A Literary Look at Video Games. Jason Sheehan, writing for NPR’s new “Reading The Game” series, which looks to cover “some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories” in video games. To kick things off, Mr. Sheehan starts with No Man’s Sky:

On the one side, there’s the built-in story of the game, which is just terrible. At worst, it is incomprehensible spacey-spaceman gibberish about ancient civilizations and lost artifacts. And at it’s best, it ain’t much better — failing on many basic levels to tell a meta-story about the in-game universe being a simulation (which, you know, it is) where the player (also called “the Traveler”) is tasked by its creator to explore his way to the center of everything, essentially making the player a kind of galactic-level landlord checking in on all the tenants.

But on the other hand, it is also the best game I have ever experienced for self-generating storytelling.

This is going to be a great series.

Tuesday, 13 December 2016