Monday Tip-Off: Nostalgia Goggles vs. Recency Bias
We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on the battle between nostalgia goggles and recency bias.
For a long time – indeed, pretty much as soon as I hit my thirties ten years ago – I’ve found myself defending nostalgia. It’s not surprising. When we’re young, sneering at the older generation and all their silly likes and beliefs, we think we’ll be immune to suffering the same fate. After all, when you’re still in the younger demographic that pop culture is catering to, you don’t consider the next generation that’ll be mocking you the same way you’ve scornfully dismissed your elders! You don’t see yourself getting stuck in your ways, or your tastes and views ever becoming old-fashioned.
To once again reference an iconic and insightful scene from The Simpsons however, it’ll happen to you! You’ll realise just how divisive nostalgic opinions can be as the years go by. Not everyone is nostalgic of course, and the backlash to nostalgia – which often carries the accusation of wearing those proverbial nostalgia goggles – doesn’t just come from the younger crowd. It’s very strange to see one of your generational peers denouncing what you both grew up with, and claiming that new is always better, without any further nuance or exceptions. In any case, it draws up the generational battlelines as we accuse each other of recency bias, or donning nostalgia goggles.
While this battle didn’t begin with Millennials like me – the aforementioned Simpsons scene came from writers that have years on my generation – I definitely think we’re experiencing it differently due to online spaces and the 24-hour news cycle. During the explosion of nostalgic online content creation in the mid to late 2000s, the charge was being led by Millennials and younger Gen X, who were feeling a combination of nostalgia and a desire to revisit childhood favourites with a critical eye. The internet was our space to create that content and have those conversations. We were also the ones on message boards and in chat rooms, staking our claim on the digital frontier.
There were older people online, too; Millennials certainly didn’t discover or create the internet and those spaces! However, as teenagers and young adults, we were far more inclined to inhabit them. We were driving conversations, becoming content creators, and perhaps most importantly, still being catered to by pop culture. Whether it was a new trend or a property with burgeoning nostalgia, our generation was still in the key demographic. Just look at the difference in reactions to Michael Jordan’s return with The Jordan Challenge in NBA 2K11, and the mode’s redux in NBA 2K23. Come 2022, there were younger gamers to which it didn’t have the same nostalgic appeal.
Social media and the 24-hour news cycle also favour sensationalism in the form of hot takes and performative debate. Not that that wasn’t a thing with message boards and the like, but it’s harder to log off and disconnect from the discourse when the internet is in our pockets. Back in the 90s, there was certainly comparison of eras in the NBA, but without the need to generate content 24/7, there wasn’t as much of an advantage in stoking the flames of generational debates. That’s not to say that there wasn’t a battle of nostalgia goggles vs. recency bias to some extent, but it wasn’t a constant talking point. Furthermore, dismissal of the past was considered ignorant, rather than trendy.
Mind you, nostalgia wasn’t unquestioningly accepted, either. Then and now, the concept of nostalgia goggles is quite real. As I said, as many of us get older, our desire to defend aspects of the past and continue to hold it in high esteem can sneak up on us. In turn, we can become close-minded as it pertains to new games, shows, films, and yes, eras in sports. It doesn’t help when the history that we lived through is dismissed and downplayed so readily by younger people with far less experience and knowledge, but I can’t deny that nostalgia can skew one’s vision. It’s just that recency bias can be just as misleading, and prone to shaping stubbornly closed-minded views.
What bothers me as someone who defends nostalgia – admittedly more than it should, since it’s a deliberately provocative ad hominem – is the attempted psychoanalysis that comes from people dumping on the past. “You just miss your childhood, when life was easy and made sense,” they say, their words dripping with an implied tenting of the fingers, and mock-pitying condescending chuckle. They might make an insulting claim about arrested development, and misuse other such psychological terms. This way, they don’t even have to counter your arguments. It deftly dismisses them out of hand, by framing your opinion as a sign of being an adult that’s struggling to function.
Not only is this incredibly insulting and also disrespectful towards real mental health issues, but it’s so easy to turn that layman’s psychoanalysis back on them! It could just as easily be suggested that anyone who subscribes to recency bias is afraid of aging, with a desperate neediness to stay on top of trends and appear cool. One could assert that it’s projection born of insecurity about a lack of knowledge, or an immature belief that contrarian opinions are always correct. If it’s an older person bashing the past, just declare that they’re conflating unhappy childhood experiences with a knee-jerk distaste for that era. Well, don’t, but it’d be on par with their insulting psychobabble!
My point is that recency bias is just as emotional, just as personal, and obviously, just as biased, as nostalgia goggles. They’re two sides of the same coin: a long fondness vs. a fresh impression, an established legacy vs. an exciting new development, and tradition vs. novelty. They involve the same feelings: a strong sense of attachment to an event, product, work of art, or period of time, the desire to have and experience the best, and a firm belief in our opinions and a need for them to be validated. The irony is that as much as nostalgia goggles and recency bias are at odds, they also prove each other’s point. They hold up a mirror to each other, exposing the follies that they share.
