Nostalgic gaming: how playing the video games of your youth reconnects you to yourself

Nick Bowman gestures to the old-fashioned gaming consoles littering his desk. "Whenever I am having kind of a crappy day, I pull out the Nintendo," he says, pointing. I also have a Raspberry Pi that I have all my emulators on. Bowman, an associate professor of journalism and creative media industries at Texas Tech University, has a vast collection of consoles and hundreds of cartridges and discs. Like me, he grew up in a time when video games were intimately tied to a physical device.