Gli elementi nostalgici dei punta-e-clicca italiani degli Anni Dieci = Nostalgic elements in Italian point-and-click video games of the 2010s

Abstract

This paper inquiries the insertion of nostalgic elements in Italian point-and-click video games of the 2010s, highlighting those elements that still survive in spite of being out-of-date from the points of view of technology and gameplay. After having clarified the notions of "point-and-click" and nostalgia, the paper presents the corpus of titles considered in the analysis, that is, thirty-seven Italian point-and-click video games of the last decade. The choice of such corpus is based on three reasons: limiting the size of the corpus to make it manageable; maintaining an adequate temporal distance from the classic and post-classic point-and-click video games, such a lapse of time being a precondition of nostalgia; focussing on video games "indie", a label including all the corpus's titles. Three categories of nostalgic insertion were detected: "technical", "thematically dense" and "thematically rarefied". The first includes titles technically similar to the classics (1990-1995), which they idealise and emulate by an explicit interface (e.g. SCUMM v. 4). The second comprises games whose inspiration is rather that of the second half of the Nineties, when new technological solutions were introduced (e.g. pseudo-3D). The third contains products more innovative than nostalgic, still interspersed with quotations. Three case studies are presented to testimony of these categories, respectively: Chronicle of Innsmouth (PsychoDev, 2017), Detective Gallo (Footprints Games, 2018) and The Wardrobe (C.I.N.I.C. Games, 2017).