For the holidays, my wonderful partner Jamie bought me what might be the best gift I've ever received for not having had any idea I could want such a thing before ripping off the wrapping. This gift was a Kirby bath mat.

The only Kirby game I've played in my life is Kirby Air Ride on Gamecube growing up - and, I guess, Super Smash Bros, if you count that. While I loved Air Ride and have fond memories of ripping around in free play on the back of a star-powered motorcycle thing for hours on end, the character Kirby has not factored into what I would count as a meaningful game experience for me for many, many years.

And, yet, I hold the little pink puffball near and dear. Nothing brought me more joy than unwrapping Kirby and displaying it proudly on Jamie and my tiled bathroom floor.

Now, Kirby makes me happy each time I step out of the shower. I towel off with a smile on my face. The rug is so soft and pink and cute. It makes what once was a plain old bathroom into the second or third nerdiest room in our house (which is saying something). I love it.

Examining my love for this gift and Kirby in general has led me to ponder what it is about video games that gives us the warm and fuzzies. More than any other art form, video games have staying power, transforming childhood pastimes into lifelong fixations. Look no further than the Pokémon plushie collection at major conferences like Gen Con - or Jamie and my upstairs media room, for that matter - to see the absolutely massive impact that video game nostalgia has had on entire generations, from Fortnight kids all the way up through sixty and seventy year old adults nerding out on retro pinball tables and arcade cabinets.

Games matter so much to us because they help us feel. They evoke freedom, joy, and even coziness, and the world's most iconic franchises bottle up these feelings and sell them back to us when we wish our lives could be filled with just a little bit more of them each day. Having familiar and beloved symbols from our favorite games in our homes and places of work does fulfill this wish, to a degree. A small feeling of twee-nerd comfort washes over me each time I flip on my Mario lamp shaped like the series' iconic Prize Block or cuddle the Dragonite my friend Jack bought me.

However, video game nostalgia is not all hugs and smiles. The commercialization of nostalgia, a feeling which - I now realize, by my own argument - is but well-aged (even fermented?) freedom, joy and coziness, is big business. It pads the pockets of wealthy people and likely accelerates deleterious working conditions and labor atrocities in countries far removed from targeted consumers. The fact that the majority of franchises I've mentioned here are owned by Nintendo - the industry's premiere purveyor of nostalgia - lends a jadedness to the company behind the world's most well-known and loveable video game characters.

Let me be clear. I don't think supporting Nintendo is necessarily a bad thing. They make games I love, and I want the market to reward them for doing so. Because we live in a capitalist system in which games would not get made if people didn't cough up their sixty bucks for each new release. Corporations exist to make money, and all video game companies take advantage of nostalgia to create longtail revenue streams for their most treasured franchises. Just because Nintendo does it most successfully doesn't mean they should be vilified any more than Sony with its Last of Us statuettes, Microsoft for its desire to put Minecraft on every T-shirt in America, or - say - Epic for making the most popular game in the world in which, coincidentally, Boba Fett can wear Spiderman gloves and dab after shooting John Wick in the face.

And, look - I will always think Kirby is cute. Mario and Luigi anything will never not be cool.

In spite of my more critical analysis above, I can't help but smile when I see Snorlax catching a nap in the aisle at Target, Walmart, or [INSERT CHAIN STORE HERE].

He's green. He's soft and far smaller than he'd be in real life. And he is thirty dollars.

I don't buy him, but I love him. And love, unlike nostalgia, is priceless.