Jenna Johnston – Building 21

Jenna Johnston

Master's Student in Bioethics

BLUE Fellowship

2026

I Roll to Remember the Past: The Creation of an Interdisciplinary-Informed Game to Explore Nostalgia

What is nostalgia? Are there any universal constants of individual experiences with nostalgia? Can you intentionally evoke feelings of nostalgia?

This project analyzes the phenomenon of nostalgia through an interdisciplinary lens and seeks integrate our own lived experiences with nostalgia within the typical academic definitions of it. I question our typical conceptions of nostalgia and explore alternative understandings of what nostalgia could be and could entail. By approaching nostalgia from a variety of perspectives, I then aim to create a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) that allows for players to have an intentional space to better understand and explore their own experiences of nostalgia.

The Game

The final version of this game, entitled Past Retrievals (See Appendix 1), encourages players to dive deep and engage with their own feelings of nostalgia. Past Retrievals was created through the engaging and inspiring conversations generated by fellow B21 scholars. Its foundation rests on insights from philosophy, sociology, neuroscience, and theories of playing games. Because no singular discipline speaks to everyone’s individual experiences of nostalgia, this game does not seek to answer or define this phenomenon. Rather, it serves as an artifact for players to explore what nostalgia means for them, a conduit for experiences and emotions. During the final showcase, I created a space for people to play Past Retrievals and to engage in conversations about nostalgia. Because this game is a solo tabletop roleplaying game (solo TTRPG), no other players are needed except yourself. Please feel free to download these PDFs and play at your leisure!

This project does not end here! Moving forward, I am developing another version of this game, tentatively entitled Future Hopes, which seeks to ask players what they will be nostalgic for in the future. Despite months of work, questions about nostalgia remain, such as:

What (metaphysically) is nostalgia?
How is nostalgia connected to how we experience time?
Why do we feel nostalgic?
Do all beings (including animals) feel nostalgic?
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Past Retrievals, and other future iterations of this game still do not seek to give concrete answers to these questions, but instead give players the chance to contemplate them, and to create more questions in turn.