How To Forget A Game

imagine a game that changed you a story that made you see the world differently characters that made your heart ache and a smile unravel across your face a setting that took your breath away an ending that brought tears to your eyes every gamer I reckon has at least one game that they plays in this category a game that has made them utter the phrase I wish I could forget it so that I could play it for the first time again I wish I could experience this blind just one more time and it's kind of a

beautiful request when you really think about it to be so enchanted by a memory that you'd be willing to sacrifice it in order to feel your heart swell and fall in love with it all over again which got me wondering is this something that you can actually do is it possible to men and black outer Wilds from your mind could I purposely erase my time with Final Fantasy 10 from all those years ago how would we in theory intentionally forget a game so naturally this being the channel That dared to ask you why you keep

playing games that you hate then used psychology to make you question how you spend your time now that that's done I can fully articulate why I hate this game yeah I've even thought about going back and playing Dark Souls 2 just so I can remind myself about all the reasons I should hate it yeah I started doing some digging and the research is there but I I kind of had to interpret it backwards you'll see what I mean how long does it take for all of those juicy details to leak out of our ears I

have answers for that how does the type of game affect my memory of it I can answer that what can we do for games that we haven't played yet to eventually forget them good question important question we'll talk about it can I really and truly completely forget a game and go back into it 100% blind I'll answer that now short of causing your brain real damage no you can't not completely not in this era let me not waste your time if you've replayed a game a ton over the years and think about it on a

weekly basis because it's part of who you are that is a much deeper rooted memory and weeding that completely out just isn't realistic based on what I found but across this little journey I've taken I've discovered that what you can do is take advantage of your mind's natural tendency to forget details and leverage that with time specific strategies and a spoonful of discipline to then later find yourself shocked at how little you actually remember about a game so that you not only feel Cascades of nostalgia when you boot it up again but also a genuine

sense of Discovery and wonder kin to what you did the first time you opened those doors you're going to learn a lot in this video today and if that's something that you come to these videos for you're really going to like today's sponsor brilliant I typically structure my videos in a very particular way I present a problem to you or a scenario and then I give you a chance to chew on it then I talk about why it matters to games and maybe why you saw it the way you did and this is exactly how

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description you'll also get 20% off in annual premium subscription thanks again to brilliant for sponsoring and now it's time we learn how to let it rest one of the weirdest habits I have is the more I like a song the less I listen to it because if I listen to it too much it loses the impact it had the first time I heard it possibly the most beautiful thing I've ever listened to is a song called Sakura nagashi a song by Hikaru utar it plays at the end of the third Evangelion Rebuild movie and it

will without fail bring me to tears but because I do have such a a visceral reaction to it I want to capture that and protect it I heard it for the first time around 3 years ago and since that day including right now when I have to listen to the opening notes to edit this I've only listen to it maybe five or six times my rationale is simply I refuse to let it become played out it would break my heart for it to start to feel like just another song or get stuck in my head

repeating a iously for 2 days and this pretty well sums up where I began my research and the first strategy we'll talk about today letting it rest in 1880 German psychologist Herman ebbinghouse ran a series of studies and developed this the forgetting curve it illustrates how quickly we forget new information within 20 minutes almost half of new information is lost within a day you lose most of what you're going to lose and then it steadies out over time and if you're thinking 1880 the same year the Cowboys last won a Super Bowl yeah I'm not

trusting that info I get it believe me I do but you should note that this has been replicated a ton in new research over the years ebing house was on to something but as you can imagine this line varies quite a bit depending on countless factors he used a list of words in his study we're talking about fleshed out worlds and characters scored by gripping music and embellished with complex battle systems which as we discussed before makes for more elaborative and deeply rooted memories your recollection of a short game with simple mechanics won't be as

strong as a longer one with several systems and a complicated plot but what's especially relevant here is something called distributed practice a term generally used in the context of studying you see this curve assumes you are exposed to the stimulus one time if you go to lecture in the never study this is about the rate that it decays from your memory but each and every time you review the material the line flattens out a little more info is stored to long-term memory and it takes much longer for it to fade away consequently the more play

sessions you have with the game the more you are building and rebuilding those Pathways in your brain we talked about this a little bit in the binging versus drifting video way back when we tend to remember significantly more about a game or a show or a book if we enjoy it slowly over time than if we binge it and this is why if it's all in a weekend we don't distrib rute the learning and the curve drops quickly if we play it for a little bit every day it Nestles a home in our minds and

the curve begins to flatten out there are two takeaways here the first is that if you love a game and you want that magical first time playthrough again you'll have a better chance at getting it if you binged the game once over a weekend than if you played it slowly over the course of a month or so which of course means shorter games are easier to forget than long ones two and by the way this is the critical one much like Sakura nagashi you have to let it rest one of our favorite things to do

as Gamers when we roll credits on something is immediately go process it by relising to our favorite tracks from the game pursuing fan art watching other people play it gobbling up an essay or lore video on it hell maybe immediately booting up a new game plus and this is all completely normal by the way do you know how many times I went and sobbed to weight of the world after I finished near aom but if and only if you want to one day come back to that game blind at some point you must let it

