Anecdotes of Reexperience

Do you remember the first time?

I remember the first time. Well, some memories are clearer than others, but I remember the first time for a variety of things: I remember hearing songs like Mary Had a Little Lamb and Happy Birthday to You; I remember kicking a soccer ball and hurting myself; and I remember walking to school alone and playing my first video game. Some experiences are good and others are bad. Sometimes I get the craving to go back and do something again to see if I can recapture the feeling I got from it originally. Rarely I do reexperience the feeling, and more often I experience an echo of that feeling through its memory. In other words, I experience nostalgia. Sometimes that’s enough for me, other times it’s not enough. Habituation and dishabituation are both processes that play a role that I figured I’d mention here as they relate to how I find comfort in the same thing but also renewed interest in a variation of the same thing. All right, that’s enough with the preface. This’ll be a mix of personal stories and thinking through writing.

Harry Potter

For a lot of people, Harry Potter was their introduction to the experiences of fantasy and reading. Since the books were released, movie adaptations of them were made and now there’s a planned television series about them. Recreating the beloved series in different formats certainly can attract audiences who hadn’t experienced the books before, though a large portion of the audience that watched (and will watch) these adaptations likely already read (or will read) the books. The question is “Why?” Why bother reexperiencing the same story? Well, though I sort of already answered it, I myself enjoyed the story and it’s fun to see it told differently. It’s even fun to re-read the exact same books. The reasons for the former may be more obvious (e.g., film is a different format than book, Alfonso Cuarón is not J. K. Rowling and thus will have a different take on the story) than reasons for the latter. My reasons for re-reading the Harry Potter books include refreshing my memory, experiencing a sense of familiarity alike the feeling of returning home after an extended time away, experiencing new insights that I didn’t notice before, and informing my own creativity and inspiration for storytelling. Other people likely have different reasons. I pretty much have the same reasons when I rewatch the Harry Potter films. Doing it is overall fun. What likely adds to the reexperiencing of Harry Potter is how much of a cultural impact it had—I mean, it was big. That it was such an intense experience in the first place is important. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t really care to go back and reexperience it.

The Legend of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda has been my favorite franchise ever since I first played Wind Waker. The sense of exploration, adventure, and puzzle-solving has always provided enjoyment no matter how many times I replay or reexperience the games. It wasn’t the first video game I played, but it was thoroughly, intensely, enjoyable. It was so enjoyable that I use it as a measuring stick to judge my enjoyment of other Zelda games. This relates to two different topics, one being replayability and the other being diminishing returns. I wanted to particularly expound on replayability with regards to this franchise.

That I experienced Wind Waker first likely factors into why I find it the most enjoyable to replay. That it’s the best game in the franchise (totally no bias here) also likely factors into why I replay it the most. Taking the nostalgia factor out (to the best of my ability), it’s interesting to see and ask what about the game does keep bringing me back. Though most Zelda games don’t really have “great” stories, the story of Wind Waker itself was interesting and the antagonist Ganondorf was arguably the most interesting and relatable out of the whole franchise’s antagonists. Its art design lends itself well to being relatively timeless compared to other older games like Ocarina of Time. I think one of the bigger important points that make it so replayable is that it has the best balance between its main story and side quests. The main story is fun to progress through on its own, but it also opens up more opportunities for different things the further you go. Testing out and learning what you could go and do at any given point in the story was worthwhile to see if it could be done earlier which would then create an alternative experience with the main story due to having done something you did later in your previous playthrough earlier in your replay. An example in the Mario franchise is how in Super Mario Sunshine you can go to the windmill to fight Petey Piranha in Bianco Hills on the level you’re supposed to defeat a goop monster. In Wind Waker, there’re tons of opportunities to see when you can finally venture out into the ocean beyond where the main story is telling you to go. The game also automatically introduces the prospect of new experiences when you first beat the game in that you restart from the beginning with a super cool-colored save file. From there, you also notice how when you start playing that save file Link has different clothes, Link’s otherwise empty item bag already has the Deluxe Picto Box, and there’s new dialogue. No Zelda game since has really catered to the idea of replayability the same way as Wind Waker.

