No Man's Sky is Perhaps the Most Anticipated game of 2016.

"Hey Preludes!" I hear you say, "You seem to have got some gaming 'journalism' smeared all over my casual-education blog, here. What's the deal?"

And yes, yes I have. But I would argue that this is a game that should perk up the interest of anyone with a healthy sense of curiosity, as it seems to promise some seriously innovative new approaches to how games are coded and how we, as artistic humans, can go about world building with glorious, terrifying maths.

So What Is It?

Big.

No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated  sci-fi exploration game that boats 18 quintillion full scale planets for you to explore. When I say 'full-scale' it's not a quirk of phrasing, I mean that each world is quite literally the size of a planet, allowing you to walk in any one direction for years at a time if you so choose. Each planet is, in turn, teaming with unique landscapes and unique life.

It seems impossible: if you were to spend only one second on each planet and explored every planet available, the sun - our actual sun- would have burnt out before you finished. It is completely possible that the heat death of the universe will arrive before you are able to experience every inch of this game. 

What's more? It was developed by the tiny indie studio Hello Games, that only has 4 founders and a handful of staff, and was previously most well known for their very well reviewed cartoonish stunt game 'Joe Danger'.

So how is it that such a small game studio can create something that is almost infinitely large? The key is how the innovative technology of procedural generation is used.

Procedural generation has been around for years and is a way of creating randomised but controlled content for games that otherwise would need far too high a memory to run. While games like Grand Theft Auto or Skyrim are large sandbox-style worlds, they are restricted in that they are all hand-crafted by gaming artists: every single element is deliberately designed. As a result, once gaming systems were large enough to accommodate them, this allowed for some gorgeous visuals and room to spread your wings. Procedural generation, on the other hand, is the realm of games such as Minecraft. The idea is that as you walk around, the games creates itself in front of your feet, allowing for organic exploration. Artists are most certainly involved in the original design and in keeping the world in check and making sure that things don't get too crazily random, but fundamentally these games rely much more heavily on hanging something pretty off an innovative and clever code as its core mechanic. No Man's Sky and Minecraft are not designed to ever really be finished in their standard mode.

How Do They Do That?

This PBS Game Show video explains it far better than I can, but effectively the answer is a whole lot of clever maths.

No Man's Sky takes the concept of procedural generation up a notch not just in using it to generate planets, but also the trees and creatures and even ships and audio that you find on it. While Minecraft may randomise what monster spawns, they are pre-rendered pieces of art. No Man's Sky instead crafts its creatures like you might in Spore or your Sims: it starts off with a basic skeleton and movement features created by an artist and then it messes around with various 'sliders' and randomised features to create them. Algorithms that are created to imitate scientific principles are then grafted in so that things always make a certain amount of sense. For example, you won't find life on planets that are too close or too far away from the central star, and if you do find animals the bigger ones are far less likely to be afraid of you, in fact they may even be a little mean.

I find that the way the developers are forced to interact with their own potentially unruly universe fascinating in that it so closely mirrors what's going on behind the scenes in our own. Maths is a language of science and science is the fabric of the universe: what are we but a load of sliders restricted by the logic of DNA? What are physics but a set of rules to stop everything from going infinitely haywire?

Will It Be Worth Buying?

On a personal level, it's a tricky one for me. Oh I'll most certainly buy it : even despite the rumored hefty price tag (the current price listed on amazon.co.uk is £54, making it even more expensive than the £49.99 triple-A game Grand Theft Auto 5). After all, one doesn't spout a whole blog post about how excited one is about a game concept without supporting the game itself, and I do think that it's a worthy game to risk your hard earned cash on. The real question is, will I enjoy it as much as I hope?

I've become a convert to sandbox games, but while I love having the option to roam around aimlessly I most appreciate large games where you have plenty of story elements - both core 'plot heavy' missions and the bazillion little side missions that give the world real flavour. I really find myself disliking MMOs where worlds get so vast and saturated in players that the story is little more than repetitive fetch quests and grinding - (though No Man's Sky  is perhaps the world's most introvert-friendly community based game). As for the procedurally generated or randomised worlds that I come across myself -such as Minecraft and Risk of Rain - or those I appreciate through Lets Plays on youtube like Stranded Deep, it can really be a mixed bag. On the one hand I love that there is clever exploration to be had. I love the idea of them and striking out into something infinitely varied. But...without much direction it can be repetitive and, dare I say, without value. In Minecraft, for example, I find myself starting over again new from scratch over and over because I get bored of getting lost or the same basic biomes repeating themselves over and over with slight variations. With Stranded Deep the core concept of being a castaway is dulled by the countless repetitive mini islands you find, the lack of logic in some of the loot you find, and the realisation that you can't really ever be rescued. You physically cannot beat the game. It's not designed to be resolved even in an open ended fashion. So....what's the point?

