A Lantern Called Desire: Time Travel, Space Nostalgia, and Desiring-Machines in The Great Perhaps

Articulated through time travel mechanics and post-Communist aesthetics, the indie game The Great Perhaps (Caligari Games 2019) is an example of the trend known as space nostalgia. The game portrays representations of past, contemporary, and future Russian societies using narrative strategies that substitute the context of a perpetual—yet unstartable—cycle for the context of origin and the worldbuilding of its representations—as both socialist societies and the real world. This fact turns the time of the game from history into an impossible, private nostalgic time of its own making. Following the deleuzian concepts of desiring-machines and the body without organs this paper argues that, through the use of desire, nostalgia, and the protagonist’s imperative need to save his family as narrative and worldbuilding strategies, the game presents a ludic argument about nostalgia and the impossibility to live in the past by means of a time paradox that turns its hero into a desiring-machine whose by-products are a miraculating-machine, that projects the hero’s desire into reality, and a body without organs, embodied in a monster destined to haunt the protagonist. The paper concludes that the representations portrayed by the game and its miraculating-machine carry a post-Soviet retro-futuristic nostalgia and aesthetics as well as a prospective nostalgia that looks to the future of the current generation rather than its Soviet past.