rest the earlier the better you have to leave the subreddits you must avoid the arc you cannot listen to the soundtrack you cannot watch your favorite streamer play it you must remove every instance of it from in front of you for a very long time because each and every time your mind retrieves and connects back to those memories you're only flat in the curve and again to really drive the point home avoiding it will not erase it from your memory any more than the avoiding Hikaru UT for months will erase that song from mine but

it will make the subtleties of her voice the rich harmonies and details of the instruments and the emotions stirred feel shockingly less familiar than it would if I just had it as a regular rotation on a playlist and the same goes for games you'll likely always remember Joel's tragic loss at the start of the last of us the rhythm of heartbeat heartbreak in Persona 4 your first encounter with orstein and SM in Dark Souls but you'll ReDiscover all of the little idiosyncrasies of what was her name again you'll come to a story beat and say

something like when did this ever happen you'll come to a forest and be completely lost again because while distributed practice helps form deeper memories you aren't reviewing every line of dialogue you've read every map every scene every enemy every morsel of lore the details are what's lost with time and I wrote that to be kind of theatrical because that's how my experience has been anytime I go years and years without playing a game or go months without listening to a good song but as I continued researching for this video it turns out that there is

existing research that supports that this is exactly how our memory Works across several experiments a 2013 study on intentional forgetting revealed a few interesting things the first is that if I sat you down and showed you a series of videos and at the conclusion of each one then instructed you to either remember or forget what you just saw odds are you later remember much less of the videos you were told to forget which may not be surprising but what's more relevant here is that this effect kind of goes away when people are asked general questions

about the video as opposed to specific ones if the video was a baking cookies it's hard to forget that she added flour but it's easy to forget how many cups it's tough to forget that a certain character dies in Final Fantasy 7 it's easy to forget that you were left with equipment in your inventory that only they can use as a constant reminder of their passing these findings suggest that while intentional forgetting is possible it is much more effective on specific details than it is gist although you'll likely never go fully blindly into a game

again you might find yourself shocked at how challenging puzzles are at how little of the plots specifics you remember at how difficult an enemy is or how unfamiliar the map and location feels so assuming you do want to forget the game play it fast enjoy it then unplug from it entirely any and every future exposure to it is to be considered a spoiler wrap it up and place it on a shelf in the back of your mind and don't take it down until until well that's the question isn't it how long exactly do you let

it rest when will that game you're trying to forget be as forgotten as it's going to get and this was the question that almost derailed this video because finding a definitive answer to this was like treating hemorrhoid not that I know what that's like you see all of the literature I was Finding was focused on how to combat the forgetting curve because you know shockingly most people find much more value in Remembering something than forgetting don't know what that's about so I was after the opposite answer in a lot of cases turns out how do

I forget I played Hollow Knight is not something psychologists are chomping at the bit to research and for the most part these studies were interested in declarative memory what we can recall about data moments facts a video game however is a complex set of declarative autobiographical and procedural memory Celeste is not a list of arbitrary word pairs Zelda is not a handful of random short video clips so all of the observations I've drawn up to this point are assuming quite a bit now I'm sweating this video is cooked surely but then I found something published

in 2022 a meta analysis out of the University of Notre Dame that compiled a ton of these forgetting studies to put my mind at ease and get me closer to concrete answers the first assumption it challenged is that the eding house curve while accurate for new onetime information doesn't look like this for complex memories like those from gaming it actually looks like this it is much more linear when memories are encoded in a complex way like the combat coinciding with the narrative the music swelling with the dramatic moments the emotions of finally beating a boss

you've been stuck on it is much harder to forget it doesn't fade away in a few hours like a um like a like a phone number would and the reason is because all of these different individual data points are Tangled together such that when you recall one they might all come rushing back if you hear the song blue skies in a battle it reminds you of your time strategizing where to put your units in Fire Emblem three houses which could remind you of when you had to put two friends against each other and that conures

up that heartbreaking dialogue that punched you in the gut at the recollection that you had caused this encounter no don't do it the researchers point out that complex memories can be rebuilt exactly like this if you retrieve a portion of that memory just more evidence that for our purposes you truly must remove any tiny reminders of that game if you're trying to erase it it's for these reasons that that line is much more linear at the start it simply takes longer for the memory to Decay and this as the authors point out is what you'd

expect for stories we see read hear or even game games that we play now they also do specify that while the curve for complex memories does appear linear this doesn't mean it'll ever reach zero complex memories don't just magically go away in theory as we forget more and more data points it becomes harder to reconstruct those memories and when that happens it begins to look a little bit more like the ebing house curve and eventually ASM tootes but comfortingly this still suggests that there is a point at which we're going to forget just about all