My hope is that No Man's Sky will operate along the same lines as one of my favourite open-alpha/beta games of last year The Long Dark. The Long Dark itself isn't procedurally generated - all the levels are very much designed - but it fundamentally doesn't hold much hope of resolution: all you do is just try to survive for as long as possible. What it has that Stranded Deep doesn't is instead a huge feeling of atmosphere. The art style is unique and beautiful, the world feels very real and often very threatening at times and peaceful at other times. It's a game that can challenge you and also let you settle into your own feeling of zen. exploration in The Long Dark is desirable from an aesthetic as well as a practical standard when resources run low, but also challenging enough to escape boredom.

Perhaps No Man's Sky will also do best, for me at least, if it can fill a similar niche. Instead of viewing it as a game of set objectives of any sort, it should instead be an experience: a chance to jump back into the good old days of sci-fi before it was quite so dystopian and take a childlike hour or two to just wander around and enjoy the atmosphere and the creativity.

You can certainly say that you get a lot for your money. 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets, to be exact.

Keep in touch....

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Stay curious!

Sources

-PBS Game/Show - how minecraft generates such huge worlds
-PBS game/Show how no man's sky creates a universe
-PBS game/show comment responses to how no man's sky creates a universe
-Intel: No man's Sky Procedural Generation
-Playstation blog; '41 amazing things you might not know about No man's Sky'
-Gamespot: No man's sky Images
-Hello Games
-No Man's Sky 2015 E3 Demonstration
-Metacritic; Joe Danger
-IGN: Joe Danger Review
-IGN: A tour of 5 new planets
-IGN: Procedural audio- otherworldly sounds of no man's sky
-IGN: 18 minute gameplay demo
-IGN: How no man's sky infinate universe actually works

Let me open first by saying "Happy 2015!"

 I hope that you all had wonderful Holiday and New Years celebrations, and that you have not yet been driven quite insane by the Back to the Future memes that are currently abound on the internet. Yes we are in 2015. Yes this is the 2015 that Marty Mcfly saw as the 'future', with hoverboards and giant 3D sharks abound.

As a kid this was nightmare fuel, let me tell you.

 We've been at this point before in 1989 with Orwell, 2001 with a Space Odyssey and more and at each point our future has, seemingly, not lived up to expectations. But could it ever?

 That said, I couldn't resist adding to this little pop-culture milestone this 2015 by taking a deeper look into what history envisioned of our future and where we are now at the dawn of 2015.



The Technology of Back to the Future 2 and 2015

Hoverboards

Hovercrafts have been around for quite a while, but it looked as if we could never gain enough control to perfect these into the swift and compact hoverboards that got Marty from A to B, but it looks as if we're on the way there with a new piece of kickstarter-funded technology: The Hendo hoverboard. While still somewhat clumsy, it seems a lot of fun and the skating legend Tony Hawk certainly got a smile out of it.

 Holograms

Holograms have been a staple of Sci-fi for quite a while as a shorthand for advanced technology. You can see it in Star Wars, Star trek, Back to the Future 2, Minority Report, James Bond, Agents of Shield and Torchwood but to name a few. It seems, that we are on the edge of diving in to this immersive technology. Nowadays you can go to concerts with 'pseudo-holograms' of your favourite deceased musicians, or your favourite incredibly-expensive actors. A 'holographic' Tupac and Michael Jackson have already drawn in crowds, and who could forget the 'holographic' Liam Neeson in the modern stage production of The War of the Worlds? But these images can't quite be called true holograms, but instead a form of live-image compositing also known as 'Pepper's Ghost'. Clever, but not quite the sci-fi ideal.
A new design called Bleen seems set to move holograms into a user friendly personal format in a  style that we're perhaps more familiar with, as you can see form the publicity video below.

 However an over-reliance of computer graphics, the photoshopping of stock photos and a board of directors and scientists that seem to vanish into thin air all set alarm bells ringing, as the website Metabunk argues. Most importantly, the concept of projection onto cool day-lit air simply doesn't mesh with physics as we currently understand it. The closest that can be achieved is through using lasers to superheat small plasma dots in the air in simple shapes, which is dangerous enough that it could never be conducted outside of the labs. I'm certainly more than a little sceptical that true holograms are still firmly in the realm of science fiction today, but I shall let you be the judges.

Self tying shoes

The 80s envisioned that light up self tying shoes were the future and Nike - the product placement of the age- has tried to follow suit with their own Nike Mags self tying shoes that will imitate Marty's exactly. This is technically a case of life imitating art, and it's mind-numbingly tricky to actually find a video of the 'moneyshot' of the power laces in action. But we've been assured that they work. Will this signal a real near-future of potentially-ankle-snapping automatic power laces? Probably not.


While the more outlandish futuristic elements of the film are hit and miss at best, there are a lot of elements that did become a reality and entered our daily life so steadily yet quickly, that many of us even forget to take proper notice of them.

Tablet Computers

Tablet computers are everywhere nowadays 
and they seem to have just sprung up all of a sudden. Like the holograms, hand held computers were a feature of any science fiction show that envisioned a future, be it near or far. While we could track the screen depth of TVs and computers getting thinner and more portable, to actually be rid of a hefty processing system and to actually have a touchscreen that was functional was truly revolutionary. Now we have it, we so often take it for granted, when really our first experiences of them were nothing short of magical. In a way it is the natural progression of the laptop, but who could have predicted that it could become a reality so smoothly?

