Dear Player: Everyone's Sky

*Warning: existential fulfilment sold separately. 

Ever wanted to be an alien? How about settling for feeling alienated? What does it mean to find meaning in a game? In gaming, the player performs the game, the game is incomplete without the player and takes its full form in the moment of play. This is the lens through which game studies theorists, anthropologists and postructuralists such as Thomas Malaby (2007) view the medium. Games aren’t a one-way street, meaning is not intrinsic to them, but the product of contingency. As No Man’s Sky plummets to the lowest ever aggregate user rating on steam, and faces a flurry of exceptional litigations, I think it is worth reflecting on gaming as a collaborative medium, and exploring this exceptional anxiety in reception for what it might mean about the player-game relationship.

NMS has arguably been a meteoric success in quantitative terms, a tiny team of 15 developers attempted to craft Sony’s biggest release of the year, and gave millions of players billions of planets. In technical terms too, the game is an amazing feat, the greatest example of procedural visuals and sound to date – generating animal animations alone was a significant breakthrough, and 65 Days of Static provided an iconic and dynamic ambient soundtrack for what is a vast universe of 18 quintillion planets. A bounty, or so it might seem.

Planets, planets everywhere, and not a drop of warp fuel in sight.

But this game is widely considered a failure and ‘betrayal’ among the wider player community. Critics expecting a calming and meditative indi experiment, such as Daniel Riendo and Alex Navaro, were happy to speak its virtues, but they seem to be far from the majority. Controversy exploded, as controversy does, and deeply felt complaints gained traction – the game was not what was publicised, according to many the game was a shadow of its potential, a lie. This became a perfect storm. The tragic shortfall of Spore was about to repeat itself, but for a generation with greater autonomy, representation and a stronger united voice.

Two pieces of evidence were particularly stressed – first, an offhand remark during an interview mentioning the possibility of multiplayer, which never made it into the game, and secondly a two-year old trailer that offered all things to all people. However, Hello Games gave indications, not promises, and these were made far from release, and while the trailer may have condensed multiple experiences to give a vertical slice of the game, but it reads as representative of what the vague label of ‘actual gameplay’ means in a AAA industry that regularly stages and choreographs playthroughs. Everything present conformed to the usual style of vertical-slice gameplay we get in open-world trailers (Skyrim involves a lot more walking from A to B than it’s trailers ever convey) – but undeniably the released No Man’s Sky seemed to lack something. Different accounts vary in the particulars, but the general remains the same: overall it was felt by the majority to be underwhelming, lacking in majesty

This squirrel-kangaroo-dinosaur is just one of the many victims of the marketing machine.

Players were offered 18 quintillion planets and maybe multiplayer, and what they got was just a measely 18 quintillion planets – why was this perceived to be a huge shortfall? Players experiences and emotional responses were genuine, but the root cause of them isn’t so obvious, and the small development team not so clearly at fault. Who lies? (everybody) That’s right, developers lie to players, but players can also lie to themselves, I know I do.

What we have here is a volatile cocktail of factors, logistics and expectations, some of them simple and practical, but others larger and more conceptual. People asked – what do you DO in No Man’s Sky? And they got a lot of complicated and vague answers. But if the researcher asks – what did No Man’s Sky do to players? We find clearer and more significant outcomes: No Man’s Sky made people uncomfortable. Moreover, it angered them in a decade which has increasing consumer agitation, organisation and powerfully vocal demands.

The increasing amount of time and money sunk into publicity inflates expectations, distorts its object, but even more importantly, it treads the line between being propaganda for the studio and mirror for the player-consumer. Since 2008’s release of Spore to a lacklustre reception, promotional cycles and publicity campaigns increased in spectacularity and longevity almost exponentially, but alongside publishers’ exaggerations we have also seen growing networks of players which create self-sustaining feedback loops of opinion amid the swelter of info dumps, speculation and social networking.