After all, while it’s fair to say that nostalgia goggles blind us to the faults and failures of the past, and that all eras have their hits and misses, that should also be a lesson about the present. Just as not everything was perfect “back in the day”, there are busts and blunders today, too. Recency bias, and that desire to be in a golden age, can make us just as myopic about the present as nostalgia can make us about the past; either way, we want “our time” to be the pinnacle. Today’s recency bias is just tomorrow’s nostalgia goggles, and the things we champion should be able to hold up to scrutiny. We should be able to critique them when they’re contemporary, and also in hindsight.
To that point, I will say that while getting older doesn’t mean always being right, it does grant us more experience and insights. Sure, it’s foolish to write off anything and everything just because it’s new, but when you notice similar shortcomings and flaws to something you’ve seen before, it invites scepticism. I’ve seen enough bad films and TV shows, games and technology that failed to live up to the hype, NBA prospects that were busts, and so on, to believe we’ve miraculously achieved perfection across the board nowadays. Once again, recognising those parallels should be a lesson to us all to not stubbornly speak in absolutes, ignoring nostalgia goggles and recency bias.
I’ll admit that when it comes to the battle between nostalgia goggles and recency bias, I tend to side with the nostalgic contingent. Certainly, I have a personal connection here – I’m not without bias – but with the shifting demographics and manufactured debate, I do feel that certain elements of the past are being unfairly maligned more often than they’re unduly romanticised. It seems as though recency bias is getting away with myopia that nostalgic views are chided for. It’s undoubtedly a product of aging out of pop culture’s key demographic, but I’ll argue that it’s also recognising the youthful follies of my generation, as much as it’s grumbling about “kids these days”.
As I said, I do remember the busts, flops, and predictions that aged like milk from my younger days. I recall being scornful when pundits and fans were clamouring to name a “Next Jordan” in the mid to late 90s. Sure, some of it was zealous fanaticism for my favourite player, but I also observed what I can now recognise as recency bias. Some of the players that were being hyped up as the “Air Apparent” still had so much to prove, and almost all of them fell well-short for one reason or another. It taught me that while bold predictions can be fun, it’s entirely fair to doubt and question them. It was also my first taste of the manufactured debate that social media now thrives upon.
Although I’ve been alluding to examples from discussions about real basketball so far, this absolutely applies to video games as well. It’s why I loathe the “everyone hates the latest NBA 2K, but claims to love it later” rhetoric; an assertion that is heavily influenced by recency bias, while dismissing praise of older releases as the result of nostalgia goggles. I’m not saying there isn’t any truth to it, because our nostalgia can smooth over the rough edges of an old favourite, and a new game that we’re getting used to is competing with fond memories of titles we came to love. Once a game is beloved, we may forget our early gripes with it, or how broken it was before a patch.
At the same time, if you go back and look at the early reactions to a lot of games, you will find plenty of positivity that gives way to more honest criticism later on. This is the honeymoon phase that I’ve discussed before, and it’s applicable to many games over the years. Recency bias, and the understandable desire to enjoy the new release that we’ve just spent money on, distorts our view just as much as the nostalgia goggles that we fondly gaze at old favourites through. We only need to look at the history of NBA 2K, NBA Live, and other video game series, to see that not every new release turned out to be an improvement, but also that many great titles have been surpassed.
Even though I’m more inclined to defend maligned bygone days, the plain truth is that nostalgia goggles and recency bias both affect our ability to critique past and present. We can argue which is worse and a more ignorant or emotionally-charged position to take, but as I said, they’re two sides of the same coin. If your entire argument is that the other side is biased – and especially if it involves any amateur psychoanalysis – it’s not to be taken seriously! Unfortunately, that approach often wins the performative debate, and provides like-minded people with a buffet of thought-terminating clichés to trot out in future conversations. I wish the discourse was more thoughtful than that.
Needless to say, I don’t expect that pointing this out will result in sweeping changes to how we all interact when it comes to our hobbies and interests. Still, as they say, be the change you want to see! Something that I’m trying to keep in mind when I make comparisons, and rate and rank, is to lift up what I’m championing more than I put down what I’m arguing against. In other words, explaining why or how something or someone is better rather than the comparison, rather than declaring that the latter is terrible. Nostalgia goggles and recency bias both have a tendency to lower the bar, which ironically makes whatever they’re championing actually look less impressive.
Being an Elder Millennial, I’m more likely to notice and object to this technique being employed as a part of recency bias; the whole “plumbers and dentists” and “everyone pretends to like old video games to hate on new ones” rhetoric that grinds my gears. I won’t pretend that those arguments aren’t made while sporting nostalgia goggles as well though, so this isn’t just me wagging a scolding finger at those darn kids. It’s a reminder for me as well, and anyone else with similarly nostalgic opinions. The battle between nostalgia goggles and recency bias will undoubtedly rage on, but we can still strive for level-headed discussions, free of logical fallacies and armchair diagnosis.
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