The Video That Started It All
17 years later.
So this trailer came out and it was magical.
I watched it a dozen times. It caused physical reactions because height depictions. It almost made me cry. The lucid dream feeling was insane. I had deep disappointment coming, but this was before i even knew what a hype train was. I was DEEPLY on board.
Why the game actually sucks to the point of me not playing beyond the first 5-10 minutes is not the topic here. But it is relevant.
17 years later I’m making breakfast and the song pops into my head.
And I’m moved when I hear it in full. At this temporal range it becomes a massive nostalgic bomb. But I never played the game… How can I feel inarguable nostalgia for something I didn’t experience?
The tightness of the loop here allowed clarity. What could it have possible been? Hope. I had overwhelming hope tied to strong visceral reminders. So why was I so sad? Because it wasn’t hope anymore. I knew now the game sucked. I was not gonna get my free running lucid dream simulator. I got a chore rail fighting game instead. Your typical try hard platformer test.
I had the mournful memory of a hope that could now never be satisfied. Like remembering how excited you were to take a dog no longer with us to a beach you never actually went to.
I sit down to the AI and I ask about all this, and it turns out no one before me has realized what nostalgia is. And so i think here’s my chance, I can finally use these new AI tools and write myself into a PHD. I figure I’ll never luck into an answer that’s genuinely new ever again. (O.O)
So I go all in. I tell the AI to write me a PHD thesis. Like 100 pages comes out. Later, they change the rules and remove the paper, which is fine with me. Here’s the dead link. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qa48r_v1
Later I wrote a newer shorter version… https://zenodo.org/records/17080076
I’m still right, and no one cares. But it got me thinking about writing papers and asking where I can post them without a degree…
The rest is history.
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTUA
Really interesting post, including your linked abstracts. What you posit about nostalgia seems highly plausible.
"This paper introduces the Invalidated Hope Theory, a novel framework reconceptualizing nostalgia as the visceral reminder of hopes that have been invalidated. [....]"