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Exploring the intersection of sacred and secular.
The action-adventure video game No Man’s Sky was released in 2016 after a massive media push making incredible claims about the player experience — for the first time, a nearly unlimited space-based sandbox, where the main story arc was only the beginning. As it turns out, those claims really were incredible at launch, because from glitching through landscape to it being a massively lonely world without fellow travellers because there was no multiplayer, it was the hottest and messiest of hot messes.
At least that’s what I heard, since it was only on windows and I didn’t own a Gamestation or whatever.
Start Mid, Don’t Taper Off
When I finally played it in 2018 or so, it was already much different. Hello Games, led by the enigmatic and emojiphilic Sean Murray, already gained a reputation because they think different — ly. They think different-ly — I don’t want to be the first Sudbury Weekly contributor to be DCMAd by the fruity folks.
They’d already released four game changing platform updates — some of them complete graphics, physics, and storyline overhauls. By 2020, they’d done something almost impossible on the interwebs — they’d gone from being lambasted by cranky gamers to being lauded for making good on the promises they made and missed at launch. Even more improbably, they achieved a Mostly Positive rating on Steam in 2021! If this doesn’t mean much to you, the internet is full of curmudgeonly juveniles who love tanking people’s reputations for the lulz. Gamers are the worst of them all — second only to scifi fans in vitriolic volume, and then only perhaps, since their vennlike overlap achieves a near perfect convergence.
The Rarest Achievements, Unlocked
Rarer still are two other achievements that break the mold. First, the playerbase in No Man’s Sky is singularly kind. It’s rare to find anyone being mean to each other, and one of the most frequent complaints is that established players have a habit of dropping huge loads of cash and resources on noobs at the Anomaly, a place where travelers converge for missions and upgrades.
Second, and this is clutch, once you buy the initial game, every update and item is 100% free. There are no microtransactions; no elite skins or OP items to be bought for an advantage. In an age of charging for nearly everything but walking — and I’m looking at you, EA, Roblox, and Blizzard — there’s no advantage to be bought because it’s all free.
Having released their thirty-ninth major update just two days ago, that’s a lot of depending on reputation to drive profit.
The Recipe for Misery
One of the driving principles of the oddly fettered capitalism that exists here is the idea that everything is driven by what has become an entirely manufactured scarcity. From Reagan’s racist Welfare Queen trope to people ranting about paying for perfectly healthy people to live without working — which is its own enfeebled fiction — people waste their lives arguing about a micro-minority considered to be the deserving poor are out of one side of their mouths, while claiming no one would be poor if they just worked harder out of the other side of their wage stealing, profit mongering mouths.
No OnE wIlL wOrK iF nOt FoR fEaR oF sTaRvInG!
So what did Hello Games do to finally succeed in creating trolls under their bridge?
The same thing they always do — in 2022’s Waypoint update, they gave everything away.
Seriously.
They introduced custom difficulty settings that allowed players to set the most bizarrely masochistic restrictions to prove how skibbidy they are (I think that’s how you say it), or choose to make everything from base building to resources to upgrades to the most powerful ships absolutely free. I’ve never seen so many people angry at one time since I changed a bulletin in church — who would have ever guessed that so many seniors could hold pitchforks that firmly!
House of Cards or Bricks?
Over the last three years, the game withered and died because no one had any reason to play anymore. The free content, ability to have everything with no work, and the lack of challenge obliterated the once-thriving community, and we proved Friedman’s premise that scarcity is the primary driver of demand as Hello Games folded under its own neoliberal weight.
Nah, I’m kidding.
No Man’s Sky is more popular than ever. Not only does everyone not automatically turn on free loot, but the community has learned to embrace the fact that the best part of the game isn’t the grind, but the joy of creation, exploration, and freedom to choose what kind of game you want to play even moment by moment. Outside of permadeath being locked if you select it, you can set the hardest challenges ever and then a minute later make it all free, and everything in between without even changing saves.
Some people still complain about the lavish gifts given by established travelers, some people still dupe items, and some grind cartilage-eroded knuckles upon each other just for the love of the game. The community is as kind as ever, and nine years in, the active player base in No Man’s Sky is bigger than it’s ever been. It’s Minecraftian, but it’s closer than anyone would ever have expected at launch.
For the Love of the Game
We live in a moment with unparalleled access to life-sustaining resources, and perhaps the most sharply divided gap between the wealthy few and an impoverished minority that’s ever existed — and the gap is still growing.
What keeps No Man’s Sky fun is that players realize the fun isn’t only in the stuff, but in the joy of choosing. While there are always plenty of tryhards and aimless wanderers, there’s a sense in the community that we’re all fellow travelers who somehow all benefit because we all choose kindness, and refuse to suffer trolls for long.
In a world of limitless options, it seems those of us under this sky keep choosing leaders who enact the cruelest timeline possible because we’ve paid a heavy, bloody price to buy into the lie that scarcity is the only commodity that makes anything worth anything.
What would it look like if we instead chose to use our voices to invest in people, not because they’re somehow “worthy” according to some glutton’s metric, but for our sheer love of the game — scifi fandoms included?
Eric Wolf is a local Lutheran pastor, and he’d love to buy you a coffee, tea, or beverage of your choice to tell him about your faith, your ideas about meaning, or whatever “sacred stuff” means to you. Reach him at [email protected]! To learn more about Eric and his writing, visit his blog at Love Sees Color.