Taxonomy of Nostalgia Triggers

This time last week I found myself at an infertile stage in my MA journey, feeling that I wasn't really breaking any new ground.  Thankfully a solution was at hand, as my tutor Josh waded in with some brilliant suggestions and insights -- resulting in two new paths of investigation.

The first of these paths concerns the fact that some nostalgia triggers are more effective than others, and therefore I've been hard at work analysing affect cues, de-constructing a typical scene into fundamental triggers and classifying them, which then allows me to re-construct the scene by using the triggers in a targeted & creative manner, maximising their effectiveness.

Mechanisms

In his book A Theory of Fun, Ralph Koster identifies that certain mental processes release endorphins, giving a feeling of elation.  Formal psychological research into nostalgia show that this feeling can be very strong indeed.

Last year I identified that particular mechanisms have differing relative strengths of effectiveness:

• Olfactory (smell) -- very strong indeed
• Visual -- good
• Mechanical -- more powerful than visual
• Auditory -- OK but seems to be less strong than visual
• Returning to a location -- very strong
• Interpersonal -- discussion of common memories (this came up very strongly in the original research)

Of these, smell is impractical to use in video gaming;  visual, mechanical & auditory are well-suited to gaming; location & interpersonal may be simulated somewhat, using aesthetic & narrative elements.

Efficacy

Isolated Trigger -- this is a trigger which brings back memories of experiences with the item itself.  For example, seeing a Rubik's cube might remind someone of the fact that they owned one in their childhood.

Cascade Trigger -- sometimes this chemical release spreads to related memories; this cascade of triggers accumulates into a powerful affect within a short period of time.  For example, someone who sees Kodak 110 film for the first time in years (presuming, of course, that they are familiar with it)...

...may also immediately recall the camera in which it fitted (in this case, a Pocket Instamatic)...

and maybe even the disposable flash cubes which were used with the camera.

Whammo!  Three triggers for the price of one.  (N.B. Not sure if 'Whammo' is a proper academic term.)

Indirect trigger -- this is an interesting one.  Sometimes it's possible to use the cascade effect to force someone to fill in a missing gap.  For example, the item below is the corner piece of a Rubik's cube.

Someone seeing this lone piece might be reminded of the whole cube, because so many Rubik's cube owners have taken the toy apart and would recognise the unusual shape.

Indirect triggers work very well without visuals, too.  Consider the following phrase:

In those of a suitable age this phrase will conjure up images of the Smash Martians accompanied by tinny robotic voices saying the phrase and then laughing.

Mis-remembered trigger -- It's possible, in some cases, that the viewer might mistake the trigger for something else.  That's not usually a problem so long as some emotional affect takes place.

One of my friends knows that I am a massive fan of legendary British sci-fi comic 2000 A.D. and has fond memories of it himself; he refers to it by the mis-remembered name "A.D. 2000".  To add to his confusion, though, if he searched on the web for it he might actually find images from the original "dummy" pilot issue produced by the publishers.

(Left) The unreleased pilot issue of 2000 A.D. comic
(Right) "Prog 3" from 1977, featuring "Flesh" (Dinosaurs vs. time-travelling cowboys from the future.  Ah, they don't write 'em like that anymore...)

Range

Primary trigger -- this relates to memories of interacting with the item itself.

Secondary Emotional Trigger -- this involves a broader emotional response because it unlocks associated feelings, such as childhood happiness or trauma.  An example of this might be a bag of cola cubes, reminding someone of joyful school-day visits to the sweetshop.

Secondary Experiential Trigger -- some items have an associated action.  Examples of this include the Evel Kneivel Stunt Cycle, which usually launched with a meandering wobble and fell over on its side.  (This particular example also demonstrates the cascade trigger effect, because the toy had a red-and-white friction winder which had its own associated action & sound.)

The young Chuck Norris becomes the only person to ever get it to do a wheelie and drive in a straight line.

Mixing different types

The different types mentioned above can be mixed in constructive ways.

