Retro Resonance: The Hauntological Power of Post-Retro Aesthetics in Videogames

Modern mainstream video games, or AAA games, are perpetually pushing toward hyperrealist graphics and complex gameplay, requiring higher budgets and ever-growing development teams while controlling risk as much as possible. The result is a homogenized product that appeals to the sensibilities of a limited demographic of young, white or Japanese, straight, non-disabled, and neurotypical men and end up excluding or alienating others. This state of the industry has historically been seen as not only unproblematic, but as normal. This is partly due to our current state of “capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009), where society not only sees oppressive capitalist practices as natural but cannot even imagine an alternative. Santiago Zabala (2017) claims that to break out of naturalizing ideologies like capitalist realism we need an aesthetic force: something to shock us out of our distribution of the sensible (Rancière, 2011), our stable and secure sense of how the world is and interrupt the flow of this stagnant progressivism. I argue that one aesthetic force in video games are pixel graphics and simplified gameplay, or post-retro gaming (Fulton & Fulton, 2010) from recent games, that use hauntology to glean elements of the past to create new experiences and stories. Hauntology is a progressive artistic practice that imagines a better future by salvaging parts of the past (Fisher, 2012, 2014), more nuanced than regressive nostalgia, though it can be entangled with it. To explore the connection between hauntology and post-retro games, this project outlines the problems with AAA games industry, examines the misconceptions of indie games today, and lays out in detail the relation of hauntology to theories on affect, aesthetics, and video games. This is followed with a critical analysis of games such as Dys4ia (2012), Undertale (2015), and Celeste (2018) for how exactly they use hauntology to create powerful, affective experiences that subvert narratives and gameplay of the problematic video game mainstream and point to a better future in games. I conclude by problematizing commercial indie games and pointing ultimately to anti-capitalist, DIY gamemaking platforms, in particular the accessible, 1bit engine Bitsy, as the future of hauntology in games culture.