No Man’s Sky’s biggest thematic problem, explained in four tweets
polygon.com
polygon.com
> What's sad is despite all our ingenuity, so many of our mechanics reinforce ideas and behaviors we know to be harmful.
Reality Check: You are a lifeform that feeds on the transition of matter from low entropy to high entropy states. We very literally consume worlds. We should try and do that in a way that doesn't undermine our own survival chances, and, as long as that doesn't interfer with the previous point in a way that minimises harm to other lifeforms that we consider useful or beautiful. No amount of virtue signalling and related posturing is going to change that fundamental reality.
It's very typical of Kuchera and Polygon to produce such badly thought-through moralising on videogames, but considering how closely the theme of the game runs to a fundamental physical truth of the human condition I find the criticism rather crass.
This is a video game. You could be anything, do anything. Introduce mechanics that do not require the consumption of worlds. Lots of games have mechanics that don't require stripmining planets.
I read the tweets more as disappointment that we can't do something different in our creation. Just because the real world is built on consumption doesn't mean all art has to be.
Any transgressive or satirical piece of art could have this exact same critique leveled at it, but generally they don't because critics in other media have a more nuanced understand of the relationship between art and the artists intentions.
Correct. But because the real world is built on consumption, criticising creative expression for exploring that is at best invalid. What's going on with Polygon is that they're making this invalid criticism to further their political narratives.
> There is no way to create on these worlds
You needn't look at anyone's politics, pro or con, to wonder: in a world where the second best selling game of all time is Minecraft, how much sense is there in a galaxy-sized sandbox where you can't build anything?
In fact I find my brain tends to do the common human ego-centric thing and compartmentalizes the entire planet to only that which I've experienced.
Yet if I just land on a planet and tape the joystick to move my avatar forward... well I could go walk away and come back in six months to a year and see if I made it back to my starting position... and even if I recorded it to watch it at my leisure, my FOV will only cover a small fraction of the total surface area.
It's a gross exaggeration to suggest a single, lone character could "strip mine" an entire planet by themselves.
You need to gather enough radioactive isotopes to power your magical space plane and keep you alive and a few other elements to manufacture upgrades and that's about it. It's not like you're managing a global conglomerate with trillions of dollars of capital invested in machinery to extract every last mineral from the surface.
update
I think it says more about the people who interpret the mechanics this way than any statement Hello Games could be making by utilizing these mechanics.
Richards intentions were selfish, but completely understandable and relatable.
Joseph Campbell said it most succinctly:
"(All) life lives on life".[1]
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/801710-life-lives-on-life-th...
I feed the animals. I don't shoot them. If one comes after me I run. Shoot a bird from the sky to identify it? Hell no. How about accepting that you'll never name that, or trying to find a way to get close enough to peacefully lock the scanner onto it?
I run from space pirates. I'm not here for combat. I paid $50 for a giant, endless painting of a cool alien world that I can wander through for as long as I LIFE SUPPORT GETTING LOW crap I guess I should pick some zinc fruits.
No Man's Sky is at its best when it embraces being bored. There's nothing to do for vast stretches. Detach from the need to be Interacting with something, to be Engaged by a Game Mechanic, and enjoy the world's most expansive walking simulator ever built, with a side dish of Alien Petting Simulator.
And then go outside and sit under a tree for a half hour, lying on your back and watching the sun move over the insane complexity of just that one tree. And think about nothing.
That probably sounds really dismissive, but I don't intend it to be. I mean, I live in a city and there was a deer hanging out behind my apartment building the other day, and a half dozen Cooper's hawks decided to stop for lunch at the pond behind where I work not long ago. I feel like maybe spending money on the game and the hardware to run it is a little bit missing the point of something? Maybe I've just been very fortunate in my choice of environment.
It's a fifty dollar ticket to a hike through a lurid 1970s sci-fi book cover. If that sounds appealing to you, then great. If not? Hey, that's cool too.
And now you're speaking my language!
