The days of pilgrimage are over.

[droqen]

Ways of Seeing
(image from 6:33)

[droqen]

A lot more is possible, but only if art is stripped of the false mystery and the false religiosity which surrounds it. This religiosity, usually linked with cash value, but always invoked in the name of culture and civilisation, is in fact a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.

John Berger speaks on art, and its reproducibility, and what is lost -- what has been lost.

[droqen]

Loss aversion in the age of plenty

When I borrow Berger's quote, 'The days of pilgrimage are over,' it is in reference to games; wikis and longplays and twitch streamers and accessibility options serve at the whim of the all-consumer, not the pilgrim:

All this content should be mine, because everything else in the world can be mine, too. The most famous painting in a universe. Any song, any film. Any piece of text, the meaning of any word, the face of any stranger.

So why not this?

We have created a digital world which seeks to flatten everything, to reduce all distances to zero, all costs to zero, all difficulties to zero; this form of meaning once existed in paintings, but the friction of experience has been reduced to zero.

There was a time when videogames easily provided this form of meaning, too, but where the technology for removing friction exists, it prevails. The meaning of embarking on a pilgrimage is eroded.

The pilgrims move on to new territory.

[droqen]

In the age of access and plenty, of civilization, it is difficult to embrace the idea that some things are irreducible; in the free market of the everlasting human search for meaning and beauty, the demand for these things fades away.

When free games exist, why pay one dollar for a better experience when I can just find a different free game that might be better? It can become a habit.

The principle applies to costs non-monetary, as well.

/Loss aversion in the age of plenty