How many memories about games do we actually have?

The relationship between games and memory is fluid and weird

Maybe it's just me, but my memory of games is so different from my memory for books, music, or movies. I can remember the content of movies, books, and music so well. Song lyrics that I memorized decades ago. Books I haven't read in ages I can still vividly picture specific passages from. Games… are harder. My memory of the content of games is much smaller.

Sam Miller’s excellent Substack, Pebble Hunting, did a bit of a “year in review” thing where he thought about what things we would remember about baseball 80 years from now:

2024 Gets Remembered, Pt. 1

And that got me thinking about what and how we remember games, and what about games we actually remember, and how we don’t remember “The Game” so much as we remember specific moments and concepts related to it. And this is important because memory is how we define art. The stuff that sticks with us is the stuff we remember. And we don’t remember games. Or at least, I don’t. At least not broadly the in same way we remember books and movies and songs.

The Stuff Games are Made Of

It is relatively easy to remember that I have played a game. If you give me a board game or a video game I can tell you if I’ve played it or watched someone playing it. And if the game is particularly memorable there might be specific moments about that game I can pull out of my mind.

There are tons of moments that I remember vividly when it comes to games.

Checkers and Baseball are how I connected with my grandfather.

Grilled Cheese and Checkers

Or how Magic the Gathering helped me stave off loneliness when I didn't have many friends in high school, and also how I made and kept some of my closest friends in high school.

I can distinctly remember playing Mini Metro while I listened to the audiobook for Brandon Sanderson's fourth Way of Kings novel, Oathbringer.¹

But all of those memories are tied to specific places and times in my life in a way that almost consumes the experience of the game itself. In some sense it’s easier to see the humanity on the page or in the song than it is to see the humanity in the rules of a game. The game falls away and the people are all that remains.

If you've spent 200 hours in Slay the Spire, or even 10,000 hours playing a sport, how much of that actual sport do you remember. How much becomes an abstract wash of an idea or a feeling? And how much gets connected to other memories in our mind. Because games fit into our lives we often don't remember the game itself but the moment or the people.

That indistinct connection between games and memory gives games a sort of strange power that other forms of art don’t have. They can slip in and out of our daily lives so easily in ways that a book or even a podcast can’t. We can idly play Wordle while we sit at a desk and barely remember how we finished the game. But if we zone out while listening to a podcast we have to go back if we want to actually remember what happened. The loose connection between the content of the game and the rules that undergird it is a feature, not a bug.

Games Have Lots of Different Modes

It’s reductive to say that all games create memories the same way though. Games have many different ways they attach themselves to us. They can burrow deep in our lives, to the point they become core memories (this is the space that sports and hobbies exist).

Games can also be totally ephemeral. I suspect people who play Dots or Candy Crush or Bejeweled don't specifically remember playing the game persay. There's no markers to attach or hold onto.

And there are other games that feel big and bombastic and attach themselves to popular culture in ways that feels like more traditional movies and art. Portal (and Portal 2) or Breath of the Wild where the game does really feel different and individually memorable. The "where were you when" idea applies. Assassin's Creed, and The Last of Us also come to mind.

I don't think it's a mistake that for a long time this type of game was the most popular. Right up until everyone realized loot boxes are legal gambling and a great way to exchange head space for cash.

I don't think it's an accident that the games we commonly associate this idea with games that are more cinematic and three dimensional. I don't think it's accidental that these are the sorts of games that so vividly captured culture for a while. They're the types of games that map onto existing stories that are much more easily packaged for sharing in ways that other types of games aren't.

Categories of Memories

One of the more commons ways I’ve seen people talk about games is the category of memories they create. Polygon talked about this with their articles “Cousin Games”, the concept that there are types of games that you only played with your cousins. My “cousin game” story is a bit different because my cousin was the primary way I could play Super Mario.

But there are other classes of memories too that float around popular culture: LAN parties, online gaming sessions, and magic tournaments come to mind. In each of these cases, listening to people talk about them, you’ll almost always hear them talk about the scene and the people (and the title of the game) more than a specific character or piece of action.

On a recent episode of My Perfect Console with Daniel Pemberton (the film composer), he recounted his experience of going to an arcade with friends and trying to beat this game. The experience of getting to and from the game and the time with his friends took up almost as much weight in the story.

And sports memories belong in their own subsection. These are moments have attached themselves to popular culture like the immaculate catch or the hand of god. These moments get captured and replayed over and over again.

Modern games have stuff like this too. Elden Ring’s “Let Me Solo Her” player, who single-handedly took down one of the most impressive bosses in the game. That moment feels indelible. A representation of the game without capturing its experience entirely.

Does Any of This Matter?

Basically no.

We will continue to play and enjoy games. In that sense none of this matters. I could pull up the facts and figures of the success of the financial side of the game industry. But also it doesn’t matter because the transmission of games seems to sustain itself just fine without particularly coherent ways in pop culture to talk about the ways we remember and love games.

Basically yes.

It does matter though because it means the only places you find people able to opine about the beauty of games are the people who are already so deep in the medium that they basically count as a sort of leader in an arcane practice. I don’t think it’s an accident that if you read someone like Joe Posnanski write about baseball, or listen to the Cracking the Cryptic guys talk about Sudoku, or the Eggplant Show talk about the intricacies of Spelunky, similar themes about the beauty and mystery of those experiences pop up.

Sometimes it can feel like you have to be immersed in the culture of it to even start to talk about it. And I think as long as that’s the case, games will always feel like this mystical realm, full of magic but at arm’s length to culture.

Games That Stuck

That all said, there are games that stick with us, both in content, and form and memory. And those games can be truly special. These aren’t necessarily games that we play all our lives, but they’re the games where the idea behind the games is so interesting, it lingers. For me, those games are:

Fidel Dungeon Rescue

If there is one game, the game, that has stuck with me, it’s Fidel Dungeon Rescue. It certainly doesn’t hurt that I think the creator is a brilliant game designer. But there’s something about the way it manages to be a puzzle game, without feeling like an overly arcane puzzle game, while also telling this (at least for me) surprisingly affecting story about a dog traversing the underworld to reconnect with their owner, that hit home.

Plants versus Zombies

Plants versus Zombies felt like the first game I played with a specific point of view. It wasn’t that it was particularly challenging to beat. It’s that it combined a really interesting hook, with a fun concept that it explored in a variety of ways, and then ended. It was one of the first digital games I really shared with my dad. It feels like a relic now, because games like this are heavily monetized and basically don’t end.

That’s All

Thanks for reading for another week! I’m planning on follow up with another article about memory next week, but this time about memory games!

1. There’s nothing particularly meaningful to me in my life about that moment, I guess, it’s just fascinating how the combination of those experiences etched themselves into my brain.