BCM215 has been one of the most insightful subjects I have taken in my degree. In honesty, over the past 5 or so years, I have lacked playing games, I only really enjoyed Candy Crush and Flappy Bird on my phone. However, the subject enhanced my understanding of the gaming industry, shifting my focus to specific frameworks and giving me further knowledge on games I previously loved. During this subject, the most poignant attribute was the feeling of nostalgia when talking about games I used to play as a child, hence the topic of my digital artefact “Nostalgia In Gaming”.

I wanted to do something I was interested in for my digital artefact and the feeling of nostalgia itself is, I believe, a really comforting aspect. For blog posts I made within BCM215, I talked in the majority, games I played as a child in relation to the analytic frameworks we learnt, such as Nintendogs and Sim city. Whilst talking about said games, I found myself reminiscing on memories of my childhood and the immense joy I found from playing video games. More specifically, I reminisced on the pleasure I received from playing WII and Nintendo games as a child, games such as WII Sports, Cooking Mama and Mario and Sonic: The Olympic games. I felt a strong desire to clean my dusty WII/Nintendo consoles and dive back into the games I once adored in response to these memories, so I did. In other digital artefacts, I have taken part in, I’ve centrally used TikTok, a popular short video streaming application that has taken the world by storm since early 2019. I have found the app to be extremely easy and efficient to use so I immediately thought it would be best for this subject too. By incorporating both Tiktok and playing my old WII and Nintendo games, I came to the idea of recording short videos on the popular gaming app of myself reacting to my old games on these platforms, describing how I feel whilst playing.  Starting with a solid foundation, I hoped to post videos fortnightly on Tiktok, utilising both my Nintendo DS and Wii console, however, I faced some obstacles. Once pitching my idea in the subject, I began to seek out both of these gaming devices, only finding my WII console nestled away. Unfortunately, my Nintendo DS was never found, which required some adjusting to my digital artefact idea. I also found that it was difficult to maintain a consistent and steady schedule, posting every Friday whilst working and doing university full time.  Along with the lost device and difficulty with scheduling, I found it hard to show my emotions and reactions in response to the WII games, finding it had little effect in the videos. Instead, I decided I would film an assortment of clips involving me playing the chosen game in one short video, finishing each segment with a rating out of 10 and a yes or no answer on whether it makes me feel nostalgic or not.

Overall, I made 8 TikTok videos for my digital artefact. Each video was around 15-30 seconds long and had an arrangement of around 4-7 clips with relevant music in the background. I aimed to post the videos at times I believed would reach the largest number of audiences as well as target my videos at the age group of 16-30 as they were more likely to relate to the video content and the corresponding nostalgic feeling. As a guideline for my digital artefact, I used the scholarly journal by a range of different psychologists and gaming fanatics called “Once Upon A Game: exploring video game nostalgia and its impact on well-being”, the journal studies the emotion of humans in response to playing retro games that were part of their childhood (Wulf, 2018). The journal studied and focused on the psychology of individuals playing old games they played as children, highlighting the nostalgia and related emotions. I hoped my digital artefact to be able to relate my secondary research from the scholarly journal with my own findings based on how I felt playing the games and how my audience responded to watching these games.

Although I hoped for a mixture of responses to my videos, I got little to no views on my videos, despite my particular timing on posting and using popular sounds to attract the most attention. This was very unfortunate yet going into this subject, I knew it would be difficult to get large attraction on such videos.

In coherence with the analytic frameworks, we learnt throughout this semester, and as I addressed in my blog post, my digital artefact is centred around interactivity, virtuality, Multimediality and connectivity. Each framework shaping my digital artefact into its final product. My nostalgia TikToks were based on 3 main concepts, these being technology, time, and nostalgia. Having these concepts and frameworks, I somewhat successfully created my final established digital artefact.

Despite the little attention I got from my videos in this subject, I still thoroughly enjoyed creating my digital artefact and delving into games I enjoyed so much as a child whilst feeling highly nostalgic. BCM215 has been an extraordinary subject to take part of. Making these videos have been son much fun and now I’ve found myself playing them weekly! Check out my TikTok for all the videos!

MY DA:
https://www.tiktok.com/@juliajanejohnson?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1