Loneliness in Games

Everyone hated No Man’s Sky. It’s a canonical fact of video games of the 2010s. Everyone hated it. The game was going to be an exciting and visionary new development for video games as a whole, with a quintillion different possible planets that the player can travel to, procedurally generated with procedurally generated animals and procedurally generated plants, resources, maps, artefacts, locations, environments and on and on so no player would ever see the same planet twice, and no player would ever see the same planet as another player would. In the way of plot, or motivation, or game objectives, there was just enough to keep you going to the next planet, and the next and the next. It was to be about the experience of the infinite generated universe, not the traditional gaming product but instead an exploration of what games could potentially become.

And everyone hated it.

No Man’s Sky received a general all-round roasting by the game-criticism community, everyone declaring it boring, completely devoid of fun, overpriced and broken, but at the same time, it also spurred the creation of three of my favourite pieces of games criticism ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DhaUe6y-Co

Hbomberguy’s AngryGameSmasher rant about No Man’s Sky is hilarious, parodying the legitimate reaction tonnes of game critics had to the game while also adding thoughtful and fun insights into the way the game makes you feel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ymRN6cCd0I

Dan Olson’s video Alone In Public is a deeply fantastic exploration of what makes No Man’s Sky good, and while it doesn’t ask you to like the game or try to win you over, the video does make a really good case for what someone might like about the game. Even the title is so deeply evocative and explains so well what feeling the game creates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgfxo3CLdNM

Dunkey’s review of No Man’s Sky is great because it’s very funny, and also a good summary of what’s actually very boring and un-fun to a lot of players, but even more than that it also sucks, and I love that. Let me explain. 

It isn’t just that Dunkey is being the exact game critics that Hbomberguy’s video seeks to parody and Dan Olson’s video seeks to provide a refreshing alternative to, but within a minute of the start Dunkey definitively states that No Man’s Sky was hailed as the next big leap forward for games and instead was a huge leap backwards, and when I hear that I just have to laugh like hell.

It’s not the travelling, gathering, collecting or building mechanics that make No Man’s Sky a big leap forward for games, it’s the loneliness. The game is deeply, intensely lonely. It’s like Depression Simulator The Game.

And it’s worth pointing out that the isolating, crushing loneliness of No Man’s Sky is, even to those who can fully appreciate it, a potentially awful experience. Pointing out what the game is doing well isn’t the same as pointing out why it’s actually secretly fun.

The solitary protagonist is pretty common in games going back a long time, but games like Doom through the years have avoided a sense of loneliness, whether it be through the linear evolving plot, enough activity to keep the player engaged or, frankly the simplest method - putting in more characters to talk to. The Machine Games Wolfenstein reboot series focuses enough on the relationships between the resistance fighters that even when B.J. Blazkowicz is alone, knowing who he’s fighting for keeps you from feeling lonely.

Horror games thrive off making the player feel lonely and vulnerable. The genre of games dubbed “walking simulators” like What Remains of Edith Finch, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Firewatch are, almost as an essential genre element, incredibly lonely. Loneliness can be used to make you afraid, it can be used to make you reflect.

In these genres, though, the loneliness feels incidental. It feels comfortable, and expected, and maybe that’s because loneliness is just a means to an end - we’re here and we need to get there. In horror games, loneliness is the road to fear, for example.

So there has of course always been loneliness in games, ever since Fumito Ueda invented games back in 2005 with Shadow of the Colossus, but it sure feels like recently developers started realising en masse how effective a little loneliness can be. 

Now, No Man’s Sky might have absolutely nothing to do with this, but it really feels like this trend found its feet post 2016 and besides, I really like this story: Hello Games creates a game that everyone hates, but accidentally is so emotionally powerful that every serious artist-developer in the industry was enchanted with this haunting loneliness.

If there is a clear change, I don’t mean to attribute the change all to No Man’s Sky either. Minecraft, a game people can’t seem to talk about No Man’s Sky without mentioning, is itself intensely lonely, and I feel like that gets overlooked in favour of discussing the revolutionary effect the game has had in terms of popularising gathering and collecting mechanics. The loneliness in Minecraft isn’t necessarily good or bad. One player might find it idyllically peaceful where another might find it desperate and terrifying.

One way or another we’ve had more games with this deliberate, constructed loneliness.

In the time since Minecraft and No Man’s Sky we’ve had open world games like Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn that are deliberately empty and lonely, and push you back out into the wilderness and away from society and other characters. 

Outer Wilds is a game everyone I know can’t shut the heck up about where you, totally alone, have no information or other characters to tell you what to do and a 22-minute window before time starts over to change their fate, is very lonely by its basic nature - nobody can help you solve the puzzle except yourself. This is another example of how value-neutral loneliness can be in games. Is it good? Is it bad? It just is.

In both Control and Hellblade you play not as the character being controlled by the player, but as a voice in their head. The character will make it clear to you who you are, whether you’re welcome (as in Control’s case) or unwelcome (as in Hellblade’s). This is a unique spin on games you could compare these against, like Tomb Raider, because in these games you aren’t alone as the character, you’re alone with the character.

God of War (2018) does something similar with loneliness, in that very few characters matter besides Kratos and Atreus. The game is really made in the moments when the father and son sit alone together in their little row boat talking. The simple development of their dynamic is like a little play we watch while performing the menial task of steering them from point A to point B.

Travel is a recurring source of loneliness in fact, isolating characters from the rest of the world by the simple fact that they are moving on and the rest of the world isn’t. 

The way that this isolation works is that it draws attention to the falseness and emptiness of the simulated world, by showing the player how much variation can look repetitive and tedious. This is probably why lots of players derisively called No Man’s Sky a walking simulator.

There definitely is a type of game where most of the gameplay revolves around the POV character simply walking through the world, observing it, but when people say “walking simulator” they’re more likely to be being derogatory. The irony of this insult is that it says more about the rest of video games than the ones being described as walking simulators. In most people’s real lives the majority of spaces you go into contain objects you can interact with, information you can discover and sights to see, and the vast minority of rooms you enter contain demons from hell or mecha-hitlers waiting for a boss battle.

The other irony of the insult “walking simulator” is that Death Stranding is a game that actually does really focus on simulating walking. The illusory tactile feedback of moving in Death Stranding creates a low-key stressful and surprisingly intense experience out of walking, and also climbing - maybe it’s a metaphor.

In the struggle to move around, carry packages and keep your balance, Death Stranding is the first true walking simulator (maybe the second after QWOP). Death Stranding’s intense walking mechanic makes you dedicate way too much mental energy into the physical effort of moving this character around this enormous, empty map, creating an intense and powerful loneliness.

Death Stranding uses loneliness in a very interesting way, because loneliness isn’t ever really about the person who’s alone, it’s about the people they don’t get to be with. With that in mind Death Stranding’s loneliness is specifically alienation. You can see other people - talk to them even, but most of the characters Sam Bridges meets and interacts with are just the holograms who talk to him in the lobby. He’s just meeting the illusion of the person who comes to the front door (and that might be like a metaphor or something).

Meanwhile, the alienation from the people Sam meets during his work day is contrasted against the solidarity to other players. Through the online mode connection things you build can benefit other players and things other players build can benefit you, so you get to feel connected to the people doing the same job as you. This is in a big way, the point of the the game, and of course why Death Stranding’s creator, Hideo Kojima, has called it the first “strand-type” game. The players are the “strands” coming together to make a greater whole.

Who knows? Maybe togetherness in games is the next big thing.