Extending the indirect example above, seeing further remnants of a disassembled Rubik's cube may bring back memories of the sinking emotional feeling experienced the first time the toy came apart in their hands, and they will also recall the clatter of loose pieces and the "snap" of clipping them back into place.

This visual indirect trigger gives immediate rise to a secondary emotional one.  It also brings secondary experiential effects, including memories of mechanical & auditory cues.  Thus, instead of just showing a boring Rubik's cube, a much more powerful affect can be constructed.

Two images of "Funny Talk" doll are shown below.  The doll's head was attached by a string which -- if pulled -- caused the doll to speak one of several silly phrases ("I'm falling apart!", "Here comes my bo-dyyyy!"), while winding the head back in.

Mattel "Funny Talk" doll, part of the Talk-Up range (1971).

The left-hand image is a plain isolated trigger; if lucky, the viewer may recall the secondary experiential string mechanism & sounds.

The right-hand image is a much better way to present the item.  By directly reminding the viewer of the string mechanism it ensures the secondary experiential effect.  It also allows those who are not familiar with the toy to experiment with the mechanism and gain enjoyment -- an important factor with more obscure triggers.

This approach starts to move into the theme of "theatre" which will be discussed more fully in the next blog post.

"Less famous brother" effect

A combined indirect-cascade trigger works by avoiding more popular items in favour of (slightly) more obscure associated ones, aiming to gain a strong "I haven't seen that in ages!" reaction to the obscure item but still indirectly trigger memories of the more popular item via a cascade of memories.

I call this the "less famous brother" effect.  Examples are shown below.

An octagonal barrel cube variant of the Rubik's cube. 

Raleigh Tomahawk bicycle, the junior version of the Chopper.  This is also a nice example of a two-way trigger: some viewers may instead mis-remember it as the Chopper itself.

TCR Racing (1981) -- it's not Scalextric!  Slotless, so you can change lanes and do jumps.

Not overdoing it

The following image shows a cube barrel in a mixed state.  At first this appears to be a "better" trigger because it mixes indirect-cascade with secondary experiential cues, but in my opinion this actually loses some effect because it's not as instantly recognisable as the plain barrel cube (image shown previously).

This is certainly debatable and open to further investigation, but it highlights a need to avoid overcomplicating things.

Conclusion

This has been a very worthwhile exercise, producing a formal description of the different types of trigger which will be extremely beneficial to my project work.

Gone Home re-visited

A few weeks ago I wrote about critical Indie hit Gone Home, a game set in 1995 which immerses the player in an emotional experience as they explore the lives of others.  In this post I'm intending to further analyse the game's implementation of nostalgia triggers and consider their effectiveness.

Triggers within the game include:

• VHS video tapes, hand-labelled with period TV programme titles
• Cassette tapes and midi hi-fi dual cassette player
• SNES game console with spoof title game cartridges
• Posters for period-style punk revival & grunge bands
• TV listings page showing a number of contemporary popular & cult programmes

Design choices

Not everything is 1995-themed, though.  The house itself is Victorian, and many of the furnishings are antiquated, in keeping with an old house.  Fashions often cycle in generations: the 1960s & 1980s tended to echo the modernist feel of the 1930s; by contrast, the 1970s & 1990s played up antiquated themes like floral patterns and natural colours, as noted in my own research.

In my opinion this dark Victorian look therefore adds semiotic reinforcement, enhancing the feeling of having stepped back in time.

The game itself was built using the Unity game engine (the same engine I'm using for my own project work).  In an interview on Unity's website, the game's designers explain that many of the key elements were built in-house using reference images from a 1992 Sears catalogue.  (The team also made extensive use of pre-built assets purchased from the Unity asset store.  This was a surprise to me, but makes perfect sense: it's going to be cheaper to buy some game elements than spend time & money building everything from scratch, especially on an Indie budget.)

