Tucked away in my mother's house, somewhere in the room that used to be mine, is a Nintendo GameCube that's not mine. My own GameCube is God-knows-where—languishing on some GameStop warehouse shelf, or in someone's garage, buried beneath an electric drill after an impulsive used-game purchase in the late 2000s. But this other GameCube, the one that's there now? I have no idea how it got into my room. My stepdad is a collector of various forms of junk, and one day when I visited it was just there, an apparition from gaming past.
The role games play in our lives has grown larger, messier, and more socially acceptable in the past two decades. Videogames are no longer niche activities; their logic inflects all digital media in one way or another, so even if you aren't playing directly, you're probably still playing somehow. (If social media visibility isn't a game, I don't know what is.) The idea of games as a countercultural escape is an outdated one in most contexts. They're just a part of the fabric of our lives.
There's one major exception to this sea change, though: the holiday season. During November and December, which for so many people involves a pilgrimage to bygone places, videogames take on a renewed and singular importance.
Home is a messy place. For many of us, it's the site of old memories, both positive and negative. The accumulated detritus of longstanding family fights, parental disappointments, grudges and squabbles lasting years, if not decades, builds up easily in an old family home, like dirt on the walls. Family gatherings are nostalgia engines, both for positive memories and the absolute worst.
Games can provide a salve to the bad memories and old wounds, happy places to go to when things get uncomfortable. If that one uncle gets too drunk and starts mentioning when you got stood up for senior prom, well, that's what that old Game Boy Color you still have in the closet is for, right?
Those old games can become a means to occupy older versions of ourselves, too. A means of visiting with someone you once knew— keeping, as Joan Didion put it, on nodding terms with your old self. Finding the old games stored in the closet, or simply engaging in an old hobby in the places you used to, can unlock old feelings, old senses of self, and let you turn them over in new light.
