Call for Chapter Abstracts — Games and Nostalgia for the Future
Edited by Richy Srirachanikorn
Abstracts (750 words) due November 3, 2025
Scholars and artists, whose works touch on nostalgia, memory, ‘old’ technology, and video games are invited to submit abstracts for an edited volume. The editor is currently finalizing with Play Story Press and Psychgeist to be the publisher.
** Why Video Games, Nostalgia, and “for the Future”? **
Video games and nostalgia share an interesting overlap. They are culturally recognizable yet personally, and subjectively, resonant. When a game adopts a style that harks back to past titles, like 8-bit, the Silly Symphonies cartoons, and PS2 graphics, does this make it a ‘retro’ game? Even if it ‘looks’ like an old game, does it play and feel like one?
Remakes and remasters, if done right, can be cash cows for game companies. Games like Resident Evil 4 and Final Fantasy 7 are examples of successful remakes that appeal to old players for its faithful restorations, but also to old and new players, for its upgraded graphics and new content. In contrast, remakes like World of Warcraft: Return to Azeroth or the Club Penguin private servers have left their nostalgic communities to take matters into their own hands. Players-turned-developers remake these remakes, but even so, some of these restorations do not follow the original’s footsteps, or just do not feel safe, legitimate, or ‘right’.
What about emulation, MAME, modding, and DIY cultures? When hobbyists and members from these groups ‘bring back’ an obscure machine or game, is it still a ‘nostalgic’ object once taken apart, remodelled, or reapplied?
These are cases where nostalgia cannot sit still. It is not a past-based, passive, and individualized emotion; it is a generative, active, and collective force to act — to define, to find a place for, to actualize a nostalgia… for the future.
** Potential Topics **
• The debate of what makes a game ‘retro’, and where this leads to
• The rise of contemporary retro games, or games that adopt past styles and mechanics
• Remakes and remasters — what do players do?
• Designers who draw on past play memories and break them
• Anemoia, counterfactual, false nostalgia that games produce — where does the yearning go?
• Past aesthetics and the problem of historicity, or defining the ‘past’
• Grief and games — what is lost and found?
• Modding and emulator communities that resist the industries’ drive for newness and progress
• Apps that help people ‘play’ with the past and see it differently
• New ways of looking at the old
• Theories: hauntology, retrotopia, simulacra, utopia, vaporware, historicity, etc.
• Similar writing and thinking on TTRPGs, boardgames, old media, consoles, non-digital games, etc.
** Submission Details **
Due before November 3, 2025
Please fill out this Google Form: https://richysrirachanikorn.wixsite.com/home/post/cfp-nostalgia-for-the-future-book
1. Abstract (750 words)
2. Proposed Title
3. Keywords (6 max.)
4. Supplemental Materials
5. Author Information
If accepted, full chapters can be anywhere from 3000-7000 words.
Publication date (expected) is September 2026.
Editor is finalizing publisher choice as Play Story Press and Psychgeist.
Contact: srirachanikorn@gmail.com