I find exactly the same problem with modern tech tooling (especially on the frontend). We, the tech community, celebrate tool builders and so we all try to build tools. We end up with a fantastic ecosystem of many diverse ideas pinging off of each other. In this situation we all win - sorta.
I write a bunch of Angular 1. React and Angular 2 are both superb libraries that allow me to build a great frontend UI. There are four React talks and a full-day workshop all communicating the _How_ of React [0]. We're building tools for the sake of tools - continually answering the 'how' with the latest framework without consideration for the end purpose, our 'why'.
> If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.
The current state of tech as I see it is that we're pumping out endless tutorials on logging [1] but never teaching devs to yearn for the endless sea.
[0] I'm picking on React here but this is just one example out of many.
[1] Pun intended
The perhaps original inspiration is equally beautiful (rendered from French): One will weave the canvas; another will fell a tree by the light of his ax. Yet another will forge nails, and there will be others who observe the stars to learn how to navigate. And yet all will be as one. Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of love.
We can get there again. We just need new visionaries. Maybe games are the best place to envision such futures?
The series has been on my to-read list, I'll bump it up in priority.
If that's what you are after, I can really recommend Peter Watts. Fair warning, though: don't expect to enjoy him.
Perhaps the area Star Trek does better than most (if one goes with the premise that it's a utopia, and really quite contradictory to it) is how humane and permissive it is with those who break the rules or fail to match the ideal (utopias don't tend to survive this kind of behavioral diversity). It might be big government, but there's still quite a bit of freedom in individual lives despite the militarized hierarchy and silly outfits.
There's a great book on humanity's grasping attempts at the ideal called Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson: https://www.amazon.com/Imaginary-Cities-Darran-Anderson/dp/0...
In the Culture novels you could live a hundred years as a dolphin, a decade contemplating Zen as house plant, and then decide you want to stop navel gazing and do something. Star Trek lacks immortality, but people still tend to live the kind of lives they chose to.
We also see that they are really willing to do whatever is necessary to citizens as well. I'm not sure we can consider the world of Star Trek a utopia, at least I can't, but it definitely is a case of overall better in life outcomes for most of the people within its grasp.
Compare that with say Star Wars, where even fan's might have second thoughts. Or a 1984 where only the fringe would even think about it.
That being said, the endless catalog of frameworks becomes incredibly tiresome.
There is nothing uncomfortable about this, unless you somehow have trouble distinguishing this fantasy world from reality, or believe this game for some reason should teach you life lessons and influence your personal values.
I personally am sick of this kind of hand-wringing, navel-gazing writing online. Especially as regards games, of all things. This isn't thoughtful critique or meaningful introspection. The original tweets are good critique. This writer's article is simply melodrama, false-intellectualism, and pseudo-ethics.
In terms of videogame critique, there is no doubt a lot to say about No Man's Sky. Including that it is disappointing that a game which is so creative, innovative, and envelope-pushing in so many ways reverts to rote mechanics like point-and-shoot and a trite explore-collect-upgrade-expand core loop design. I personally would have loved to see NMS' core loop be about discovery and improvement -- leaving planets better than you found them, perhaps. (Though "better" on what dimensions and metrics would be an interesting question.) And one could actually write a meaningful article on philosophy, culture, or even sci-fi and futurism based on the universe NMS presents for consideration. Unfortunately, this article does none of this and is a lazy aping of more thoughtful tweets.
As much as the article critiques NMS for relying on the tropes of shooting, and extracting+expanding in games, it leans entirely on its own tropes of online "journalism" today, with shallow thinking, false moral criticism, and pointless hand-wringing for the sake of attention.
Ditto, it's happening whenever anyone writes about media of any kind these days. Sometimes I think people can't remove themselves from the events of the world. Another example I read is in the upcoming Deus Ex game there was a poster where a character in the background had an "Aug Lives Matter" poster. Apparently that's reason to get enraged these days. Disregard that the games themes are metaphorical about racism, lets just call that offensive.
From what I've read, they're planning future content that includes the ability to build things. Though as you say, "better" is open to definition.
