No Man’s Sky is Elite for the 21st century. Pointless? Maybe but also sublime

There was no point to any of this. If you got rich you could upgrade your ship with better weapons and defence systems, and as you did that, you became more formidable in battle, increasing your rank. But it wasnt really about that, it was about the experience. Id drift in space for hours, scooping fuel from suns, mining asteroids, watching the vector-based planets withdraw into the distant nothingness behind my craft. Id pretend to be in Alien, world-weary and skittish, terrified of passing too close to LV-426. When I bought a docking computer, Id listen to the games simple but beautiful rendition of the Blue Danube as my craft spiralled delicately toward the space station entrance. Id imagine myself leaving the ship, wandering the white, brightly lit corridors of the station, finding trading partners, discussing deals. In the game, you never left your ship, and the space station interior was depicted as a series of trading lists. You never saw anything. You had to create it all. The game was the backdrop, the words on the page.

I have of course been reminded of all this playing No Mans Sky, which is in effect Elite for the 21st century (yes, I know there is an actual Elite for the 21st century Elite: Dangerous but it is much more of a serious simulation, and is constructed in a very different way). Theres little point to it, beside the promise of some narrative event at the centre of the universe. You drift from planet to planet, mining, selling and buying; there are little compulsion systems that prod you toward increasing your inventory size and following astral paths through the glittering cosmos, but you dont have to. I like floating just above the surface of a planet, watching the details bubble into life below me; the ships engine makes this dull clunking sound, which seems brilliantly anachronistic in a craft capable of faster than light travel, but it adds a sort of workmanlike feel to travel. It brings back that sense that Elite provided that youre a lonely and vulnerable traveller, in a puny rust bucket only ever one dramatic incident away from destruction. The universe wont care when youre gone. The universe barely knows youre there.

Some people have reacted badly to this. Used to being told they’re the centre of the galaxy, gamers are furious about the lack of direction in the game, the lack of point, the lack of meaning, the lack of recognition. It has occurred to me while watching the controversy unfold that many of the angry comments about the game are expressing existential angst. Theres no point and no direction. You hear this a lot about life in general when you spend time in online forums. I think the internet and the vast cynical, largely anonymised community it has engendered, has allowed a kind of nihilism to form and propagate. The people dismissing the No Mans Sky creators as liars and thieves because some of the potential features they talked about haven’t yet materialised in the game, are having trouble coming to terms with the vagaries of the creative act and of life itself. They think everything has to work and operate like a product; whether thats a game, a movie franchise or other human beings. When things dont work like that they feel cheated.

I mean, I dont know whats changed in the 30 years since Elite. Is it simply about technology? Is it that we require more detail and direction from our games now? That makes sense I suppose. Or is it a wider sociocultural phenomenon that we have been taught to expect some sort of cogent journey, some carefully scripted satisfaction, from every single thing we engage with? We are certainly very impatient when the decisions we make dont generate the rewards we expect. And now social media has allowed us to revel in and communicate our fury.

I just know that I didnt expect Elite to provide me with much. My life in that game was 90% cruising through space with a full cargo hold, hoping not to attract attention from either the police or the authorities. The other 10% was terrifying and desperate space battles that would often see me jettisoning in an escape pod and starting my empire from scratch once again. The game had missions, but they were randomly allocated and dangerous. I rarely bothered with them.

Video games are still very tricky to define. They are not technological objects in the same way as printers or smart watches or Bluetooth speakers. But they are not art in quite the same way as cinema or literature. Instead, they are works of complex creative endeavour, they are imaginative machines, but the players themselves must complete the circuitry; you have to bring something with you and with some games that requirement is greater. The clash over No Mans Sky is a clash between people who see games as an entertainment product and the people who see them as an experience. As a product the game falls short in many practically understood ways. As an experience it can be utterly transcendental.

The problem we face now, in a consumer marketplace utterly saturated with choice, is that value is both a defining and an ambiguous factor. In order to commit to something, be it a TV series, YouTube channel or video game, we apply all sorts of criteria in the fear that were committing to the wrong thing. But those criteria can be misleading especially when money is involved. Can No Mans Sky be worth 45 when it has no point to it; when you may get bored after 12 hours? This seems like a sensible question, but when were talking about experience, it really isnt. A gorgeous meal, a trip on the London Eye, a night at the theatre, a Champions League play-off ticket these are all hugely expensive propositions, that may only yield seconds of truly memorable entertainment. But those seconds may live with you forever. How do you place value on those things?

I still remember the hours I sat at that desk, the Blue Danube softly playing, clicking between the different views from my space ship, watching the stars dart by, watching the empty circle planets rotate. I paid 15 for Elite and another 15 for the joystick. It was so much money to me back then. But while there were other games that looked better and were more exciting, I dont remember many of them now. I guess Im old, thats the thing: Ive learned how much moments matter, and how, when the context fades, the joy often remains, like a pinprick of light in the blackest sky.