Replaying the Past: Wholesome Nostalgia or Morbid Melancholia?

Rob Gallagher's paper examines two artgames, Oikospiel Book 1 and Sonic Dreams Collection, which build profane, politically charged collages from assets ripped out of child-oriented franchises such as Sonic the Hedgehog, The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong. The central argument is that this aesthetic strategy exposes how the nostalgia pervading digital and gaming culture slides into melancholia. The analysis is framed by a comparison with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, whose seamless integration of heritage characters presents gaming as wholesome, family-centred play that lets adults relive their childhoods through their own children.

Against this backdrop, Sonic Dreams Collection is read through psychoanalytic theories of melancholia and the vore pornography tradition. Its distended, cannibalistic bodies are interpreted as an expression of fannish attachment that refuses to let go of the past, in contrast to Ultimate's orderly arrangement of assets. Oikospiel is read through Marxist commodity fetishism, with its use of Unity asset-store materials and its heterogeneous, deliberately seamful tableaux drawing attention to the devaluation of developer labour and the favouritism of copyright law toward major corporations such as Nintendo.

The paper's scope is primarily analytical and theoretical rather than empirical. It relies on close reading of the two games, along with their developer statements, fan wiki material, interviews, and a broad base of scholarship in game studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and media studies. The author concludes that these artgames are not merely critical of nostalgia but suggest that digital culture might achieve more hopeful futures if it first recognises the melancholy core of its attachment to the past and acknowledges what has already been lost.