The comfort of childhood media during lockdown
We are in Week 3 of social isolation, and I have regressed. The plush yellow duck of my youth has waddled out of storage and into my bed. Real pants are a distant memory. And all I want to do is play Myst, an immersive adventure computer game from the 1990s that I was obsessed with when I was 11.
Myst begins on a mysterious island, on a dock next to a sunken ship. As you traverse Myst Island — encountering riddles, age-worn letters and magic books that transport you to new “ages,” or levels of the game — you also unravel the story of Myst, which concerns an olde tyme teleporting family that loves drama. But the game’s real draw is its meditative atmosphere.
Much like in real life now, the player rarely encounters other people in Myst. It’s just you, an old windmill, an old library, an old lighthouse, an old rocket ship and several old clock towers. The gameplay involves clicking and occasionally dragging objects, but mostly wandering around befuddled. The soothing sounds of flowing water, crackling fires, flipping pages, groaning wooden elevators and satisfying mechanical clicks and whirs ought to be marketed separately as a sad-girl whitenoise machine.
The sounds are also the keys to solving the game’s often-frustrating puzzles, which means I
need to be listening to Myst all the time, as opposed to my husband. He recently solved his own puzzle, discovering that when I am holding my phone horizontally and am completely unresponsive, it’s Myst Time.
Myst Time is the opposite of News Time, Twitter Time and Doom Googling Coronavirus Projections Time. The immersive beauty of Myst feels particularly suited to a quarantine: At a time when I can’t go anywhere, it makes me feel far away, surrounded by lapping waves and opulent rugs and actual mist.
But sheltering in place has also activated a strong nostalgic urge. In this, I don’t think I’m alone. Last week, my colleague Astead Herndon imagined being quarantined with old Windows computer games like Minesweeper and 3D Pinball Space Cadet; I recently caught my husband playing a reconstruction of The Oregon Trail on a browser. (“You died of dysentery,” he told me.)
When I saw Herndon’s tweet, I immediately searched for iphone versions of early ’90s point-and-click adventure games like Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, the 7th Guest and Myst — and commenced my reversion. The demand for isolation has knocked me out of my adult life and sent me into a state weirdly reminiscent of childhood, which is the last time I was confined to my bedroom, my free will constrained by a higher authority. I used to play Myst hunched over my family’s hulking PC, homeoffice doors closed to the rest of my family, and now I play it with my phone in my face, mind blinkered to the rest of the world.
The Buzzfeed-style, “Are You a Real ’90s Kid?” brand of nostalgia that prevails online is often framed as an easy comfort, but nostalgia has darker roots. Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the word in a 1688 dissertation, defining nostalgia as “the melancholy that originates from the desire to return to one’s homeland.” He believed it could result in insomnia, stupor and even death.
The more recent understanding of nostalgia has recast it as a wistful longing for the past, but what’s happening right now feels tinged with a shade of that original, morbid definition. It’s not so much that I miss my childhood as that I feel seized by it. It’s a memory for my mind to visit when my body can’t go anywhere else, and a vain attempt to grasp control over my surroundings. Hofer described nostalgia as a pain that originated from separation, a feeling born of social isolation. It’s more about the disappointments of reality than the draw of the nostalgia object itself.
I’ve now traveled to every age in Myst, navigated each of its mazes and peered into all of its old telescopes. I beat the game, which ends with the player (spoiler alert, 27 years later) enabling the father of the teleporting family to commit the implied murder of his evil sons. I’ve departed Myst Island for Apartment Island, where I am left to roam in isolation for a new host to claim my attention, the sound of computer keys tapping in my ears, the glow of the App Store beckoning me in.