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I’m really happy that my niece likes video games. Like, that’s just an obvious thing for the two of us to share and try to bond over; it is something that I consider good. And one thing that you might think as a result is that I have tried to introduce her to the video games that I loved when I was her age, to which I would respond by laughing until my trachea exploded. I have not done that, I would never do that, and that is a terrible idea.

Why? Because a lot of the games I loved and still love, while good, have also not exactly aged gracefully. They have a lot of dead ends and designs that were expected then but aren’t expected now, manuals you were expected to read, and other game mechanics and quality-of-life features we now see as standard just didn’t exist then. Sure, that’s pretty obvious, but it also comes up a lot when you talk about MMOs from our past and the ways in which all of us are, to some extent, lost in our memories.

To be clear, all of us means all of us. I am us. I am part of that collective. I can dearly remember, for example, learning to navigate around aggro in various maps of Final Fantasy XI just to get to leveling camps. I remember learning to navigate those maps without actual maps, even. This was a special experience, the feeling of having to deal with a hostile map in a world that didn’t care about me. Gosh, can you blame me for wanting that feeling back?

You don’t actually have to answer that, of course, because it doesn’t matter if I want that feeling back or not. That feeling also involves a lot of other elements that you can’t get back because a good chunk of them involved being 23 and having an entirely different life in what amounts to being a different era of human history. Just putting those bespoke inconveniences back into an MMORPG will not make other players want to experience them for the first time, and it will not necessarily make for a better game. It’ll just be familiar to me.

My point is not that I loved this because I didn’t know any better back in the day or that I love it only because of nostalgia or any of that. These were real experiences I had and that I think back on fondly now. I have a lot of those. My first time walking into Stormwind in World of Warcraft was a unique and novel experience for me, and it still looms in my memory. I still can explain to you how the windowing of the first moments in the city stirred something within me, and it’s all real and true.

I don’t have that memory of stepping into the city in WoW Classic, but the reason isn’t because it’s nostalgia-related; it’s because you cannot uncross a river. I cannot walk into Stormwind the first time again because I already did that. And I can describe to someone what it made me feel, we can both log in to WoW Classic and I can describe it all to her, and she cannot experience that because it’s my memory. It happened to me.

Does that mean it’s not special? Of course not. Does that mean that walking into classic Stormwind (which definitely looks better than the Cataclysm version; I’m of the mind the modern city is halfway an improvement with some rather poor decisions here and there) didn’t bring a smile to my face? Of course not, once again; it was familiar, and it was nice to be back in a familiar place. Every time I go back to FFXI, I’m delighted to go to Jeuno again. But I cannot introduce other people to the Jeuno of my memories because it exists in my memories.

This is even true of other people who have overlapping experiences that I did. Like, MOP’s Bree and I have overlapping memories of more than a few different games. But I cannot play her memories of Guild Wars any more than she can play mine. We both love the game, but things that to me are core parts of the experience aren’t core parts of hers because we just… have different memories and had different priorities and ways of playing.

Not all different priorities; we both still trifle with a door or two for old time’s sake, but you get the point I’m making here.

It’s tricky to talk about this because acknowledging that a great deal of your feeling about a given experience has to do with your memories sounds like saying “nostalgia,” something that MMO players in particular can be really defensive about (for good reason). This exists on a spectrum, where you will have people look at you with the stink-eye if you dare to suggest that the only reason you might want to go back to multi-hour grinding parties camped in a corner in order to gain one level is because you’ve got a bit of nostalgia on the brain, and you will have other people who dismiss deeply felt emotional stories as “nostalgia” because they happened six months ago. But what I’m talking about is memories here, and the thing is that no one can play your memories again. Not even you.

Maybe you really, genuinely love open PvP because you remember playing with that ruleset in Ultima Online and it really produced some amazing memories for you and you think it’s so much more special. I can absolutely believe that. But no one else can play those memories. Players, on a whole, decided they preferred to not have an open PvP environment. The fact that you remember loving it very much does not mean that others can engage with that environment. No one else can play those memories and that experience.

Similarly, my niece cannot play Xenogears. I mean, she can download the game and play it, but she won’t be playing it like I did. She won’t be sitting in an upstairs room with the window open and an old CRT perched on the dresser, a Subway sandwich and a bag of chips on my lap, bottle of Coke nearby, playing on a lengthy Saturday session before heading back to my summer job on Monday.

You might find this disappointing, but personally, I think it’s just part of how it is. I can conjure these sense memories. They were a part of me. I can run down all sorts of memories that I experienced making my way through MMOs back in the day. And no one else can experience them, so I have to engage with the world and the games as they are now… but it also means that I get to keep these memories, something other people cannot touch.

If my niece wants to explore those older games, of course I’ll be there to share my memories with her. But she won’t have mine; she’ll have her own. And one of them can be me getting a faraway look as I talk about things that aren’t there any more, but they’re still there to me.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.