The Sealed Capsule

Aleatory — Concealed Contents · Issued by Various

Payment precedes knowledge of what payment has bought.

The Sealed Capsule inverts the ordinary order of commerce: the visitor pays first and learns second what the payment has purchased. Its contents are governed by a published, or more often unpublished, distribution of probabilities.

Descended from the physical gachapon vending machine, the digital capsule removed the two frictions that had restrained its ancestor — the walk to the machine, and the coin in the pocket. What remained was the pull.

The museum's conservators have determined that the essential mechanism is not the reward but the interval preceding it: the brief, engineered suspension in which the outcome is unknown and therefore, momentarily, anything. The reward closes the interval. The next purchase reopens it.

A duplicate is not a defect of the system. It is the system. The visitor who receives, for the third time, an object already held has not been failed by the capsule; the visitor has been served exactly as designed.

The remainder of this placard is reserved for the museum’s patrons. Your contribution of $2.00 ensures the continued preservation of this exhibit.

Provenance

c. 2004Randomised capsules enter free-to-play catalogues.
2017Regulatory bodies begin classifying certain capsules as gambling.
2018Several jurisdictions compel disclosure of probabilities.