Psychology suggests that adults who replay their childhood games are not looking for entertainment, but to rediscover the child they were.

For adults who replay their childhood games, it’s neither the quality of the graphics nor the cumbersomeness of the controls that really bothers. Pixelated screens and 8-bit music have survived the years without losing their identity. Old consoles retain a strange ability to attract us despite their simplicity. We sometimes think it’s out of pure nostalgia. But something else is at play, more behind the scenes. A feeling difficult to name, which even precedes the moment when you press “Start†.

That evening, the living room is quiet. An old console came out of a forgotten box. The cartridge clicks into place with a familiar sharp click. The chiptune melody starts. The title screen lights up, unchanged for decades. Sitting on the sofa, the old controller in my hand, a brief feeling of fullness invades me. Then he disappears.

The magic that once enlivened the afternoons now disappears in a few minutes. The problem, according to psychological research, is neither imprecise textures nor clumsy handling. It resides in the person holding the controller.

A growing body of research into the psychology of retrogaming among adults who replay their childhood games suggests that those who return to their childhood games are not simply looking for entertainment. They try, often unconsciously, to find a version of themselves that no longer exists.

For adults who replay their childhood games, but not only that, memory reconstructs the past, it does not replay it

What pushes adults towards old cartridges is nostalgia, but not that of postcards. Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym, writing in the Hedgehog Review, defines nostalgia as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or never existed.”

She describes it as a feeling of loss and uprooting, but also as “an idyll with its own imagination”.

Boym distinguished two currents of nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia strives to rebuild the lost home. Reflexive nostalgia, for its part, dwells on the desire itself, delaying any return, often with irony or sadness. Retrogaming thrives on the tension between these two trends. The player knows that the past cannot be reconstructed.

However, the desire to try does not disappear. The brain amplifies the illusion. Psychologists describe a phenomenon called the “reminiscence effect.” A tendency to encode memories of adolescence and early adulthood with disproportionate intensity. Identity is consolidated during these years. The emotional charge of this period etches experiences into memory more deeply than the events of any other stage of life.

For someone who replays a game from their childhood, the memory of the software becomes mixed with that of the first person who played it. The brain erases the rough edges, the merciless difficulty peaks, the endless loading times. It amplifies victories. The game we remember is much better than the original game.

The adult mind cannot re-enter the zone

Memory isn’t the only thing that’s changed. The way adults play has also evolved. As children, players easily entered what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called a flow state, a state of total absorption where time relaxes and action seems automatic.

Csikszentmihalyi described this experience during a TED talk. “Flow is a mental state in which a person is totally absorbed in an activity,” he explained. “Time disappears, attention is total and everything seems natural. HAS”

The state of flow is based on a perfect balance between challenge and skill. Too weak a challenge and the mind disperses; too great a challenge and anxiety skyrockets. The adult brain disrupts this balance in both directions. Years of pattern recognition mean that bosses that once took days to defeat now announce their moves in seconds.

The challenge disappears. At the same time, the weight of adult responsibilities overwhelms us. Part of our attention remains fixed on the professional deadline, the unpaid bill, the dinner that remains to be prepared. A child could cut himself off from the world. An adult cannot silence the incessant murmur of responsibilities for long. Total immersion becomes a struggle, not an obvious fact.

The game has not lost its appeal. The player has aged, and the cognitive abilities that made video games so captivating during childhood are no longer relevant.

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Knowing & reliving are not the same act

In an article published in the Annual Review of Psychology, neuroscientist Endel Tulving draws a distinction between semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory stores facts. Episodic memory allows us to delve into the past and relive an experience with all its emotional charge.

Tulving describes episodic memory as a system that “makes possible mental travel in subjective time, from the present to the past, thus allowing one to relive, through autonomous consciousness, one’s own past experiences.” He notes that this system seems to be specific to humans, that it appears late in development and that it deteriorates early. It is also particularly fragile in the face of brain dysfunction.

This distinction is fundamental in the world of retrogaming. A player can remember the layout of a dungeon, the name of a weapon, the solution to a puzzle. This is semantic memory. But the deeper appeal is episodic.

The cartridge becomes a trigger, releasing not only the game, but also the Saturday morning that marked it, the friend sitting cross-legged on the carpet, sunlight filtering through a particular window. The goal is not really to play. It’s feeling, even briefly, what the person who first held the controller felt.

Tulving argued that episodic memory relies on three interdependent elements: subjective perception of time, autonoetic awareness, the conscious sensation of reliving an event, and self-awareness. When an adult restarts a game from their childhood, these three elements are activated simultaneously.

Memory is not a hard drive

Memory is a process of encoding, storage and retrieval, not a perfect record. “Remembered experiences can be said to consist of encoded sets of interacting information,” the article states, adding that “interaction appears to be a primary factor in forgetting.”

Forgetting, as the article states, has an adaptive function. It helps the brain to find its way in time. Old memories fade, new ones remain vivid, and this decay provides clues to how events unfolded. Without it, behaviors adapted ten years ago could persist long after they have become obsolete, or even dangerous.

The childhood game frozen in our memories is not the same object as that stored on the cartridge. Years of affection and selective forgetting have polished him to the point of making him inaccessible to reality.

Boym captured the essence of the problem when she wrote that nostalgia “is a mourning for the impossibility of a mythic return, for the loss of an enchanted world with well-defined borders and values.”

The game has never changed. It’s the player who has changed. No amount of repetition will be able to bridge this gap.

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