 Video Conferencing
 

 Another element that was always a staple in science fiction in the past was video conferencing, whether it was between councillors on space ships or employees. It seemed like a predictable and natural progression and so perhaps didn't require much of a stretch of the imagination to envision, but it couldn't have been made reality without some serious technical developments along the way, the chief of which is the sheer usability and speed of our internet connections. Without such a detailed and clever infrastructure in place, it simply wasn't possible, but we have gradually chipped away at this and made it into a reality. Like the tablet computers, and paraphrasing a John Green quote, we seem to experience this amazing technology's development like one falls asleep: slowly and then all at once. Long distance relationships have never been more connected, and it's set to improve even further soon enough.


So, in the end, Back to the Future 2 was hit and miss with its predictions. But what shone through in it's initial envisioning of the future was the media-based, consumer led brightness and imaginative boldness of the 80s. The imagined future, in this respect, was a mirror on the present.

How the past envisioned the future.

Whether or not we reached the goals that the past envisioned for us is never really as important as taking a step back and viewing the spirit behind these imaginations. Science fiction has often been a perfect genre for not only imagining a creative future, but also turning an eye back to view the society that envisioned this future in the first place. Imagination, after all, is always tied to the social influences  of the place in history from which it began.
So, while back to the future was very 80s, if we look to the victorian period often it was very, well, victorian.

The current fashion for steampunk has risen out of the sheer unbridled optimism of Victorian science fiction. Sometimes it was dystopian - just think of the Morlochs in HG Wells' the Time Machine - but when it came to technology the visions of the future showed a capacity to achieve anything. The Victorian age was at the height of blue-sky thinking through the industrial revolution, and this shows in how they envisoned the year 2000. Surprisingly, while it may look different, we actually achieved many of these.



Moving Houses By Train
 

Victorians had the rather sweet idea that having houses on a railway line would keep everything varied. While this idea in itself seems a little silly, nowadays we have the capacity to move huge items - even houses - regularly if needs be. The Victorians of course couldn't predict the decline of the railway, as it was the height of their technology at the time. Nowadays if you want to move a house you need to call up a truck.

 Holidays to the North Pole

The NorthPole was an inhospitable place for the Victorians, but there was hope. Expeditions in 1827, 1871, 1879-1881,1895,1897 and 1900 meant that the North pole was well in the conciousness of the Victorian society. While it was dangerous in the future they hoped to conquer it and make it safe and farmiliar enough to holiday to. Holidays were a new national pasttime and very popular - a true celebration of their progress and civility. And how else better to get to the North pole than by exciting and advanced airships?
Making the dangerous and inhospitable welcoming and accessible is a common feature in any time's predictions of the future. For us, we dream of tourism in space and the moon. For the Victorians, their dream was at least partially achieved. Nowadays, if you're tough enough, you can go and holiday in the North pole...though it;s hardly a walk in the park.

Televised Outside Broadcasts

With the development of the telephone a revolution in communication was at hand, and the Victorians envisioned how entertainment could be shared in this medium. Their solution was similar to the 'Peppers ghost' illusion that we now use for pseudo-'holograms', but they couldn't possibly predict how quickly the advancement in communication and entertainment technology could take place. Now we have Tv, computers, mobile phones, skype, 3d images and more. Quite impressive.

Individual Flying Machines

A successful aeroplane would not be invented until the Wright brothers in 1903, but humans have always wanted to fly. The Victorians had a spirit of exploration and a faith that technology would find a way: surely we would have flying machines by the year 2000!
Not quite. However individual ways of taking to the air are possible. We have private planes and gyrocopters for true flight. We also have handgliders and wingsuits if 'falling with style' is more your cup of tea.

In the end, envisioning what we want for the future is key to understanding who we are in the present.

Whatever your time period of birth, it's very difficult to pick out how the future will look. Marty McFly's 2015 was a future coloured by the 80s - all bright plasticy consumerist goodness with a little lashing of dystopian anxiety towards the end. The Victorian vision of the year 2000 was one that focused on the freedom of exploration and the joy of invention, yet it coached everything in Victorian ideals and could not predict the social revolution of the future that would, for example, put many women in trousers.
So often we use the future  to dream, but also to pass social commentary on our own present. This was  the aim of even earlier visits to the future, and we often see it in our current science fiction media. By imagining a utopia it shows us what we need to make a change, and by imagining a dystopia it cautions us as to what elements of our current society might cause decay and corruption.

To envision the future is to create a mirror, in the end, and it will always be interesting to look back and see how much of that reflection really came true.



Sources

- 'Back to the future how science envisioned 2015'
-11 things from back to the future 2 that came true
-Things we have by 2015
-Back to the future self tying power laces
-Bleen holograms
-Liam Neeson War of the Worlds Hologram
-5 awesome holograms
-Hoverboard
-Victorian visions of the year 2000
-North Pole, Wikipedia