Perhaps you think you’ve lost your gamer friends and compatriots to PokemonGO, the revolutionary mobile meme that creates the perverse incentive for the recluse gamer to venture outside the confines of his gaming cave. Spelunking through the local drainage ditch, public park/heroin enclave and mafia burial ground is adventure incarnate, to be sure. But this adventure is so terrestrial, so Terran. Ultimately, a rediscovery of our decaying suburban landscapes is a mere analog flashback, a nod to the Kings of Summer of old. But our greatest adventure lies ahead, and it lies within.
PS4 release is August 9th. PC release is August 12th. For those not in the know, No Man’s Sky gives us a procedurally generated (that is to say, algorithmic) galaxy with over 18 quintillion worlds to explore, catalog, and exploit. This game is intergalactic Minecraft on alien steroids. It has been estimated that if you spent one second on each of No Man’s Sky’s worlds, you would consume more time than our sun has left before it goes supernova and explodes.
The vastness of this virtual universe could put an end to the Daywalkers unleashed by PokemonGO. When the time comes to explore a limitless galaxy, the communal virtual air raid meme will sound the return from stumbling about in the analog sphere. The Daywalkers will slowly recede like the tide, back to the safety of their basement man caves, back to the glow of their 4k LED personal Cinemadomes, back to the home-womb, to the Matrix where they will plug in and fly into the cyber heavens at speeds a Deoxys or Ninjask could never dream of. They will crawl into sensory deprivation tanks and hyberbaric stasis chambers, to preserve the living tissue at a minimum caloric intake, to prolong the body, the bio, the increasingly nuisance-ridden flesh-casings that they must maintain to maximize their lurchings through space-time.
Yes, my friends. The Daywalker’s days are numbered. The long night is coming.
Read a previous YTR work on No Man’s Sky — God is A Mildly Autistic Irishman.