Given the average age of the team it's easy to presume that the 1990s setting was driven by personal sentimentality; however, it came instead from pragmatism:

"We started from, 'we want to make a game that's about exploring a place and finding bits and pieces of the story scattered everywhere.'  If it was more recent than the 90s, [too] much of that stuff would be in devices: an email message, a text box," he says.  "It was a very practical decision of, 'we'll choose this era because that means people would be actually writing notes and leaving them for each other.'  That physicality is important to the game."

— Interview at IndieGames.com

However, there was still room for personal memories from the game designers, raiding their own recollections to add realistic details to the environment:

"It came from the team's own memories -- what could they recall about their living rooms in 1995?  Recorded VHS tapes off TV with written labels, two recordings on one tape to save memories, for example.  Such details give the game its very lifelike and plausible texture."  Gaynor also read blog posts about experiences of people growing up in that time, and was influenced by the memories of others.

— Interview at IndieGames.com

The TV listings page illustrates this well.  Some of the shows listed were short-lived and have rarely aired since their original broadcast, so they may carry an enhanced affect if recognised.  Examples of this include: M.A.N.T.I.S., Hangin' With Mr. Cooper, the RoboCop spin-off TV series, cult comedy Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and gritty sci-fi war series Space: Above And Beyond.

Anchoring the game with real-life 'pegs' is great but, as I've mentioned before, copyright & trademarks can be a thorny issue.  The team have hit this problem themselves, and have managed to find a compromise of melding generic designs (e.g. the made-up-game SNES cartridges) with genuine music from the period:

"As there there are many cultural signifiers the team can’t use explicitly due to copyright situations, being able to license iconic music of the mid-90s has contributed a lot to the game’s tone and atmosphere."

— Interview, Unity website

Emotional response

There's a strong affect from recalled memories (as identified in psychological research) and this adds a layer of emotion to the setting.  However, the primary emotional content of the game is formed from the exploration of the lives of family members (at the centre of the game's mystery) via notes and mementoes.

In my MA research so far, I've focused on the idea that nostalgia triggers can introduce an emotional "yank" into a game.  However, in this game the triggers are being used to enhance existing emotional content.

That might sound like a small distinction but it raises a vital question, echoed by my tutor Josh: have I been paying too much attention to nostalgia as a bolt-on "veneer"?  Should I instead see it as part of the overall charm of a game?

On reflection I think that Josh is right: I have drifted into reductionism, losing sight of the whole body of the game.  Writing this post has acted as a timely reminder that nostalgic triggers cannot work in isolation.  The relationship between game elements -- aesthetics, mechanics, story & technology -- is symbiotic.

Do the designers' nostalgia triggers actually work?  Are they effective?  I believe that these quotes from reviews answer the question:

"I was transported to a home I’d never visited, but that felt achingly familiar."

— Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku

"Of course, when it comes to Gone Home stirring up my own memories, it helps that the game not only takes place during the mid-'90s, but evokes the era so accurately that playing it feels like using a time machine."

— Carolyn Petit, "The Places of Our Past: Exploring the Emotional Intimacy of Gone Home"

The Greenbriars, however, are only half of what makes Gone Home special.  Set in 1995, the house [...] is as much a character as its inhabitants, a window into the past I never wanted to close. [...] The TV Guide outlines Full House and Boy Meets World air times, Street Fighter II arcade cabinets beckon new challengers at local 7-Elevens, and VHS tapes advocate old-school piracy with recordings of The X-Files, Airplane!, and Blade Runner.   Gone Home allowed me to project my own memories onto each scene as I searched under every bed, beneath every pillow, behind every chair."

— Josh Kowbel, WikiGameGuides & GiantBomb.com

The answer, then, is a resounding "Yes".  The trigger elements have definitely "twanged" emotional heartstrings for these reviewers, demonstrating nostalgic affect in action.  Case proven.

1980s bedroom (part 6) Adding triggers

Although it seems at times like a never-ending saga, the 1980s bedroom is slowly nearing its conclusion.

Today I've been adding the first of my nostalgia triggers.  I've gone for a variant on one of the handheld games consoles seen on my Play Expo trip -- the Galaxy Invader 10000, released in 1982.

