How No Man's Sky Is Like Reading
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This is the author's thesis, even if it is, arguably, the only time the thought crops up in the piece.
It strikes me as so empty and abstract as to be "not even wrong". Yes, a book is an inert object that needs to be combined with a very specific decoding mechanism (namely, a human) in order to derive semantics. This is also true of shoes. In fact, most things surrounding the human experience are (under certain, current, postmodern-leaning interpretations) stripped of their meaning in the absence of their human meaning-givers. This is the heart of the problem of semantics, and the duality of encoding/decoding. Would the author agree that No Man's Sky is like shoes? If not, then this claim could be restated as, "No Man's Sky is a thing that humans made". Which is delightfully tautological.
To follow, I'm not convinced that the extent to which No Man's Sky is procedurally generated is anything but orthogonal to its status as a "thing to be interpreted". Does the author also think that Minecraft is like a book? What about DOOM? Most modern games that are not strictly deterministic have, at their heart, some set of emergent semantics that are the byproduct of algorithmic world-grammars, be it procedurally generated landscapes or responsive AI. I'm not sure what bearing this has on 'worthiness of interpretation'; one could, I suppose, try and link this to the ongoing conversation about the relevance of author intent, but that is a deep (albeit interesting) hole, and I'm not really sure how the author's examples point to this being their intention.
I shouldn't succumb to snark, but I can't resist here. This article strikes me as an attempt to intellectualize a cognitive dissonance. "No Man's Sky is a priori -worthy-, because that's what is said. But I'm not having fun".
Compared to a game, a book is doing much more work, and games are often leaving a lot up to the imagination. To me, the article up to the closing argument indicates that No Man's Sky is even less like a book than most games, given its lack of overt plot and characters. All symbols are inert without human attention, but the symbols of a book definitely don't just "specify a world" without "constituting" it, unless it's the Silmarillion; they do constitute the plot, and that's what makes procedurally generated games so unlike books.
I find this argument to be "not even wrong" (not really, I see some point in what you say, but I just wanted to convey how bad is this "outright dismissal" it attempts to the author's points).
The shoes don't give us back a narrative/plot from the semantics we derive for them -- No Man's Sky does.
So the author's point has some merit in pointing out this, even if he doesn't qualify fully what kind of semantics he means (not the crude semantics we get from interpreting "most things"). The nature of the game's derived semantics make it more like a book than a pair of shoes or a t-shirt with a slogan.
I would say, semi-seriously, that one can definitely find a story in a pair of shoes. It may not have quite the same complexity as the story found in a book, but I'd be careful to avoid implying that that somehow makes it less. Consider the job of an archaeologist/anthropologist, for example.
However, I'll concede you that there is a possible hierarchy of things that convey 'more' (ehhh...I hate to use that word here, but for lack of a better one at the moment) semantics. And that No Man's Sky could be placed higher on that hierarchy than a pair of shoes. Even given that premise, I don't really see any strong arguments presented in the piece that No Man's Sky is any different from any other game in that sense.
Watching this game on twitch and going from one stream to the next I was left with thinking exactly this, it's all the same, and it's all a grind. The game's procedural generation creates superficial visual differences. It doesn't create anything non-visual worth exploring. Outside of wondering what the next thing looks like, what is there to be curious about?
They should add procedurally generated problems to solve in the environment that can affect your life in the game. Different environments requiring unique ways to survive, perhaps some not even solvable. There could be online discussions about particular dangerous places about how one could possibly create a habitable solution for exploring them.
I stopped playing it after they included a game-in-game instead of making the game playable...
And if No Man's Sky is worse than Starbound then honestly I think I don't want to play it. Starbound is still on the level of "fun at first, but quickly getting repetitive" in terms of procedural generation. It's much more engaging than it was - but that's because authors invested a lot of time in adding non-generated content.
My complaint about all the attempts at procedural generation I've seen so far is that they lack depth. You have plenty of randomized stuff on one level, but obviously repetitive patterns on a meta-level. Take Starbound, again, for an example. Sure, on every planet you'll encounter a slightly different set of creatures - they may differ in sprites, stats or attacks. But after visiting a few worlds you quickly notice it's always the same combo of one non-hostile ground critter, one weak and one strong hostile ground critters, one or two flying critters...
