The rationale behind the 2D pixel look is to help distinguish and reinforce that part of the videogame is taking place in the past, yet for starters videogames barely existed, with Spacewar! having only been developed two years prior. It is the 1964 setting that is particularly interesting in this whole context. Roughly half of the videogame is set in 2020 and featured 3D depictions of sports and venues whilst the other half is set inside a videogame recreation of 1964 Tokyo with 2D depictions of sports and venues. Playing it now this notion blends with the videogames plot of going back to a digital version of the previous time Tokyo hosted the Olympics back in 1964. I originally got it back in the before times of late 2019 and despite being Mario and Sonic themed was depicting an event that was going to occur. This thought became even more pronounced, paradoxically by going back to Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. The more I played it the more it became apparent to me how this is depicting an alternative event, one that never took place. It is still a challenging game (mostly due to the AI) but learning the controls is often mostly straightforward. The Official Video Game is more of a sports-themed arcade game than anything close to resembling a simulator, and that is absolutely the best decision. This might be an official depiction of the Games, but realistic it is not, which also seems at odds with how it drew my attention to how what we got was not the Tokyo 2020 Games. That is until I played The Official Video Game. The speed climbing was also an interesting distraction.īecause I was engaged and distracted by these newer events, the lack of spectators and mascots and general festivities weren’t something that I particularly acknowledged. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite? Yet watching new Olympic sports such as Skateboarding and BMX events provided thrills. I thought it was a foolish decision to go ahead with it this year, given the situation in Japan is just as bad, if not worse, than in 2020. I watched a lot more of the Olympic Games this time around than I expected. The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 does not exist. Am I being pedantic? Not really, because whilst a year later the world did get to compete in an Olympic Games that took place in Tokyo, with the year 2020 still splashed all over, this obviously was a very different event to what was meant to have been.

Now that we have an overview of hauntology you might begin to understand why hauntology, the Olympics, and videogames have been on my mind. But this brings me to the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. I’m going to leave the explanation of hauntology there for this issue and possibly return to it another day. In keeping with the theme that one might imply from the haunt part of the name the concept also considers that which is simultaneously dead and alive, kind of like a ghost. However, there is more to the term than highlighting what does not exist. If ontology is the study of “being”, existence, and reality, then hauntology can be broadly understood as the opposite of this. Therefore it is not surprising that hauntology has a relationship with ontology. A portmanteau of haunting and ontology, which takes on a double form is you imagine a French person saying it in which they drop the H, and it sounds like ontology. Hauntology as a concept is one that is still being understood, but its origins, whilst not that old, began as a bit of comical wordplay. Urn:isbn:963863619X Scandate 20110301155643 Scanner my own research into the connection between nostalgia and videogames I have recently been looking into the concept of hauntology as a means of better understanding what is happening to videogame form. OL2172523W Page-progression lr Pages 270 Ppi 500 Related-external-id urn:isbn:037571927X Comment Set Scanfee to 100 on all Pre-June IA Sponsored Books as per Robert Donor

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Time out of joint