This may be going on a tangent, but I don’t care. I have thoughts about Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Both games are massive in scale and content, and that works to both games’ detriment (TotK more so than BotW). There is so much content but so little of it is enjoyable. The scarcity of those enjoyable moments makes replaying either game to reexperience those moments a slog. Additionally, since both games give you free rein to do anything and everything at any given moment, it’s not worthwhile to replay the games to reexperience a moment differently. No matter what you do, those moment will always be the same. Not to sound morbid, but that’s tantamount to death. Their replay value is dead. It’s the unfortunate consequence of both open-world games, in that no piece of story progress or completed side content affects the rest of either game. This sort of brushes upon the topic of diminishing returns, as both BotW and TotK are designed with an emphasis on the first playthrough. They are both about the initial discovery and experience, not the reexperience. Follow-up experiences, thus, diminish exponentially quicker than the other games in the Zelda franchise.

Souvenir

Well, apparently I’ve discovered that I can take these yawn-filled days

And turn them into movies

I’ve found the secret and trick to it

Under this sky where we don’t get along, I closed my heart and locked it

That’s how I’ve managed to live my life

And the melodies now overlap

I wanted a sign, no matter how small

That I could actually find better than any streetlight

I put a ribbon on each of the sights that my eyes pick out

And I collect them like souvenirs as I continue down this path home

The seasons each say hello, and I shed a few tears as I go

Where should I begin to talk about this way home that you’ve given me

These are some lyrics from the song Souvenir by Bump of Chicken. I found them fitting to evoke my thoughts on this topic of reexperience. No, I won’t do a song analysis.

Songs and music more than anything else have an uncanny quality that allows them to be listened to over and over again with minimal diminishment to the pleasure of those listening. There are plenty of songs I like to listen to on repeat or listen to again after a long time of not hearing it. That’s pretty much all I have to say about strictly music, but I figured I’d talk more generally about the idea of souvenirs.

My go-to listening app (because cassettes, CDs, and records are antiquated) is Spotify, and so that’s the primary way I find and listen to songs. Spotify playlists serve a function for me as collections of what I enjoy, similarly as libraries for records and CDs would be part of someone’s collection. Picking and choosing songs I like and keeping them gathered in a place I can find is comforting. This is true for other things I enjoy like DVDs, video game discs, board games, Pokémon cards, and interesting rocks or coins. Something pretty common is the giving of cards for various events like celebrations and losses. I’m not much a fan of event cards, but I imagine they hold value to people and it can be nice to collect them and look back on the various birthdays you’ve had. Yearbooks, too, serve a similar function. There’s plenty of stuff I like to hold onto as a souvenir, and it does make me question if it’s bordering on hoarding. I suppose the way I distinguish it, other than the obvious in that it’s not cluttering my living space, is that it’s not necessarily the thing I’m holding onto but love.

There’s a little game called World of Warcraft. Some might have heard of it. It’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that came out in 2004 and it was among the first experiences I had playing something with other people. In terms of experiences, playing it was a bona fide experience. Yessir, a real humdinger of an experience. In this little game, there are little things called items. It’s kind of crazy. Anyway, these items are things that the player (I) could collect. So I did. I collected items like weapons for fighting monsters, armor for improving my character, food for replenishing my character’s health or mana points, and items that were useless and/or for novelty. What did I do with items I had no apparent use for? I either sold them, destroyed them, or put them in my in-game bank. Of these items, there was a gray (the poorest item quality) dagger I found from a chest on one of my first characters that was a dwarf rogue. The dagger was marginally better than the weapon I started off with, but it was quickly replaced by a better weapon rewarded from a quest. Despite that, I kept the dagger. I eventually lost interest in the character as I was more interested in a different faction and class, and I didn’t ever really return to playing that character. Though, oddly, I didn’t delete the character. It remained taking up a space on a limited number of characters I could play on a realm, similarly like that dagger took up a space in that character’s inventory. More time passed and eventually I moved on from World of Warcraft in the midst of when its Cataclysm expansion released. My account was eventually deleted. For some strange reason, I still think about that gray dagger on that character I never played on on that account that no longer exists. Or maybe it’s not strange at all.

Here in the year 2024 World of Warcraft is still an ongoing game that has a lot of versions. In 2019 WoW Classic (virtually the same game that was released in 2004) released, and since then the subsequent expansions of The Burning Crusade Classic, Wrath of the Lich King Classic, and now more recently Cataclysm Classic have been released. They’re pretty much re-releases. I’ve been enjoying replaying the game and reexperiencing them, as well as having new experiences. It’s crazy to think that there’s a market for gamers who want to play a game again. Or maybe it’s not crazy at all. All these things I’ve collected, real or virtual, have some value. I like to look at them, and if I no longer have them then I like to simply remember them, and think: that happened.