I really liked the concept of Starbound and the games it descended from, but it didn't really feel like it added anything to the formula.
No Man's Sky certainly inherits a lot from that genre, but it feels substantially different and it's been engaging for me in a way that the genre hasn't since I first started playing Minecraft.
For me the game is perfect. I love the slowness of it all. I love just being able to go where I want. I discovered by accident that mining asteroids in space is quite lucrative. I've spent the past few nights doing exactly that and for some that's a grind; for me it's a peaceful, relaxing way to spend my evening. I managed to earn enough to buy a much larger ship that looks amazing and it's been fun sharing pics of her with my nerdy friends also playing.
But beyond all that this game feels like stepping into artwork from Heavy Metal magazine circa 1978. As a kid that would lay awake in bed at night dreaming of what it would be like to step inside a Mœbius painting, this game nails it.
I get that this isn't for everyone but some of us, esp. those that grew up playing pen & paper RPG's like Traveller in particular, yeah good stuff!
Anyone with half a brain these days knows not to put money down on a pre-order, wait for peer reviews or accept the risk of severe delays and quality issues at launch. But apparently some people just never get it.
there is as much hate as hype for this game. Hello Games vague and misleading PR didn't help. We still don't know if the game is effectively multiplayer or is not. It seems we can't get a simple yes/no answer.
Density is where the fun is at. The world doesn't need to be big, it needs to be intricate: packed with interesting characters, interactions and stuff to do. Big spaces are good for battlefields and pretty vistas, but don't make for fun "live another life" games. The first Deus Ex figured this out, Human Revolution refined it and it sounds like Mankind Divided has distilled it even further.
Indeed. Massive, procedurally generated worlds have been tried over and over again before – Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall contained a 1:1 scale map of Britain; Frontier: Elite II contained 513 million "unique" star systems, and so on, and so forth, but no matter how fancy your generation algorithm is, meaningful variation is always constrained, and there's only so much excitement you can get out of an empty world you can barely interact with in any meaningful way.
Borderlands also figured it out: Sure, all weapons are procedurally generated, and there's billions of possible combinations… but it's just one aspect of games with 40+ hours worth of story content.
(Disclaimer: Haven't played NMS yet, so I cannot comment on how/whether they addressed this. They need to, however, if they don't want everyone to toss out the game and forget about it in a year.)
It probably is not a bad game. But it's simply impossible to have the depth that people imagine into it. Maybe if the developers find other ways to refinance the next ten years and continue working on adding more details, objects, animal attributes, ship parts, crafting trees, etc.
PS: I'm really really disappointed that this game has taken so much from Out There and Out There is not even mentioned anywhere in the website, the marketing or the media coverage. Out There is an incredible indie game and should get the praise it has earned if it is so good to even motivate other creators to copy parts from it. (I'm not related to the Out There team. Just love playing the game)
I think a lot of it depends on how much of the contributing genres someone has played before.
If you've played minecraft/terraria/etc. you'll find the gathering and crafting systems to be very simple and the creative component to be missing almost entirely.
If you've played a lot of shooters, you'll be circle-strafing the brain dead creatures/robots to death no sweat.
If you've played any space flight games, the ship-to-ship combat is about as easy as it gets.
If someone isn't familiar with one or more of those genres coming in, it would probably feel extremely fresh and interesting. If someone is very familiar with them, they'd probably be frustrated with how under-developed each piece is.
I think this actually hits the issue, though in a different way than you meant. I'm not sure that there are ways to "exploit" it. To start with, there isn't a whole lot of depth and very little complexity. Additionally, there aren't really any hard goals or any flexible, open ended activities to do (like building stuff). It's also not multiplayer, so other people's activities don't really directly impact your own.
I think the mixed reviews are largely down to the fact that it's a pretty niche indie game which for some reason got AAA marketing from Sony. I fit into the niche very well and have found it immensely engaging, but I'm not surprised that it's not for everyone.
Oops
I don't see how it's like reading, when a book offers you a story and then asks you to imagine accordingly, with something that offers you synthetic imagination and asks you to come up with a story.