[dmreedy]

> So maybe it’s not such a New Thing. What is a game like No Man’s Sky, really? A set of symbols that specify a world but do not themselves constitute it. A rich grammar that’s inert without the trigger of human attention. > >Doesn’t that sound like something else? > >It sounds like a book.

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".

[bbctol]

For some reason, comparisons between books and other forms of media always focus on how much less work the book does, how much more it requires imagination. Which I always think is silly: sure, a book requires that you make up the pictures and sounds, but it tells you, directly, what's going on in every scene, pulling out the relevant information, and more often than not going inside characters' heads and revealing their motivations directly.

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.

[coldtea]

>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.

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.

[dmreedy]

I will admit I was overstating for comedic effect, and that was somewhat unfair. However, I disagree with your defense here.

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.