The model is 170 triangles with a single 512x512 UV, featuring diffuse, bump & specular maps.

Edit:

I don't usually go back and add content to posts but in this case I thought it worth doing.  I've been cogitating ... and I think I've missed a prime opportunity to evaluate audio & mechanical triggers in this context.  This type of hand-held game had distinctive sounds and animated graphics, and these add significantly to both the affect and the charm of the object. Therefore I'm going to re-visit the Galaxy Invader model at some point, adding a movie texture showing the game playing a demo cycle, accompanied by appropriate sound effects.  I've done sound in the Unity game engine before, and it's very good at doing location-based audio which you hear as you get closer to an object.  I haven't, though, done movie textures so this will give me an opportunity to advance my technical competency in this area.

You can see it here, taking the place of lava lamp in the original Gizmo game:

Next up is a Sony Trinitron showing the home page for Oracle, ITV's original teletext service (replaced in a franchise bidding war in 1993 by the imaginatively-named Teletext service).  The TV itself is not intended to be a primary trigger but I'm hoping that Oracle will be, given its relative rarity compared with the BBC's recently retired Ceefax.

The TV is 88 tris with a single 512x512 UV, with diffuse, bump & specular maps.
The record collection is a single mesh of 48 tris with diffuse & bump map only.  

I've also added some vinyl LPs into the shelving.  (If you can identify any of the album covers then you get a prize!)  I've deliberately gone for period items that were popular in their day but would no longer receive airplay today, in order to maximise affect.  I've done a bit of copyright research and I believe I can get away with these under quasi-Fair Dealing exceptions to the 1988 Act, classed as incidental content.

1980s bedroom (part 5) Decor completed

I'm nearly at the end of the 1980s bedroom project, with the main room decor now completed.  All that remains is to add details (such as records, cassettes, etc. on shelves) and plant the main nostalgia trigger items.

One item which caused me some inconvenience is the anglepoise lamp, based on an Arne Jacobsen design for Habitat.  I wavered over whether to rig the lamp with a bone structure & inverse kinematics, to allow it to be manipulated like a real lamp in order to make it easier to position.  In the end I decided to rig it and I'm glad I did -- it took a few tries to find the optimum pose which looked good and also cast a suitable light cone.

"[Michael] Standing produced what became known within the BBC as the ‘Green Book’, whose purpose was to eradicate smut, innuendo and vulgarity from all BBC programmes. [...] In June 1949 he issued a memo to all staff in which he forbade BBC employees to illuminate any room with an anglepoise lamp unless the main ceiling or wall light was also illuminated: Standing held a firm belief that a man working at a desk in a confined space with only the light from a low-wattage lamp would nurture furtive ideas and produce degenerate programme material."

— fascinating trivia courtesy of Wikipedia

I also decided to switch the table map to a coloured lampshade to balance the over-emphasis on white in the room, experimenting with different hues and incandescence settings.  The lighting makes an enormous difference to the tone of the room.

The windows and blinds were fairly quick to produce, with a night sky backdrop to match the original game exterior (which fits nicely with the whole '80s "dark" feel).

However, the blinds weren't quite right so I angled them slightly and discoloured them slightly to sell the moonlight tone.  The final touch was a "drawstrings" plane texture, which made them look a lot more realistic.

So there you have it.  The main decoration is complete; now I need to populate the room with objects.

Lego in the digital age

Which old toys would you like to see updated for the digital age?  That's the question posed by the article "Retro Toys Rebooted For The Digital Age", appearing on Intel's iQ narrative content curator (for those of us who don't speak corporate, they mean 'blog').

The article begins by examining the way that Lego is pushing into new boundaries, illustrated by the augmented reality toy "Life of George" and and their partnership with Sony developing small robotic toys (manipulated by PlayStation DualShock controllers).

This move certainly shows imagination on the toy-maker's part ... or desperation, depending on how you look at it.

