do? Relive a period of my life that was halfway pleasant only due to the children’s toys that tricked me into being unaware of my hopeless circumstances for just a few moments until my simulated avatar perished in a world created to destroy him?
Anyone my age with technical expertise probably has experience with some of these emulators — names such as MAME, Nesticle, SNES9X being a few of the earlier ones. They can prove an interesting diversion or flight of fancy for those who remember fiddling with the original systems as a kid — but for some of us, these games border on an obsession because the playing of them can bring back powerful sensations and emotions almost as strongly as a familiar scent or a favorite melody. I have mostly moved past such obsessions today, but there was a time there when my prospects were dim and my financial resources almost non-existent that I chose to spend large portions of my days reliving the few positive times of my childhood by playing the video games I enjoyed back then in almost obsessively perfect detail.
The pursuit of an “authentic” emulated experience can be — rather extreme — and it is one that I have participated in. A major factor in my decision to purchase a monitor higher than the most basic 1080p resolution was so that my CRT filters, which simulate the appereance of scanlines crossing a television, could be more authentic. I have collected giant packs of these filters which conjure impressions of ancient screens from wooden RCA floor model televisions to the Sony Trinitron, one of the last popular CRT displays ever produced. I almost enjoy the unique combination of talent, luck, and technical expertise required to replicate these old memories as closely as possible.
What was I seeking when I spent all day, every day, playing the dozen or so old games I found in Piggly Wigglies and Pizza Huts before I reached adolescence? “Young men look to the future, old men look to the past.” And why are many of my significant memories centered around such escapist tendencies in the first place, instead of meaningful interactions such as scholarships won, lovers bedded, or careers established? I don’t know the answers, but I suspect it’s a combination of chronic illness and poverty that have dogged me for most of my life on this Earth and stunted my growth to such a degree that I entered a wicked cycle of masturbatory self-reinforcement.
Read the rest of the blog (and the tea leaves) and maybe you can tell me something about myself that I don’t already know.