Today I talk about a question for which I have not landed on an answer: Does the convenience of digital storage cause a loss in nostalgia? And is that loss worth the convenience?
Over the weekend I got a Facebook friend request from a friend I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. Turned out that we both still lived locally so we got together and had lunch yesterday. Even after two decades I found we conversed easily. It was great to catch up, talk about how our lives had progressed, and chat some about those halcyon days of yesteryear.
Nostalgia is one of those funny feelings that I find hard to describe. It’s this weird, bittersweet sensation that hovers between “good times” and “I can never go back there again.” Still, I guess it provides a sense of perspective on how far I’ve come since then, and I’m all about having perspective.
I’m kind of a packrat by nature and have to force myself to purge stuff on occasion. This keeps me from becoming a full-on hoarder and it also frees space so I can collect other stuff. My packrat urges also motivate me to create new and interesting places to store stuff like a screen porch attic, secret room, and treehouse. I may have a bit of a problem…
Anyway, one of the things I’ve chosen to hold onto is a bunch of my old gaming stuff. I don’t just mean game manuals and copies of Dragon Magazine. I’ve got at least a ream of old character sheets, dungeon maps, grandiose campaign plans, and pages upon pages of homemade rules and monster stats. Several folders and binders worth of stuff.
A certain amount of this is junk I should probably toss. But it doesn’t take up too much room in the grand scheme of things, and every time I crack open one of those binders and see my juvenile scrawl listing out stats and inventory for some bygone Half-Elf Fighter-Thief, it makes me smile. I’ve been in this hobby for a very long time and traipsing along memory lane for a few minutes is time well spent.
Nowadays I’m generating more gaming content on my computer than on paper, and I’m wondering if this is ultimately a good thing or not. There are unquestionably benefits to this method, not the least of which is that neither I nor anybody else needs to read my terrible handwriting. I type much faster than I can write by hand anyway, and I can send such content out to my players or other GMs I know with naught but a quick Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. This is a giant step forward, right?
On the other hand, I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt nostalgia from staring at a computer screen. Something about the flat display of words on a screen fails to grab that sentimental part of my brain the way a wrinkled old sheet of notebook paper does. Maybe it has to do with engaging more of the senses, but it just isn’t the same for me.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that digital storage isn’t something I’m going to typically stumble across like I do with a physical folder stuffed full of papers. When I delve into my game closet looking for that old copy of The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, to steal the maps for the upteenth time, I’ll pick up one of those folders and take a moment (or half an hour) to thumb through it and see Badder the Dwarf. He’s the character my sister made for a solo Basic D&D game I ran when I was 11 and she was 8. Also I’m pretty sure she meant his name to be “Badger,” but she wasn’t that great at spelling at the age of 8.
This is an experience I’m probably not going to have 20 or 30 years from now looking back on the notes for my 13th Age game because I’m throwing them into a Google Drive document, and I won’t accidentally run across them reaching for something else. On the other hand I know that if I DID want to go look them up, it would be infinitely easier to do in the form of a document stored “in the cloud” rather than a document stored “in some folder in my basement closet.”
I think we see this happening even significantly to our photos. I know very few people shooting pictures on film anymore. All of the physical photos we’ve got around here are ones that were taken more than a decade ago. Everything since is sitting on a hard drive or backed up onto a DVD. How often do I go browse through those old photos? Pretty much never.
I tend to live in the moment more than I spend time trying to take pictures of everything. But this trend still has me puzzled about how to preserve the memories I want to keep. I know for sure that digital is a more reliable, space-saving, efficient means of keeping them. But what happens when I carefully keep memories and then forget to go back and look at them?
How are you storing your stuff? Do you revisit those old pictures, and gaming materials? Does looking at them on a computer feel like something is lost in translation?
Over the weekend I got a Facebook friend request from a friend I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. Turned out that we both still lived locally so we got together and had lunch yesterday. Even after two decades I found we conversed easily. It was great to catch up, talk about how our lives had progressed, and chat some about those halcyon days of yesteryear.
Nostalgia is one of those funny feelings that I find hard to describe. It’s this weird, bittersweet sensation that hovers between “good times” and “I can never go back there again.” Still, I guess it provides a sense of perspective on how far I’ve come since then, and I’m all about having perspective.
I’m kind of a packrat by nature and have to force myself to purge stuff on occasion. This keeps me from becoming a full-on hoarder and it also frees space so I can collect other stuff. My packrat urges also motivate me to create new and interesting places to store stuff like a screen porch attic, secret room, and treehouse. I may have a bit of a problem…
Anyway, one of the things I’ve chosen to hold onto is a bunch of my old gaming stuff. I don’t just mean game manuals and copies of Dragon Magazine. I’ve got at least a ream of old character sheets, dungeon maps, grandiose campaign plans, and pages upon pages of homemade rules and monster stats. Several folders and binders worth of stuff.
A certain amount of this is junk I should probably toss. But it doesn’t take up too much room in the grand scheme of things, and every time I crack open one of those binders and see my juvenile scrawl listing out stats and inventory for some bygone Half-Elf Fighter-Thief, it makes me smile. I’ve been in this hobby for a very long time and traipsing along memory lane for a few minutes is time well spent.
Nowadays I’m generating more gaming content on my computer than on paper, and I’m wondering if this is ultimately a good thing or not. There are unquestionably benefits to this method, not the least of which is that neither I nor anybody else needs to read my terrible handwriting. I type much faster than I can write by hand anyway, and I can send such content out to my players or other GMs I know with naught but a quick Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. This is a giant step forward, right?
On the other hand, I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt nostalgia from staring at a computer screen. Something about the flat display of words on a screen fails to grab that sentimental part of my brain the way a wrinkled old sheet of notebook paper does. Maybe it has to do with engaging more of the senses, but it just isn’t the same for me.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that digital storage isn’t something I’m going to typically stumble across like I do with a physical folder stuffed full of papers. When I delve into my game closet looking for that old copy of The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, to steal the maps for the upteenth time, I’ll pick up one of those folders and take a moment (or half an hour) to thumb through it and see Badder the Dwarf. He’s the character my sister made for a solo Basic D&D game I ran when I was 11 and she was 8. Also I’m pretty sure she meant his name to be “Badger,” but she wasn’t that great at spelling at the age of 8.
This is an experience I’m probably not going to have 20 or 30 years from now looking back on the notes for my 13th Age game because I’m throwing them into a Google Drive document, and I won’t accidentally run across them reaching for something else. On the other hand I know that if I DID want to go look them up, it would be infinitely easier to do in the form of a document stored “in the cloud” rather than a document stored “in some folder in my basement closet.”
I think we see this happening even significantly to our photos. I know very few people shooting pictures on film anymore. All of the physical photos we’ve got around here are ones that were taken more than a decade ago. Everything since is sitting on a hard drive or backed up onto a DVD. How often do I go browse through those old photos? Pretty much never.
I tend to live in the moment more than I spend time trying to take pictures of everything. But this trend still has me puzzled about how to preserve the memories I want to keep. I know for sure that digital is a more reliable, space-saving, efficient means of keeping them. But what happens when I carefully keep memories and then forget to go back and look at them?
How are you storing your stuff? Do you revisit those old pictures, and gaming materials? Does looking at them on a computer feel like something is lost in translation?
(think Dragonlance mixed with Forgotten Realms and you've pretty much read it already.)