The app displays a picture of what to build; the player then constructs the model, which is verified -- visually, using the phone's camera -- by the app, scoring for speed & accuracy.  The app, garnering mixed reviews, requires a special mat and is available for iPhone only.

Background

Let's not forget that Lego was on the brink of extinction in the mid-1990s.  Their stuck-in-the-mud attitude had seen competitors like Mega Bloks challenge Lego's brick patent, grabbing market share.

"The company realised its staff of older white men located in remote Billund, Denmark, was culturally distant from its target customer: the world's children."

— How Thinking 'Inside the Brick' Saved Lego, Wired magazine (Oct 2013)

In the end, two major changes in policy saved Lego's business:

• Listening to their customers
• Expansion into licensed properties, which they had avoided for too long

The first point is vital.  Major multinationals are busy making the same mistake right now, arrogantly ignoring consumers in favour of a "we know best" attitude:

• Apple had clearly not learned from their the ill-fated maps fiasco -- which wiped $30 billion from the company's value -- when they released the controversial iOS 7, full of bugs.
• After Vista, you'd think Microsoft would know better.  Ladies & gentlemen of the jury, I give you Windows 8 for laptops & desktop PCs....
• Google, well ... let's just say when the new Google Maps goes live on browsers, it may cause some upset.

The second point -- licensed properties -- is a biggie.  Precise figures are hard to come by, but it's clear that Star Wars, Harry Potter & Pirates of the Caribbean tie-in products are now a significant proportion of Lego's income.

The future of Lego

Video games are a big part of the modern face of the company.  Early efforts like Lego Island (1997) and Lego Racers (1999) sold satisfactorily, but it was the hard work of Tt Games -- harnessed by creative directors Arthur Parsons (who visited UCLan Games Design students last year) and Jimmy McLoughlin -- which raised the video game brand to become a global best-seller.

One headache for Lego is that these video games are not their own product; they are dependent on the build quality -- and the creative impetus -- of another company.  This golden egg could easily crack, leaving Lego with a hole in its income. This happened to Disney with Pixar, and their solution was to buy Pixar and swallow its creative team.  Purchasing a game developer may be impractical and risky for Lego, who have no business experience in publishing video games.

Lego has had strong success with its venture into board games.  These well-designed games have surprised many.

However, at the dawn of the 3D printing age, the plastic brick manufacturer must be worried.  Already people are printing their own custom bricks, made from the same ABS plastic that Lego uses.  Bulk manufacture keeps prices low, but how long will kids enjoy building something from parts when they can create new structures whole, freed from the limitations of brick shapes?  As James May pointed out in his Toy Stories TV programme, Airfix and Meccano are now seen as irrelevant, because children have other toys to distract them -- more interactive and less hard work.

Does Lego have a future in the digital age?  Are physical building blocks destined to become tomorrow's nostalgia?  Present sales indicate not quite yet.  But I believe that the Lego of the next generation may bear little resemblance to the toy we know and love now.

1980s bedroom (part 4) More construction

The 1980s bedroom construction is coming along slowly but well.  The chairs are looking great.

I'd needed to put two transparent grids back-to-back to get the "grille" on the back and seat (to avoid problems with backface culling) and was concerned that I'd get a messy Moiré pattern if the two sides didn't align perfectly.  In the end it worked out well and I think the shadows set them off well.  (Which reminds me that I need to learn a bit about baking shadows at some point.)

For the walls I tried a few different colours & patterns but nothing really worked to my satisfaction.  Eventually decided to go for this dark colour with grid pattern, based on the neon/grid motif popular with Acorn Computers -- I'd seen signs done in this style on the Replay Schools retro educational computing stand at the Play Expo and was impressed at how it threw me back into the era of the BBC's Micro Live programme.

You can see how it works in the render below.  I experimented with a green grid, which looked too derivative of that whole Matrix black-and-green vibe, and purple/magenta, but in the end this turquoise tint seemed to balance well with the other elements.

Next up is the door and window, with horizontal blinds, followed by the other shelving with records and TV.