Kosmonaut's Log: Field Notes on the Politics of Nostalgia in Ludic Representations of Soviet Space Exploration

This paper examines how a set of indie video games, including Lifeless Planet, Little Orpheus, The Great Perhaps, and the Red Matter VR series, represent Soviet space exploration through the lens of "Space Nostalgia," a trend that combines post-communist nostalgia with postmodern remediation of history and memory. Its central argument is that these games borrow the iconography and rhetoric of Soviet space culture but invert its utopian promise, presenting the cosmos as the setting of a late-capitalist, post-apocalyptic dystopia that speaks more to the post-communist present than to the communist past or future.

The analysis draws on the author's field observations and ongoing research, situated within a body of scholarship on game nostalgia, retrogaming, and post-Soviet cultural memory. The author finds that these games blend appropriated Soviet space legacies, Eastern Bloc science fiction, commodified memory of the Great Patriotic War, and globalized popular culture, often with irony and parody. The protagonists are typically nameless, generic figures, a choice the paper reads as both a non-individualistic stance and a prefabricated, vicarious form of experience. Rather than embodying the optimistic heroism of socialist realism, these figures appear stranded, lost, and isolated, a configuration the author links to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" as a principal model.

The paper concludes that these melancholic representations ultimately contrast with a narrative that calls for hope in shared humanity and environmental responsibility. In a meta-nostalgic register, the games also reflect on memory, progress, and humanity's limited capacity to learn from its past. The paper is presented as the first in a planned series on post-communist nostalgia across video games and digital narratives.