[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.