Videogamers are excited about a new one: No Man's Sky, an "open world" game akin to Minecraft that allows a player to explore almost infinite fantastic worlds in futuristic spacecraft.
The game has just been released, with much anticipation, since it was first promised by an independent British studio called Hello Games in 2013. Its first reviews are enthusiastic despite a few bugs: Players are both daunted and excited by the idea of travelling through endless hours of new landscapes, encountering new lifeforms and learning their languages, and endless days of harvesting enough local materials to repair one's ship and move on.
What is the point, exactly? No one seems sure yet. They are still talking about the pleasures of discovering exactly what science-fiction settings the computer has generated. For they are all computer generated, of course – if there are to be 18 quintillion possible available planets, as the designer promises, they must be. The hype assures us that every pixel is "procedural" – i.e., created by algorithm, not by human. Reviewers who have been playing it for a few days report having visited about 14 planets each so far.
What do players see? Lots of pretty classic sci-fi renderings: toxic desert planets, rich blue oceans, fantastic creatures with reptile heads and furry bodies, etc., all in gorgeous moving full colour. It is dreamy and intriguing, even if familiar from several decades of similar van-and-album-cover art. It turns out algorithms are amazingly imaginative things.
What do players do? So far, just try to survive. There are issues of supplies and storage and inhospitable climates to deal with. You collect the necessities of life and move on. You can meet other players if you play online. You can engage in battle with other craft, but so far, you can't kill other players. Nor can you settle down and build a civilization. The game does, in theory, come to an end: You can travel to the centre of the universe (and one reviewer has claimed to have done that in 30 hours).
Already, at least one reviewer has reported a sense of "malaise" at this endless drifting. I suspect at some point players are going to crave a narrative, and fantasy narratives always come from larger goals – from quests. Often the life in these games comes from the communities of players that congregate there, and their social/rivalrous interactions, and no doubt that will arise here. But so far it is an experiment in random world building.
This – world building – is a phrase fantasy authors use, too, when writing their fictions, and they spend a lot of time thinking about how much of their text should be devoted to it, and how much to the story. A successful fantasy world easily integrates the useful information about the ecosystem – what Tolkien called writing "about trees as trees" – and the characters in it, without making a reader feel she is perusing an encyclopedia or a manual. (Encyclopedias about fantastic worlds do exist, of course, but usually to please fans of the fiction after they have read it.)
There are conventional fantasy entertainments that eschew overarching plot as well: TV lends itself to these particularly well. The original Star Trek series, for example, was made up of stand-alone episodes, each of which could be watched in isolation with no lack of understanding. This is similar to the encounters with alien civilizations that occur in No Man's Sky: They are episodes rather than plot points.
I was discovering No Man's Sky at about the same time I was reading an interview with Canadian fantasy novelist Guy Gavriel Kay. The interview, conducted by Christine Fischer Guy, another Canadian novelist, appeared recently in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Kay is a careful and detailed world builder; his worlds are based on periods of actual human history, such as the Byzantine empire or the Tang dynasty. His most recent book, Children of Earth and Sky, is inspired by the European Renaissance and its pirates. In each case, he has invented names of countries – and in some cases added a second moon to the sky, so that we can tell that the world is not actually ours. Then he can go and add his fantastical elements, such as ghosts and magic, and the world may follow its own rules.
One reads for immersion in the details of the world, from its weaponry to its social hierarchies, but of course, one also reads to find out what happens: to experience the bravery and deception and self-sacrifice of its characters. One is not in control of these, as a reader, of course: One reads in a linear fashion as directed by a human consciousness.
No Man's Sky is an interesting experiment: a setting without a book. I suspect narratives will be imposed on it by its users – by human consciousness – as well.