You can't go back to not knowing

There's a phrase that turns up in any conversation among people who have been playing for years, and that gets said half as a joke because saying it seriously is a little embarrassing: I miss being a noob.

It usually comes with an explanation that seems obvious. That the game was better before. That it's filled up with stuff. That it no longer has that feel.

That explanation has an advantage that's rare among nostalgic explanations: it can be tested.

The experiment almost nobody does all the way

The old versions still exist. They install in a few minutes, with no tricks and without paying anything. Anyone who believes the magic was in the 2013 version can have it running this afternoon.

Lots of people have done it. The result is usually the same: a game poorer than they remembered, with fewer things, clumsier, and not a trace of that feeling. The conclusion almost always drawn is that memory deceives and nostalgia invents.

That's too harsh a reading of oneself. Memory wasn't failing. What failed was the hypothesis: we took it for granted that what we missed was stored inside the game.

It wasn't. It was in us, and it was not knowing.

What habit devours

In 1917 the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote a few short pages about this that are still among the best things ever said on it.

His observation is that perception becomes automatic. What we see once, we feel; what we see a hundred times, we stop feeling and start recognising by a label. It's a saving the brain needs —you can't live in astonishment at the door handle— and it's also, he said, the way habit devours things: work, clothes, fear, the house you live in.

Against that he defined the task of art: to de-automatise. To present the familiar in a strange way so as to force us to look at it again, so that the stone is felt as stone once more instead of merely being identified as such.

Applied to a game, this explains the whole scene. The first cave, you perceived. Cave number two hundred, you recognise. The cave hasn't changed at all.

The bill for knowing how to play

From this comes an idea that isn't pleasant and is worth saying plainly: all competence is paid for with wonder.

Knowing how long the night lasts takes away the fear of it falling. Knowing that sound is a bat takes away the start. Knowing the optimal route to iron saves you two hours and takes away the only couple of hours in your life when that place was unknown. None of those losses is reversible, and all of them came from getting better.

And here's the part almost nobody sees. The veteran, without any ill intent, destroys what they miss every time they help too much. The perfect guide saves the newcomer the tedious part and also gives away the ending. It gifts them efficiency in exchange for the one thing that can never be made again.

Almost all of a community's well-meaning advice works like this.

The principle: nobody can unlearn

Step out of the game, because this is one of those that don't stay inside it.

The city you live in, which seemed enormous the first week and which today you cross without looking. The language you studied that no longer sounds like music but like information. The person you know so well that you no longer observe them. In every case the same thing happened: you understood something, and understanding made it invisible.

That's why the nostalgia of people who know a lot is neither silliness nor weakness. It's the mind's way of noticing a real loss that nobody warned it came included with learning.

And as a practical consequence, the only one there is: your own wonder can't be recovered, but other people's can be protected.

What can be done

It doesn't take a system. It takes restraint.

Letting someone get lost. Not telling them what's in the next room. Answering what they ask and not what they haven't asked. Holding back the urge to save them the detour, which is a generous urge and that's why it's so hard to stop.

If there were a place where nobody gave away the ending in order to help you, and where losing an afternoon through not knowing was looked on kindly, I'd like it to be called KobiiCraft.

Now the honest part: this can't be imposed. The information is already on the internet in full, and forbidding explanations would be absurd as well as impossible. Some people enjoy optimising more than discovering, and they're doing nothing wrong. And no place can give a veteran back their first cave.

What it can do is not speed up the disappearance of other people's wonder. It's not much, and it's all there is.

The first cave

That one wasn't special. It was an ordinary cave, badly lit, with two zombies and some coal.

What doesn't repeat isn't the cave: it's the person who went down without knowing what was below. That person no longer exists, and you traded them for someone who plays much better. It was a good deal, and even so it's normal to miss them.

Frequently asked questions

Why do I miss being a beginner at a game? Because the first time you see something you truly perceive it, and from the third time on you only recognise it. What you remember about that cave isn't the cave, which is still the same, but the state you looked at it in: not knowing what was inside or whether it was dangerous. That state doesn't depend on the game, it depends on your ignorance, and ignorance is the only thing in the game that can't be reinstalled.

Does going back to old versions bring that feeling back? Almost never, and the experiment is easy to run: old versions are available and install in a few minutes. Whoever tries it usually finds a poorer game that they remember differently, and concludes that their memory was deceiving them. That's too harsh a reading of oneself. Memory wasn't failing: what failed was the hypothesis that what they missed was stored in the game's files.

What did Shklovsky say about habit? Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian literary critic, argued in 1917 that perception becomes automatic through repetition: what we see many times stops being felt and starts being recognised by a label, a saving that everyday life is grateful for and that impoverishes experience. Against that he defined the function of art as de-automatisation, that is, presenting the familiar in a strange way to force us to look at it again and recover the sensation rather than mere recognition.

Is it wrong to explain to someone how to play? No, and refusing to help would be an odd form of cruelty. What's worth doing is distinguishing between getting someone unstuck and giving away a discovery in advance. If someone asks how to do something specific, answering them is a favour. If someone is exploring and you tell them beforehand what they're going to find, you save them a bit of effort and take away the only part of the game that can't be repeated. The difference lies in whether they asked you.