No popular game is without controversy, and No Man’s Sky is no exception. While most gamers are upset about the performance issues and the fact that it’s dreadfully boring—and rightfully so—Polygon’s Ben Kuchera has taken a different approach by voicing his issues with the game’s themes.
Quoting games writer Walt Williams, Kuchera says that No Man’s Sky’s biggest problem is its embrace of expansion and resource exploitation as core gameplay mechanics. Mining raw minerals, harvesting plants, and killing wildlife to study them are problematic pursuits that encapsulate everything wrong with humanity as a species, he argues.
“NMS is a beautiful game undercut by bleak, expansionist mechanics. A whole universe of ‘what can I discover and how much $ will it earn me?’” wrote Williams. “What’s sad is despite all our ingenuity, so many of our mechanics reinforce ideas and behaviors we know to be harmful.”
There’s no question that the overexploitation of resources on planet Earth is unsustainable, but that’s only due to the fact that our planet contains finite fossil fuels and our species demands much more than what’s available. If we had the technology to travel across vast distances of space in the blink of an eye—as we do in No Man’s Sky—the exploitation of any materials we come across in our explorations would be a drop in the ocean.
Kuchera asks: “We’re landing on planets we know nothing about, in systems that are completely alien to us, and we just start strip-mining each environment for minerals?”
“We’d be a bit annoyed if aliens landed in the Grand Canyon and, after spending a few minutes gawping at the majesty of the place, took out their space lasers to carve up the landscape for fuel,” he continues.
The comparison is flawed because the majority, if not all, of the planets and moons you can land on in No Man’s Sky contain no sentient habitation. You’ll be lucky if you come across a single intelligent alien sitting behind a counter.
Kuchera admits that while he doesn’t think anyone is going to get the message that it’s okay to board a plane to Africa and hunt wild game just because they played No Man’s Sky, he concludes—like so many other culture critics—that the game made him uncomfortable because of its subtext.
“But the uncomfortable subtext of No Man’s Sky is that the galaxy exists for your benefit, that it’s OK to blindly consume and profit from everything you see,” he writes. “It’s just what you do: You land on a planet and take whatever you can grab for your own profit.”
“The attitude that we can use as much of whatever we want—due to there being an infinite amount of everything—is a bit outdated, if not outright ugly, in 2016.”
The question to ask is: so what?
