Dharshini Karthikeyan - Week 13 - Flappy Bird Nostalgia
Technology is improving at a faster pace than ever before. It’s amazing to think that just a decade ago, the Iphone 6 was all the rage, and Instagram was only four years old at the time. With budding technology came extremely fun smartphone games. Games like Temple Run, Talking Tom, Flappy Bird, and Subway Surfers are still what I consider the epitome of casual gaming. Were these games really better than the casual Iphone games available today, or is it nostalgia that makes these games seem better than they were?
Research has found that “nostalgia can increase our sense of well-being and boost inspiration.” Nostalgia often makes things better than they seem. To test this, I downloaded some old Iphone games and gave them a go. The games were not as good as I remembered, which was interesting to me, but it also reaffirmed that nostalgia plays a big part in making memories seem better than they actually were.
image: https://yourstory.com/2023/04/flappy-bird-rise-fall-viral-mobile-gaming-phenomenon
While nostalgia plays a part in making memories seem better than they were, the games were in fact, according to technological comparisons, somewhat better than casual phone games today. For example, when people are looking for casual games to play in their few minutes of free time, they often look for simple, low risk, high reward games that give them an instant dopamine hit. Numerous studies suggest that older games tap into psychological mechanisms to sustain high dopamine levels, while newer games don’t utilize psychological devices to keep users coming back. That’s why a lot of gaming apps today have a spike in users during the game’s release, but because users don’t keep coming back, the app dies out after some time.
Regardless of whether the reason for old gaming apps being superior is because of nostalgia or psychology and marketing, playing these games when they were new and exciting is still one of my favorite memories.
Hi Dharshini! I agree with you, I think nostalgia is a powerful emotion that does influence our memories of the past, and I think it'll just get more potent as time goes on. This is pretty relatable, but this isn't the only thing that makes our memory unreliable. According to scientists, our brains create false memories without realizing it, and this can bee affected by emotional involvement, expectations, and environmental change. And in addition to inventing scenarios, we can also misremember things, which happens often; our brain is wired to develop and make use of social categories and schemas, which, combined with a variety of other cognitive biases, can influence the accuracy of our judgments. Each time we remember something, we reconstruct the event by reassembling it from traces throughout the brain, which leaves ample room for distortion of memories.
ReplyDeleteHey Dharshini! I remember the era of the infamous iPhone 6, and the ones that came before as well. The instagram and youtube logos, along with the iconic games you mentioned: "Temple Run, Talking Tom, Flappy Bird, and Subway Surfers" was a truly better time. When these games were popular, there was a dramatized fear that spread through my school that the developers of the game Talking Angela could see what we were doing through Angela's eyes. A couple weeks ago, I revisited Angela, and found the fear of being seen by her disturbing eyes was the only interesting thing about the game, even though I remembered it to be much more entertaining. So, I can definitely see, and agree how nostalgia plays a part in glorifying past memories.
ReplyDeleteHi Dharshini,
ReplyDeleteYour blog brought back memories of me playing the games you mentioned like Temple Run and Talking Tom and induced me with nostalgia. Your blog is an intriguing exploration of the intersection between technology, nostalgia, and gaming. It really got me thinking about how rapidly technology has evolved in just a short span of time. It's dismal to reflect on how the iPhone 6 and early smartphone games like Temple Run and Flappy Bird were once at the forefront of innovation, yet now they are belittled in comparison to the advancements we have today. Your experiment of revisiting old iPhone games to test the influence of nostalgia was particularly entertaining. It's fascinating how our memories of the past can make it seem better than it actually was. Yet, your insight that some of these older games might indeed have had certain qualities that made them more engaging from a technological standpoint adds an interesting layer to the discussion. An interesting aspect of your blog is that it highlights how crucial it is for developers to understand the psychological aspects of gaming and user behavior to create long-lasting, engaging experiences.
Hi Darshini,
ReplyDeleteI believe my comment was deleted from this post, so I'm just gonna paste it back here now. I found it really interesting that older games were better suited to give users dopamine hits over the newer ones, and I wonder why that is. Has the focus in the casual video game industry shifted, and why would that be? You brought up Temple Run early on in the blog post, and that brought me back to when I used to be addicted to that game. That reminded me how real the psychological effects and dopamine hits of these games really are. It's true that these games may not be as good as we remember them because of nostalgia, but it may also be because of the wide variety of casual games that exist now. Your blog was really interesting and it's cool that you actually did an experiment yourself to write it. Great job!