The Patreon Letters - August 19, 2017

Hello friends, M here today to bring you the latest bit of writing. I've sure felt down the past two weeks, I don't know about y'all. The world is in a rough place. Let's do our best to take care of each other and support the world we believe in. 

I wasn't quite sure what to write today. Normally I have a couple of ideas on deck, but today I'm feeling pretty empty of self-expression. So let's do what we originally and still occasionally do on Abnormal Mapping, and talk about some video games.

The most universally beloved game of 2016, No Man's Sky, got a substantial patch last week that got people talking about it again. I passed on the game at launch, mostly because I try not to buy new games, but I'd definitely been intrigued by the game from pictures and stories told about it. So when that patch came with a nice discount, I decided to the The One Person Who Buys No Man's Sky Now, and give it a go.

This isn't a review, but if you want one? It's nice. It's a chill podcast game. It still seems like the game people were mad at just with more stuff. The whole thing was very overblown, but the game itself has eaten up a few hours of my life already and I'm sure will eat up many more if I allow it to. 

What's interesting to me is that as a survival-lite game, it ends up butting against the other great survival-lite game I've poured dozens if not hundreds of hours into: Minecraft. Minecraft is as much a building tool and game engine as it is a survival game at this point, I'll grant you, but I want to mostly focus on the idea of what Minecraft is when you're just gathering resources and getting your foothold into the world in Survival mode, since that most aligns with my first few hours of No Man's Sky and is where the space I want to explore today exists.

No Man's Sky definitely belongs to the second or third wave of survival games in that most of its gathering is highly abstracted. You go up to a rock and you hit the gather button and the rock dispenses X amount of goods, which is a seemingly semi-random number offered to you for your time spent. Most survival games offer some version of this type of resource gathering, since the one-for-one concept Minecraft trades in really requires a rigidly expressed measurement system that all but demands a world made of blocks. You know a tree will give you 5 logs because it's 5 logs high. A tree-or-treelike-structure in NMS offers you X amount of carbon, but aside from bigger trees offering bigger numbers, the amount is both changing and unimportant for how you see the world. You just farm trees until you have the carbon you need.

This sort of abstraction layer applies to everything in the world. Objects on the planet are clear resource packets, where you farm them to make your numbers go up. This is in sharp relief to be Minecraft's universal resource mentality, where every part of the world is made up of a block of something you can acquire and use. The entire world is resources, you just have to choose to extract them. But that difference spirals out into a schism of behavior that results in two very different world views.

In NMS, you vaporize the resources, but also you find large deposits of rare materials in big ovoid or arch shaped (and more, maybe? I'm still early) dotting the landscape. These are different in that as you farm them you carve away at the geometry, leaving huge holes in what were smooth surfaces until you can raze the entire resource pocket to the ground, leaving only a vague crater where it once stood. Because the only resources are discrete objects, there's nothing as far as I can tell that resembles a fill command to restore these craters. Similarly, you can vaporize trees and rocks, but you cannot place them.

This is all a part of NMS's general design, which is a near infinite amount of planets to explore, so each one is inherently disposable. You go, you get the things you need, and then you fly away. Why would you need to redress your damage to a place when you're soon off to the next planet or even system. It's a mote of dust in the wind, never to returned to.

Arguably the same could be said for Minecraft, on paper. It is a nigh-infinite plain expanding in two dimensions, where you can always travel further on the map to roll out new lands for you to explore and mine. The interesting thing, however, is how the world of Minecraft pushes back against that. Almost every tree you fell drops multiple saplings, one for replanting and one or two to carry forward. Every time you go digging for sand you can erase entire beaches, leaving ugly flowing water that nobody likes the look of. And even if you can just walk away, because the game's materials are so abundant and fed into the idea of shelter- and location- building, you don't want to leave a nice spot. You set your spawn point there, you live there, this is your home.

Those systems create a custodianship that NMS lacks, a sense that your actions can have consequences that are real and worth concern. That isn't to say don't mine, that's nigh impossible if you want to get anywhere in Minecraft. But it does suggest that when you mine you don't level whole mountains with TNT, or strip beaches of their sand and clay without restructuring the landscape to account for your need. Most Minecraft players can recount sand farming in a desert where you just carefully shave hills down to not blight the landscape with a strip mine as you gather materials for some sweet glass, which you use to build a home.

That one to one relationship with the materials that come from the land offer an ecology that is hard to do but that any long time Minecraft player probably cares about to some extent. If you build a home, you don't want it to be surrounded by the blight of your construction. That means landscaping. That means environmental awareness. That means consideration of the natural world, even abstracted into blocks. You can't just hop into a ship. Worlds might be endless, but the human need to settle cannot be shunted indefinitely. And for all of its vast geographical and biological wonder, the infinite space game seems to not understand what it means to be connected to those systems as much as the 'video game legos' game did years before.