No Man’s Sky and the Beautiful Return to the Weird
I remember when Seaman came out. I was just out of High School. I had taken a pause from video games in my personal life, but always stayed closely interested. My younger brother must have picked up a copy one day without me knowing. I had walked by his room and heard him awkwardly shouting slow and mundane questions in such a way that I knew he wasn’t talking to anyone real. Continuing to listen, I heard him talking to Seaman, holding some type of fumbling counseling session.
“What’s wrong Seaman?”
Upon investigating, I found him playing a “game” that consisted of little more than talking to a fish with the face and demeanor of a cynical middle-aged man. I sat in his room for a good hour watching with an emotional cocktail of amazement, confusion and intrigue. It was so weird. The best part about Seaman is that appeared to be the whole thing. You just raised this man-faced fish and had conversations with him. It didn’t need to be anything else.
Video games were young and weird and we loved it.
It’s like someone gave us these creator’s tools and said, “make something that responds when you poke at it”. That’s what we did back then. Make weird, interactive play things.
Another favorite of mine, Monster Rancher, had us grabbing for obscure compact disks to see what strange creatures the system would spit out. It was a strange pinata of chance that was delightful, even without the rest of the game’s systems.
It’s hard to say whether today we reach the same level of originality. Everything is a remix, after all. While independent games are big, it feels like we get a lot of saccharine nostalgia or blunt force absurdity to the head. Almost like we REALLY want to be original. It’s really hard to create in an unbound environment. I call that the “Repeat Xerox” effect. Creating a copy of a copy just doesn’t look good or pure anymore.
One thing I don’t believe is that we’re just jaded and there’s nothing left but to combine familiar elements into something hopefully new. In fact, ideas are only ideas. Execution is where something feels unique and original, and in that we have a universe of unique perspectives nearly as deep as the space in No Man’s Sky.
So, a lot of what we play now is directly referencing successful experiments of the past. This is fine and works pretty well for the most part. We know more. We know what works.
Compare this to the human experience. As we grow, we build reference to perceive the world around us. That reference paints our daily existence. It keeps us from harm and helps us assess logically efficient pathways toward any number of destinations. When we’re young, we experiment bravely (or ignorantly) because we have no perceived boundaries. We don’t know how to process them. This beginner’s mentality allows us to generate truly boundless play and see familiar things in strange and beautiful ways.
No Man’s Sky’s design lead and public face, Sean Murray, has a childlike approach to his creative drive. He’s identified an emotion so distinctly connected to his youth and relentlessly pursued it. Nostalgia is a powerful creative motive, but it’s a nostalgia he owns, not the collective nostalgia of a cultural phenomenon. The sounds, sights, and smells of laying under the stars in the outback of Australia were spent wondering how closely the worlds he saw on the cover of science fiction novels were connected to the distant representation of the universe he saw in his yard.
While No Man’s Sky has the trappings of many games we’ve all played, it emphasizes some things that other games don’t. For example, there’s a lot of joy in discovery, and claiming ownership of your discoveries through naming creates meaningfulness in wandering. Taken relatively seriously, you start to try to understand environments and atmospheres to perceive the existence of foreign organic bodies in order to properly classify them. Discovery is no longer passive, but engaging with the minutia of the generated landscape.
There’s also this great moment of breaking free of your starting planet. Upon beginning, the game provides no introduction. You simply exist. Alone. This can be a very suffocating feeling, especially if your survival depends on how well you adapt. Eventually, there’s a symbolic emergence from the atmosphere of your planet of origin. Finally setting out independently and then discovering another massive, lonely planet provides more questions than answers. It’s the quiet, familiar illusion of newly gained freedom. Not too dissimilar from our own human experiences. It’s a known unknown.
What’s important about all of this is that these design decisions are deliberately risky. Good creative direction means you put your flag down and build based on a vision. That may mean that many won’t appreciate or even like it. This kind of creative work doesn’t seek everyone’s approval, but seeks to express a package of bottled up ideas in the best way it knows how.
As you’ve probably heard it said in the last few days, No Man’s Sky is not made for everyone. It has a clear identity that is not up for compromise. We’ve had hundreds of games over the last couple of decades that feel like the baby of carefully conducted focus groups that either pander to stereotypes or play into expectations. We rarely get a game that asks you to let it drive and take you for a ride you’ve never been on before.
These weird games endure and often spawn new cultures in play. Pokemon, Guitar Hero, Defense of the Ancients, these are playful experiences that created something familiar, but executed them in a way we’ve never seen before. Original ideas are hard to come by. While No Man’s Sky isn’t 100% fresh, it’s execution largely is. My hunch is that a lot of the negative feedback will spawn other game makers to be inspired by what Hello Games has created and try to improve upon it. It’s too strange to ignore.
No Man’s Sky is a flawed game, for sure. So many of the memorable classics are. But they were weird and unique enough to give us experiences we couldn’t get elsewhere and never leave our memories. Great work is often polarizing. We won’t soon forget this game and what it meant to us.