we're going to forget about a game so this study was extremely helpful in clarifying how the let it rest phase is actually going to go essentially it's just going to take a little longer for those memories to fade but how much longer we still haven't answered that you you failed me Notre Dame even your research studies are overrated you see how this almost derailed this video completely defeated I was really about to throw in the towel and just say this is dumb just enjoy the memories never forget never forget do you remember where you were

when 911 happened ladies and gentlemen may I present to you the flashbulb memory it's a phenomenon that goes a little like this if you've ever been in a wreck and remember strange little details like what shirt you were wearing or what the weather was doing despite it happening years ago you've probably had a flash bulb memory essentially when an extremely emotionally significant event suddenly happens time almost seems to slow down for you and it feels like your mind soaks up an immense amount of detail flash bold memories are wildly Vivid and people usually have them

for historic or personally significant events which is why most folks in the US remember where they were when 9/11 happened it's why your parents probably know what they were doing when the Berlin Wall fell or when JFK was assassinated if the news comes as a shock and is emotionally impacting your brain in codes it with much more detail than it would the news that I I don't know your your Amazon package is delayed now your memories with the game are likely not Flash B memories unless you played omori but they are complex and Flash B

memories are also complex therefore if we can pinpoint how long flash bulb memories last for we might be able to find a safe estimate and then I found it the answer finally I had stumbled upon the holy grail the final piece of the puzzle everything I had worked for it's a ear it's just a it's just a ear you know asterisk so two studies right the first was a 10year survey where the researchers found that the most forgetting for Flash bow memories and basic event memories happened within the first year but did not significantly change

even after a 10-year delay the second found that while flash bold memories do have better detail than non- flash bold Memories the rate of decline was still the same for both after a year the same memory faults remain suggesting that the line has almost fully flattened out after one year's time the asterisk is of course that flash Bowl memories while complex like our memories of games are not encoded in the same way they're emotionally driven often times traumatic and capture a particular instance in time not for several multi-hour long play sessions but there are similarities

as well we think about them repeatedly after they happen folks talk with us about them and that both reminds us of them and leads us to elaborate on them they both become complex because of the emotions and the consequences and the associations and the repetition and if this is how long flash bow memories last it stands to reason that gaming memories have at least a similar expiration date a point in time when you've forgotten almost all you're going to forget about a game where the line FL platens so the strategy is as follows if you're

planning to play something you think you'll want to forget speed through it then let it rest if you've already played it just let it rest think about it as little as you possibly can for a year or more remove all of your exposure to that game play other stuff to distract yourself from it wrap it up put it on a shelf in the back of your mind and then let it ferment until it's aged like fine wine and this should work for movies and books and shows too since there are arguably a little less complex

on account of being less interactive and speaking from experience I'd go longer than a year or even a few years to really seal in the ignorance there there's the next shirt everybody Daryl talks games seal in the ignorance I could wrap this video up by telling you that this felt like an impossible question to answer it was one of the silliest prompts I had on my list of video ideas and it was such an interesting question that I had to at least try and present you all with a good answer an answer that maybe you'll

put into practice but I want to pause and look at those instructions again all you have to do to forget a game in order to Play It Again blind is play through it as quickly as possible when weekend then don't allow yourself to think about it shove all of that fun all of those glorious inspiring hours down into the depths of your subconscious and close the door and do not allow yourself to think about it for years just to be safe then you can finally open it again down the line when you're ready to pretend

you've never experienced it if I told you to do that for a human being so that you could meet your best friend for the first time again or have your first kiss with your lover again this would sound insane it honestly sounds insane even when it's for a video game so my real advice here is don't take this advice don't forget your time with that game life is not a series of endlessly chewable morsels that you can bottle up and re-experience your time on this planet was not meant to be captured and placed on an

Instagram story or saved to be relived later it's a series of moments that are meant to be lived not rushed not optimized not filmed not monetized not forgotten my advice instead of wishing you could replay a game blind is to encourage someone else to play it blind who truly can so that you can share that Joy with someone else soak up every drop of warmth from that Adventure until the flame goes out and if you just so happen to get swept away in life and you naturally haven't had time to revisit that one special sprawling

artificial World in years and you haven't listened to the soundtrack or had any interest in watching anyone else play it just know that if you never do decide to boot it up again it will greet you like an old friend your mind will ignite at the tendered details that have been completely lost you'll find yourself swaddled by the warm embrace of this place and with any luck it'll feel just like the first [Music] time hey there everyone Thanks for indulging me on a topic that felt extremely out there but maybe it was extremely interesting if

you enjoyed what you saw and want to see more hit that subscribe button down below and be sure to leave a like let me know what game you'd like to play again for the first time down below and if you'd like to support the show check out my patreon page for one single dollar a month you can get all kinds of bonus content creative input weekly updates and your name and the credits like you see here a special thanks to this month's featured patrons John Smith an anr Gavin trout Jack edelhauser Philip Wilkinson Paul Gaston

Robin and Long March n thanks again for watching take care and please have yourself a damn good [Music] one I really hope that was worth it I feel so St look at this look at the