The survival feedback loop is a well-trodden trope in game design. Punch a tree. NMS actually succeeds here by constantly draining resources in order to survive... the same resources needed for many crafting recipes. You also can't carry a mountain's worth of resources in your back pocket. The severely limited (at first) inventory space is a subtle resource as well.
Thematically it makes sense enough to immerse oneself in the game. Space, for all its wonders, is incredibly hostile to soft, squishy meat bags. It's tougher than the sea on our equipment... and the sea destroys everything eventually. So of course it takes resources to survive and travel to new worlds.
The narrative framework of these mechanics is not built on one of harmonious living on a single patch of land with a zero-carbon footprint.
And you don't have to kill the animals at all to catalog them (tiny, fast moving birds not-with-standing).
Thematically I don't see this as the "biggest problem."
They created all these cool worlds and new animals and you can fly between worlds! The harvesting resources doesn't really bother me, that's common in games.
But how do you harvest resources? You shoot it with a laser gun. You shoot the environment. You shoot the animals. They flop around.
Why does everything have to include shooting? Why not some other mechanic that doesn't look like 'killing' everything. Even if the gun just had sort of a cone like beam instead of the generic laser that seems to explode things it would feel different.
It just sort of feels like people come up with cool new ideas for worlds for games, and then slap a gun/FPS interface on it because it's well understood and some sort of default.
They put so much thought into making No Man's Sky.... except using a weapon as the main interface.
No luck finding it again.
Imagine if Minecraft was initially partnered up with EA and sold for $60 instead of staying indie and having a modest pricing scheme. That's exactly what's going on with NMS.
Granted, the backlash would be much less if the game was priced apropriately, and it's likely that the game will have weaker legs now that more information is known about it.
Even if someone only got 10 hours of play from the game it cost them 6 bucks per hour - the day after launch I was reading about people who stayed up exploring all night and didn't even leave their starting planet
A few thousand? Twenty thousand with all the languages? How many millions did the game take?
It would never triple the price of the game.
I definitely would like to see some evidence to support this - if you have any.
Yes, FPS is massively popular, but there is also a massive amount of less known titles that are not FPS games
The core problem is that for all the games look pretty in graphical terms, they've got major fundamental limitations in other ways.
One of the biggest is that you don't have hands. You have a laser pointer and perhaps even several dozen verbs for that laser pointer, but no hands. You can not pick up two things and do anything useful with them like you can in the real world. We can navigate around in 3D environments OK, but we have terrible interaction with them. Shooting is not the only thing that we have, but once you start seeing how limited the palette is, it becomes obvious that it's one of the more popular choices for a reason. In fact, even "melee" combat, under the hood, is generally "shooting" with a short range and an animation utterly disconnected from the underlying mechanics, hence things like the silliness of swinging your sword cleanly through someone's torso, something that in the real world would cleave them in twain, for zero damage. See also the absurdity of what passed for "speech" in games, as you attempt one of the most complicated activities there is by pointing with a laser pointer and grunting at what you want to "say".
You have no significant AI, so while No Man's Sky may have world upon world of fantastic-looking creatures, you can't do much of anything with them. You can't pet them. You can't raise them. You sure as hell can't communicate with them. What else are you going to do but point a laser pointer at them and grunt? And what other grunts are there that are of any value other than "Shoot"? The advantage shooting has is that both damage and death are relatively easy to make the target respond to. (Death in particular; once animated once you don't even have to animate on an ongoing basis.) Yes, you can come up with some other options, but they tend to peter out fast.
So, basically, you can't interact with the world very richly, and the world can't even correctly respond to those limited interactions. The graphics in modern games deceive you. By being nearly realistic they convince a good chunk of your brain that the game must be realistic. But the graphics are not representative of what's really going on; instead they are the bizarrely advanced spike sticking out above a landscape of much more modest design means. You've got games where the landscapes are almost photorealistic, but your ability to "speak" is walking up to a person and tapping them, which we saw 30+ years ago.
