The past through stereoscopic lenses. Video games nostalgia in virtual reality

The paper examines the phenomenon of retrogaming in the context of virtual reality. Author begins by introducing two categories of gaming nostalgia (homo- and hetero-medial) and argues that almost none of the existing VR experiences belong to the former category. In the next part of the paper, he applies two distinctions used by scholars to analyze nostalgia and discuss four case studies illustrating each of them. Author argues that in all of these cases the main focus of the developers concerns the external circumstances that the games of the past were played and not the games themselves (a factor that Mark P. Wolf called a “mode of exhibition”). He finishes the paper by discussing two problematic cases of retro VR experiences that do not fit the classification used previously. He argues that both of these cases simulate the mode of exhibition of contemporary retro practices.