Memory Crystallization

Here is a strange list of observations.

• Before you play a game, it could be 'anything'. The visuals give a vibe but not all of it. As you go further along in the game, and get more 'spoiled', you lose something, you lose most of the mystery. And every replay of the game expends something.

• It's interesting how 'illegible' screenshots and gameplay can be before playing a game. I've never quite successfully mapped out a game's entire map by only watching visuals of the game. (But when I actually play the game it crystallizes for me.)

• I once had a very different vibe of "Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective" before playing it, specifically the 'Phantom Detective' bit, where to me it made it sound like you would be doing 'normal detective' things like walking around a building. Meanwhile, the way you move around is so NOT usual in Ghost Trick.

• Similarly open world games feel so expansive, with classic vista shots in games like Breath of the Wild, and especially in games with less content, those shots feel more linear and explored after you play the game.

• It's also sometimes a false feeling that you have 'explored everything' or 100%'d it at all if the game has secrets or hidden movement tech. Often it's a multiplayer game, people complain the game gets boring because the game didn't get updates (some will say this for battle pass battle royales, CCG's, etc.) - but it's a bit odd, because often the true optimal 'meta' still hasn't been discovered.

• Although, the kinds of discoveries you make when you've done something for a month are just not the same, or as large, as the discoveries when you've done something for a year, at least they come much slower. As you learn more, there is less to learn.

This also can apply in a real life context, like learning a bike or instruments, first it's a complete mystery, it clicks (crystallizes) and it is forever 'easy' to improve at it.

Reading about experiences online instead of doing things firsthand have issues and is sort of demotivational even, a blind person may never be able to quite visualize what it is like to see from just descriptions.

This means you should be more open minded about how much you learn about rare experiences (in childhood, or ones that deeply alter your worldview and perception of the world), as these are very vulnerable to misreading as you cannot easily communicate everything that happened.

People who have followed my music journey know that I have a rare experience with music where I have felt some aspects of music got 'crystallized' after over 10 years. But for a normal person music is very resistant to this. Repeating a sentence is annoying but repeating the same bassline and melody is common, it's much more immune to being repetitious. I also find it fascinating why a melody could repeat something exactly X times and it would sound worse if it were 1 more or 1 less. It makes me feel like the composer was perfectly attuned to good things.

Generalizations of life are also strange. It's like thinking of how an 80 year old has 'only' experienced 80 winters. Like, if this were anything else, like 80 games of chess, that's way too small. To say that restaurants all taste the same that you're no longer open to new experience is to have had too many experiences where you try something 'new' and it wasn't really a new flavor or it was bad.

Generalizations of people can also be cursed in the same way, as in many ways people really don't act the same, but when they do (likely due to consuming similar sources of media) it's worth some contemplation. It's seemingly taboo to be judging people by patterns except that literally all communites have people and groups they exclude. I think something that contributes to polarization is that people won't take seriously the "worst" and "best" example of people of each group. People are motivated to not call attention to the worst parts of their ingroup or the best-argued parts of their outgroup. It's not something that needs to be thought about for standard child troublemakers, but it slowly gets more eroding in terms of mutual respect and relatability when disliked/blasphemous things for one community or belief is a normal and true foundational belief in another. When this happens a group can easily develop a warped picture of their outgroup, crystallization 'gone wrong' in that sense.

There is a cursed quote from 4-years-ago-me that I wrote, even in an article context. It's weird how I don't know if I agree with it anymore.

Imagined depictions of immortal people say the world gets boring. I don't agree. It's already impossible to read all the books there are to read, play the games there are to play, watch all the videos there are to watch, and new ones come out every day. So an immortal could indulge in societies even as the mortal people in each generation eventually die.

Did you know that 4-years-ago-me typed in capital letters and proper english to try to be serious good writing, and now the current version of me is just doing it out of standardness/obligation and it's not a thing I care about. Anyway something happened to me in the previous 1-2 years and I feel much less motivated to do 'boring' things like maneuvering or walking in games due to life priorities etc. Actually very cursed for my motivation, and while my mind frequently thinks of this as a "life is repetitious" action, this seems like a rationalization for other reasons life and my body feels weightier. Some life events though potentially did not help, such as LLM's making the idea of reading text on the internet seem like a potential trap and waste of time, which hopefully doesn't spread to other text in general.

I'm reminded of an article, "The Illusion of Explanatory Depth". I was once in a meditation-like mindstate where I really felt younger and more excited and curious again, and I think what really happened is I felt way less of an emotion of 'already seen this'. The current version of me can't imagine replaying a game unless it was way far in the past, while other people (and my past self) replayed games constantly. I suspect the younger version of me was able to forget things more easily (in a certain way) and treat more objects as unique instead of broken into many pieces.