While I credit No Man's Sky for making it to release where many of its peers have had significant trouble making it that far, I've never been excited about it, because I've already played the "big universe of nothing much to do" game with things like Frontier: Elite II. Unfortunately, what procedural generation tends to produce is the stuff that was already easy in the first place. Writing a story that transcends the manifest limitations of the medium, or writing tight levels that require you to exploit certain mechanics, or creating creative puzzles based on a slowly-increasing set of mechanics, and so on, that's the hard stuff.
I'm not saying nobody will have fun, or that it's a bad game, or that you shouldn't try it. I'm saying that these limitations are pretty fundamental to the medium, and whenever somebody promises implicitly or explicitly to overcome them, you should be really skeptical. There's a long, long line of this sort of thing, Black and White, Spore, Fable, endless lines of procedurally generated games, things that even if the end result was not always "bad" are things that could not transcend the limitations of the medium.
I still have fond memories of my brother trying to teach the creature to pick up rocks, and then throw them. The intention was to bombard the other villages.
Training it to pick up was easy. Leash it, pick up the rock in front of it, repeat. Put the rock next to it. Did it pick it up? If so, pet it. Repeat.
Getting it to throw the rock was more involved. Even after watching my brother doing it, the creature would pick up the rock, then put it down again. He must have spent at least half an hour trying.
Then, all of a sudden, the creature starts throwing rocks! Success! Well, except that it was also picking up feces. And throwing them. And picking up friendly villagers, and throwing them. Repeatedly.
That was the funniest thing I've seen in a game, by far. That, and watching my brother scolding the creature for the behavior.
The underlying creature model appears to have been somewhat simplistic. Creature needs were manually coded with first order logic. Not sure how training was actually done, but it was unlikely to be too complicated.
Now, more than a decade later, one should expect one "creature" that's even more advanced, specially considering the renewed interest in AI. Or that the creatures that one encounters in an RPG to be at least as advanced as the B&W one. Instead, they are not actually much more advanced than Pacman ghosts, no matter how pretty they look.
Black and White was one of the reasons I tried to carefully write that so it was clear that not all the things I listed were "bad". What I recall is that Black and White failed its promises; the creature is nowhere near as smart as what was promised. But many people still had fun with the game that resulted.
I find the failures of AI are often quite entertaining; they have a different character of failure than other sorts. I also frequently enjoy the errors that word-based AI makes, because there's often some bizarre, twisted sense behind it that our brains can pick up on and enjoy. Markov Chain babble generators are the simplest example of that, but the serious work can generate a lot of great stuff too.
I'm amazed at what they accomplished. My issue here is more of a graphic choice. Why does the thing you use to kill and animal to defend yourself look exactly like the thing you use to harvest plants for resources look exactly like the thing you use to destroy terrain?
It feels almost like it was just assumed and no one ever thought about it.
So I picked up this game with the intention of letting him watch a little bit and talking to him about space.
After he went to bed and I was a few hours into the game I realized this same thing though... All I'm doing is going to a planet, consuming their resources and leaving. The only nice thing I can do is with other aliens and I can feed some animals but not all of them. You don't build anything on the planet and you end up destroying a lot of resources.
It's still a fun game, don't get me wrong, but the idea that after the game is over (which I'm not at yet) all that will follow my character is a gouge in every planet he came across just seems... sad.
I compare this to something like Minecraft where at least you leave structures and buildings behind, and just feel like it's kind of a sad game as well as an exploratory game. Which may have been the point behind it as well. Maybe that's the deeper meaning the developers want you to get.
Sure some of them included witty triggers on a minority of chests, but by and large the "visit new place, steal everything that's not nailed down, profit" trope persisted and continues to persist.
PS Edit: On the going-to-Africa-to-kill-a-lion comment, for a more nuanced take, I would highly recommend this RadioLab episode. It's an amazingly balanced treatment of an emotional topic from a multitude of perspectives. Corey Knowlton (who paid to kill a black rhino and did so) makes an incredibly clear, realistic, and essentially Roosevelt-ian argument for game management near the end.
