Doctors Paul Wake and Sam Illingworth
That there’s been something of a nostalgic turn in tabletop gaming is hard to miss. Recent years have seen the return of classic franchises such as Thunderbirds and Ghostbusters, alongside re-releases of titles long consigned (fairly or not) to gaming’s storage cabinets – games such as Restoration Games’ Stop Thief! and Fireball Island (which funded on Kickstarter in under an hour). We’ve also seen wargamers returning to past rulesets, homages to the aesthetics of the recent past in miniature ranges like Diego Serrate’s Greenskin Wars, and the emergence of print histories such as Jonathan Green’s YOU are the Hero! and Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s forthcoming Dice Men, about the origins of Games Workshop. Tabletop games – and their players – it seems, have reached an age where a turn to the past is both desired and, at the risk of sounding cynical, lucrative.
Where is this interest in nostalgia taking us? To the past or to somewhere else entirely? And what exactly are we remembering? The answer, if there is one, might lie in our understanding of the nature of nostalgia itself. The word comes from the realm of 17th-century medicine, a time when nostalgia was considered a curable disease, its treatments including opium, leeches, pain and terror. It is, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, a “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of the past”. But there’s more to it than this. Noting the Greek roots of the word (notos meaning “return home” and algia meaning “longing”), Harvard professor and scholar Svetlana Boym defined nostalgia as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed” and, more pointedly, as “a romance with one’s own fantasy.” In other words, we may well be pining for a past that never really existed.