No Man’s Subway Station
No Man’s Sky started as a flop with broken promises, and what seemed like immense empty space. The last part is the most intriguing though, a game full of empty space with very little to do. Of course the game has improved now, especially with the “NEXT” DLC which came free. Still, a game about empty space is enticing.
Space to humans is becoming limited, not in an increasingly worrying manner, but in maybe a slow, uncomfortable one. With all the space available in No Man’s Sky, the game reminds me of two things, the New York subway system and a book, The Stranger, written by Albert Camus.
No Man’s Sky and New York’s subway stations don’t seem immediately comparable at first, yet they share a sense of crowdedness that makes a person feel lost and small within tremendous space. In New York, livable and buildable space is a pricey commodity. The price is due to the high demand for real estate and the ever reducing available empty space New York has. The limited space has forced the city to rise up into the sky because of the city’s small land area. The sky has become crowded and burdened by buildings. In the New York sky, it seems like a No Man’s Sky already. Below the massive offices and apartment buildings race the decaying arteries of the city. The subway system mimics the high rise buildings in crowdedness. I remember standing in those crowds and realizing there was never a moment to myself. There was never a moment when I didn’t hear all the people rushing past. There was never a moment when I wasn’t uncomfortably close to someone else. That close proximity was at times stifling. The same can be said about No Man Sky. At all times there is an all-encompassing and direct contact with the empty space around you. It crowds around you and seeps into the story and gameplay. That space becomes a fixture in the game, an experiential fulcrum the game pivots around.
That fulcrum is most visible in the game’s early moments. When you begin on a planet it isn’t immediately apparent to you how much empty space there is and how much it crowds you. As a naive player, I remember awakening on a strange planet, wandering around for a bit and becoming captivated by the plants and sparse animals. Then, when I had regained my excitement of what lay beyond the sky, I got into my ship and took off. That’s when I saw the planet’s size I just came from. Only the planet’s top crown fit into my ship’s viewshield. The rest of it loomed somewhere out of sight. Just beyond that looming giant waited for another neighboring, elephantine planet. This planet sat barely contained in my ship’s viewshield. Then looking past that neighboring planet you see the void of space, speckled with tiny stars, and after that, you realize how much flying you could do in the game. You could never land and there would be more flying left to do. The space in No Man’s Sky is truly remarkable, but it is also encompassing.
When I moved through the New York subways I realized wherever I went crowds of people existed. I wasn’t going to be able to get away from humanity’s white noise. It was something you had to accept about New York. You were going to be smothered by the limited space that raced past you. Crowds are how New York moves and functions. I had a similar realization about No Man’s Sky with all its empty space crowding in around me. In both cases, No Man’s Sky and New York share that your body and the character’s body is surrounded at all times. Their crowdedness was because in whatever direction you moved you encountered more of New York’s dreaded crowds and No Man Sky’s empty space. They both encompassed me. They both made me realize how small I was. They also showed me how two opposites, extreme crowdedness, and too much space can have the same effect on a person. That effect makes you realize you’re little more than Carl Sagan’s blue dot in seemingly limitless space.
My smallness in the limitless confines of a city and in a game’s universe is a strange feeling. In both these instances, you have boundaries. Games express boundaries in their mechanics and mapped limits. In cities, usually, you can find a calm place to sit down and be by yourself. This wasn’t so. In New York, I was met with mild claustrophobia. In No Man’s Sky, I met with a claustrophobic feeling that resulted in me just flying about in a near aimless manner, completing the loose story, collecting resources, and scattering my existence across the galaxy by leaving deserted, spacious bases in my wake.
The feeling No Man’s Sky left me with directly correlates with not only New York but also Camus’, The Stranger. The book takes places in French-occupied Algeria and discusses the existential concept of the absurd. The absurd is a concept that explores how reality seems to have a “tender indifference” when it comes to humanity. A way to understand this indifference is by realizing that all the people you know will grow up and die. Some of those people will suffer massively for seemingly no good reason other than they are living. In this act, living out your life just to die, living begins to seem absurd.
To express this absurdism, Camus creates and then introduces you to the character Meursault, a man born and raised in French Algeria. At the novel’s beginning, Meursault attends his mother’s funeral. At the funeral, he doesn’t exhibit any typical displays of grief. Instead, he sits and drinks coffee and smokes a cigarette as if to pass the time. Much of his behavior comes from him being a quiet man and almost entirely uninvolved in life. He is detached and distant from society and individuals in his life. A few days after his mother’s funeral, Meursault shoots and kills a man who had agitated his acquaintance. This might seem like an about turn from an indifferent man or Meursault’s exhibition of sociopathic tendencies, but I assure you he was just as disengaged in the murder and the events that lead to it. The book does a tremendous job at expressing absurdism through Meursault’s realizations. His mother’s death was a distant affair and he was never interested in family. Friends seem fleeting in their loyalty. The murder happened, but the gun transformed into five harmless bursts of noise that erupted into the air.
So how does No Man Sky fit into this? When you’re on a planet after experiencing the overwhelming amount of empty space around you and you look up you see a sky, but beyond that colored sky exists an expansive universe. A human figure standing in an empty field, head raised, staring into the yawning, expansive abyss of the universe fits perfectly into the absurd. You know you will never explore every planet, collect every mineral, speak to ever gibbering alien or collect every ship. Your existence in this game is measured somewhere along the Plank scale. Your impact feels like nothing compared to the procedurally generated explorable environment. And yet, you keep pushing forward in some Sisphysian hope to explore planets and see the cosmos.