Trailers are designed to show people their inner desires, they manipulate their audience, and we continually forget this – they sell us futures, not actualities, they sell us dreams no reality can fulfil, and in the case of No Man’s Sky, they left a vast volume of space in which everyone could project their fantasies of a total simulation. It suggested more than it showed, and that is what the endless memes and tirades across steam and youtube really attest to – shiny virtual worlds turned to dusty banal ones. The relationship was one of faith violated, but interestingly this very motif is perhaps one of the most significant themes of the game itself.

A dreamscape populated primarily by spiders.

Critiques focus on the emptiness of space, the lack of meaning and of purpose, and the insignificance of player actions, but if we read these sources obliquely, we can see this was also an accurate assessment of what makes this game special, and the very qualities that made it attractive to masochists like me. Without limit conditions, clear affordances, or the potential for player mastery; without challenge, and without an end-state, this game barely seems to be a game. In No Man’s Sky we are thrust into an uncaring and meaningless universe, and our freedom to do everything paradoxically makes nothing worth doing. In No Man’s Sky we live in a godless universe, in a context where players want to be gods, or assume there to at least be a strong authorial presence. The possibility space is too vast, and every element too insignificant, for concepts of achievement, discovery, identity or progress to be possible

These space pilots are all actually suffering deep existential ennui.

I am not, as it may seem, arguing that the developers had genius of foresight or subversion – indeed they built in bland and ineffectual game loops to try and counteract this nihilistic effect, but only succeeded in making it stronger. The game was a perfect storm, a combination of events and agents which made it the perfect articulation of Existentialism and absurdism.

Space. The final commute.

It is telling that one of the games metrics for achievement is a pedometer, the idea of the quantified self which many people with fitness bands use to try and create measurable meaning out of the endless flow of daily life. No Man’s Sky was in many ways a game discovered rather than designed, to which meaning had to be added after the fact.

Von Neumann bots had to be created to map and quality control a universe too vast for even its designers to fully comprehend – bots were sent out into the game to compile gifs of planets in an exponential wave of discovery to try and get a measure on a universe so vast, it already has more documented species than the earth. The game’s universe is as much a found object as it is authored or crafted, and this principle has been controversial for audiences ever since Duchamp first exhibited a urinal in the context of supposedly meaningful paintings and sculptures.

No Man’s Sky is more a reflection of an indifferent reality than a rewarding game, and the problems we have with it are problems we all have with our own lives – nothing has inherent meaning, nothing, proportionally speaking, carries any weight. In Jean Paul Sartre’s Existentialism, it is us who produce meaning, in Camus’ Absurdism, our relationship to reality is absurd, you collect some stuff and then you die. But, as theorised in the Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, we should not waste our life searching for meaning when the universe is fundamentally inhuman, instead we should focus on its contingency and possibility. Not a hidden design, but what we can create out of it. This is the terrifying freedom of a truly open world.

Modern art. Ain't it beautiful.

Players often want to be the centre of attention, but games have an exceptional capacity for showing us just how insignificant we all are. But on the bright side, the process of many humanities disciplines teaches us that what disappoints us can often be the most interesting part of an event or experience, and encourages us to open up points of friction and controversy to see what they might yield by being critical of first impressions. Duchamp’s urinal, his Fountain 1917, is now considered to be possibly the most important work of art of the past one-hundred years, but at the time, a lot of commentaries on the face of it just read: “damn, that’s a janky sculpture, I want my money back.” In a hundred years’ time, the least popular games may come to be seen as the most ‘progressive’ art.

Cory Arcangel, Clouds 2002

In the end, maybe No Man’s Sky has a lot more in common with ‘Game Art’ (under John Sharp’s (2016) definition) than most commercial AAA releases – and in particular Cory Arcangel’s Clouds. Arcangel’s video installation is an unending stream of another sky, the upper reaches of Mario, stripped of all assets and mechanics. Like Hello Games’ work it prompts questions not only about what constitutes a ‘game’, but also how we can find something beautiful in the minimal, something magic in the banal. I think there’s an interesting but also terrifying horizon for everyone in No Man’s Sky – named, poignantly, after an existential void.

Happy Halloween.

Merlin Seller