I hope that they do more with what they currently have because it is a damn impressive platform for a v1. The planets, space ships, animals, plants, etc. are all great. It just needs "humanity." Imagine finding a planet full of advanced life with culture and government and a military. or one where people simply battle. Or one where you bring your mined resources for the greater good/evil. There are so many possibilities.
Instead, I read some diatribe about consumption. There are 18 quintillion planets! Surely one can find a way to grab whatever resources are needed and not bother the locals much.
This new political correctness trend is bothersome. It is just a game.
Now, just out of spite, I want to make a game where you are a sentient AI and can use organics (sentient or otherwise) in whichever way appeals to you. Friends, food, fuel, building materials. Looking forward for the reviews.
Jeez, what a depressing, existential kick in the nuts.
You can't build huge monoliths to yourself for others to find, you can't make things together, you can't leave your mark on the universe in any way except for meaningless additions to a catalog of species.
You can't even meet each other, and has been made clear now despite hemming and hawing from the developer.
This should have been clear from the mechanics of the universe, but I think players are just now starting to realize how empty that might make the game.
I grant that there is probably still a lot of fun just gathering materials, and gawking and beautiful landscapes, but I don't see how that will maintain people's attention the way games that allow you to make and change the universe do.
Now I don't even bother going in them. Chances are my inventory is close to capacity, and I know there's not going to be anything exciting down there because it would be marked on my map.
I've been playing Civ5 recently: first run I played warrior-like, then realised I could have played differently, then realise that the diplomacy mechanic was really lacking that it made the game too one-dimensional, then realised that diplomacy is harder to model because it's harder to do.
Tomb Raider: as Lara Croft, in game, you basically assumes that everyone you encounter in the game is out there to kill you, so you kill them off pre-emptively. You kill every living species you meet to craft better weapons and eat.
Torchlight: explore, find lizard village, exterminate them all. Presumably, they mate and have children so even though it's not explicitly depicted, you kill women and children too.
Rocket League: you go the extreme of sometimes blowing up your opposing team players to score a goal in a televised game.
All RPG: the world is a loot, just for you.
Frankly, I've found that abstract games and games with less realistic back-story have been the only ones presenting stories and game mechanics that are not first-degree unethical and amoral.
> I don't see the point of the article as to what is particular in NMS
(I say this as someone with Steam open, waiting 12 minutes to finally be able to play...)
I was hoping that we'd be able to build buildings and colonize planets. It'd make particular planets feel more special and give you more incentive to stick around. And if they ever got around to doing this, it'd be great if we could build things wall by wall in great detail instead of just "ok, plop down prefabricated factory here".
The most asked question about Spaceway i got is what to do in this infinite universe with no goals and challenges. Most feature requests and feedback were along the lines of making this or that gameplay mechanics or story that would use up a few stars in one galaxy, and leave the remaining quadrillions of them unused.
I've thought for years about what to make of it, but there is simply no ideas for an infinite world better than what NMS did - explore and consume.
Might just be a genre failure.
Are we talking about the same movie? I haven't seen Independence Day in a few years, but I don't remember the aliens showing up in a tiny ship, wandering around the surface for an hour, grabbing some iron that was visible, getting lost in a cave for hours, and then flying away. I remember them showing up in giant ships, and obliterating every major human city that they could.
Hell, can you even consume every resource on a planet in No Man's Sky? This is a terrible comparison.
At least in terms of species, we don't do that because it's a game that is designed to appeal to members of _our_ species.
There are well known psychological hooks that can be employed to make a game interesting to play or even addictive.
For example the slight delay as all the blocks fall down in angry birds was a carefully chosen interval that makes the player more likely to continue playing.[1]
If a game attempted to have the player embody a creature with a completely alien psychology, it probably wouldn't be playable by humans.
[1] See: https://web.archive.org/web/20120310214952/http://www.mauron...
Of course, must of us don't pay any attention to these lessons.
Nah, Neither do I.