Pixelnauts.net

Even knowing whether we the recreation is accurate will become a near impossible feat within only a few decades. As living first hand accounts of games in their heyday dwindle over the coming decades, verifying the meta experience will soon prove impossible.

Perhaps the least obvious of these intangible experiences is scarcity -- if only for the reason that it's also the greatest benefit over original consoles. Yet since the benefit and problems surrounding scarcity are directly tied to a ROM's mass availability, the issue is both the easiest and most difficult of all the presented problems. Our brains are magnificent at parsing reward structures. We value something far more when  obtaining it requires sacrifice. Whether that effort was spent working to gain money or during its acquisition, a reward means more when we have to trade something for it. Such logic is extended even further since often the reward means more when more effort is exerted.

If you've wondered why you've rarely, if ever, invested more than a few hours into an emulated game, it because of the ROM's value assignment. When every title exists at your fingertips, probably for free, then there was no investment in the acquisition of an experience. Compounding this problem is the information overload from suddenly having access to so many titles -- most of which are complete crap. The end result is disillusionment and attention deficit as you jump from title to title. Even if a game is good, the mindset that there could be something better often overpowers any tenacity the current experience may offer.

While a rational response to such a problem would be to either limit the number of titles, or the frequency of game swapping, such an answer is anything but easy. That's because people believe they prefer more choice, when in reality their satisfaction diminishes as choices increase. Sadly, even if we are aware of this inherent human behavior, the temptation is often too great to actively discourage it even in ourselves.

One possible solution is to decrease ease of access by placing only a handful or titles in the main folder at any given time. Unfortunately, such a solution requires constant reminders to maintain a task, and as New Year's resolutions show, resolve weakens overtime. On top of that, the issue of sacrifice is still unaddressed. The only practical and coincidentally, legal solution I've seen to reintroduce scarcity is a project called Retrode. By using a physical cartridge instead of a rom, both scarcity and value are restored to the experience. However, such a solution also allows for rom files so the primary benefit of availability isn't torn out of the concept of emulation.

Sadly, the last component lacking in emulation, contextual experience, has no answer in sight. Recreating the experience of playing a game during its prime is something that, at least as far as I can comprehend, is unsolvable, regardless of nostalgia. It's but a fond remembrance; not a recreation of an experience. While it can make a mediocre game enjoyable, it cannot diminish your refined tastes to that of your six year-old self. Five minutes replaying a once-loved, but terrible game quickly illustrates this concept. For those titles which we have no direct playing experience to pull from, its tempting to assume we could overcome this obstacle by pulling context through an historical analysis of the culture. Such an endeavor would prove futile though since we know the results from older, more studied media. All an academic approach like this can do is illuminate why a person or group of people would react to an event. It can't reproduce an accurate transference of emotions.