2404: No Man’s Sky and the Case for “Games for Grown-Ups”

Back in the ’90s, MicroProse, a software company that already produced a number of the most complex computer games on the market thanks to their near-exclusive focus on military simulators, launched a spin-off label called “MicroStyle”. MicroStyle’s “thing” was that they produced “games for adults”. This did not mean “adult” as in “porn”; rather, it meant games about things that — supposedly, anyway — older gamers would be interested in. No cutesy platformers with rainbow colours here; MicroStyle was all about motorbikes, fast cars and, err, Rick Dangerous, the latter of which perhaps erred a little more towards the side of cutesy platformers than its stablemates.

The reason this largely pointless piece of gaming history trivia is at the forefront of my mind right now is due to the recently released No Man’s Sky, and the bafflingly negative reaction it has received from many online commentators. I had been asking myself why there was so very much whining going on about this game, when it occurred to me, partly after a bit of reflection on my own part and partly after a discussion with my friend Chris.

No Man’s Sky is a game for grown-ups. And some people don’t know how to deal with that.

The reason I say this is that there’s a very obvious dichotomy when it comes to this game between those who have sat down and spent time with it — and then, crucially, reflected on the experience — and those who take it at face value, judge it against the frankly unreasonable expectations they set for it in their head and consequently respond rather negatively towards it.

There are two particularly good pieces on the subject of No Man’s Sky that I invite you to read right now before we go any further.

The first, from The Guardian’s Keith Stuart, explores the game from the perspective of someone who grew up playing the original Elite on 8-bit computers. Stuart describes how invested he was in the virtual galaxy that Elite allowed him to explore; how he went so far as to buy a particular joystick to play it with because it looked suitably futuristic, and to make copious notes about profitable trading routes and sectors to avoid. His prose reminded me of my own youth with computer games, when I’d actually go so far as to dress up in a bomber jacket, home-made “oxygen mask” (made from a bit of cardboard and an old vacuum cleaner hose) and balaclava (the closest I could get to an actual crash helmet at the time) when playing games like F-15 Strike Eagle II and F-19 Stealth Fighter on the Atari ST. The use of imagination was key; these games were thrilling not because they presented the most impressive visual spectacles on screen, but because they truly allowed you to become someone else for a short time. The idea that you could sit down in front of your computer monitor and become a space traveller or fighter pilot was intoxicating, and even though at the time I was far too young to really understand those games properly, those experiences still stuck with me.

Stuart describes No Man’s Sky as an Elite for the modern age. He also notes that we already have an Elite for the modern age in the form of Elite: Dangerous, but makes the crucial distinction that Elite: Dangerous has gone heavily down the path of complex simulation, while No Man’s Sky eschews some of the more “unnecessary” aspects of realism in favour of providing an experience that stokes the fires of the imagination.

Stuart’s piece is complemented nicely by this piece in Rolling Stone/Glixel from Star Wars novel author Chuck Wendig. Wendig describes No Man’s Sky as “boring”, but notes that this isn’t actually a bad thing.

“We often play games for the destination,” says Wendig, “but I don’t think that’s why we play No Man’s Sky. We play it for the journey. There is an eerie calm to this game. A utopian serenity. A pleasant, alluring boredom that draws you along the journey – but not too fast. This is sci-fi that doesn’t ask you to kill, kill, kill. It asks you only to wander. To discover. To catalog your findings and sell your wares and move onto the next moon, the next space station, the next world, the next star system. All in pursuit of whatever it is you wish to pursue.”

He’s absolutely right. While there is combat in No Man’s Sky, it’s a rare occurrence — rare enough to make every time you switch your multi-tool from mining laser to boltcaster mode feel significant. The emphasis instead is on exploration, discovery and, above all, imagination. You’re given very little context or explanation for the things you are seeing in No Man’s Sky, and I have a strange feeling that even if you “finish” it by reaching the end of one of the narrative paths and/or the centre of the galaxy, it still won’t answer all the questions you might have.

My friend Chris also describes it as “a game for people who like books: you have to have a bit of imagination, and have your sense of wonder still intact, and understand that there are breeds of sci-fi that aren’t about action.” I can’t help but feel that the fact the whole game looks like an Asimov cover is entirely intentional.

The trouble is that this style of play is the exact opposite of what a lot of younger gamers expect from their games these days. They don’t expect their space sims to be quiet, contemplative, artistic affairs that minimise action in the name of cataloguing flora and fauna on diverse alien worlds. They expect their space sims to be more along the lines of the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare trailer we saw at E3: all action, all explosions, all bodies floating off into space. And No Man’s Sky isn’t about that.

I can’t help but feel that the loudest complaint of all — the fact that the game isn’t the synchronous massively multiplayer title that a lot of people had come to assume it would be — also ties in with this. Fundamentally, No Man’s Sky is a game about being alone in a vast galaxy, and occasionally coming across traces of evidence that other people have been there before you — whether it’s long-forgotten ruins, from which you can learn snippets of the various alien languages in the game, or star systems, planets and species of flora and fauna named by other players. The fact that you can’t see other players flying around is entirely intentional; the game hasn’t been designed in that way at all, and “true” multiplayer would add absolutely nothing to the experience other than the opportunity to be griefed by players who fancied a career in virtual space piracy.

No Man’s Sky is a game for grown-ups. Specifically, it’s a game for grown-ups who grew up with games in the ’80s and ’90s; it realises the dream of being able to freely fly a spaceship around a vast universe, land on planets and explore them at our leisure; it gives us enough fuel to stoke the fires of our imagination, and withholds enough to allow us to let those flames flare up as much as we want; it’s a game that is the exact opposite of something like Mass Effect’s grand space opera, in which nothing is left to the imagination. (This isn’t to put Mass Effect down, mind you; there’s a place for both the quiet contemplation of No Man’s Sky and the dramatic bombast of Mass Effect in this world.)

Perhaps most tellingly, all the most interesting, thoughtful and sensible commentary on No Man’s Sky has been by people over the age of 30. And the negative comments very much come across as being written by much younger people. (I obviously can’t say for certain how old many of the naysayers are, but their words certainly come across as being less… seasoned, shall we say.)

If all you can do is rant and rave about how Hello Games’ Sean Murray “lied” to you about the game being multiplayer… well, then you’re missing the point. Spectacularly. And you should probably go and play something else. Something with more guns in it.