You can't go back to not knowing

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

"I miss being a noob" is one of the phrases most often repeated by people who have been playing for years. And the usual explanation —that the game was better before— has the rare advantage of being testable: the old versions are still there. They can be installed in ten minutes. Almost nobody who does it gets back what they were looking for.

The reason is that what was lost wasn't in the game. It was in you, and it was ignorance.

The critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917 that habit devours things: what we perceive many times stops being perceived and starts being recognised, which is much cheaper for the brain and much poorer on the inside. He held that art exists to break that automatism and give the sensation back.

The uncomfortable consequence is that competence is always paid for with wonder, and that the veteran unwittingly destroys what they miss every time they save someone the journey.