No Man's Sky appears to be vying for your attention again. There's just one problem: selfish fans are getting in the way.

I'll get to that. First, let's look at what's actually happening here.

Things have been mostly quiet for Hello Games' space exploration simulator since the end of 2016. The U.K.-based studio was widely seen to have overpromised and underdelivered when the game launched last August, but subsequent — and significant — updates put it back on track.

Now, members of the game's passionate Reddit community are embroiled in what appears to be the embryonic stages of an alternate reality game (ARG). Those members of the subreddit, including multiple moderators, have received packages containing No Man's Sky swag and a cassette tape.

The tape is what's noteworthy here. It's part of a puzzle of some kind. It's not clear what this will all lead to, but some expect it's tied to the game's next update — which is believed to relate to a series of mysterious, unactivated portals scattered throughout the game.

Not all the tapes have surfaced yet but there appear to be 16 in all, based on the way they're labeled. See the tweeted photos below:

On all of the tapes to have surfaced so far, the contents of Side A appear identical: roughly 8 minutes of electronic music that sounds similar to the works of No Man's Sky soundtrack composer 35daysofstatic.

Side B is where things get interesting. Listen, and you just hear some noise. But if you run that audio through a spectrograph — as the subreddit already has with at least one tape — a message (of sorts) starts to form.

Here, take a look at the spectrograph results from one of the tapes:

The message reads: 706s7274616p. If you take that message and apply a particular cipher — documented in this post — you get an actual English word: "portal."

At least six of the tapes have been revealed so far, but only one has been publicly analyzed. This is where the drama comes in.

Apparently, some of those who received a tape aren't inclined to share it. I'm not going to dive into the specifics of the drama; you can get a sense of all the players yourself in these shared snippets from the group's private Discord channel.

The good news: at least one of the tape's recipients is in contact with Hello Games, and they've been told that the studio will provide assistance as needed if tape-holders don't step up.

That's the thing about ARGs: they're meant from the outset to bring groups of people together around a collaborative puzzle. Some have a valid excuse for not sharing quickly — unsurprisingly, it can be challenging to find a cassette player in 2017. But there is definitely evidence of selfishness and temper tantrums in these Discord screenshots.

It's a real shame to see something potentially cool like this derailed because of childish behavior. Hello Games might have missed the mark with No Man's Sky, but that studio has owned its mistakes and worked hard to build a more robust game out of an admittedly promising foundation.

Now there's this neat-looking build-up going on around what appears to address one of the game's biggest mysteries to date. But now, needlessly childish behavior threatens to sour it.

Good on Hello for communicating and pledging to keep the ARG on track if a couple of bad actors work to derail it. Drama or not, it looks like No Man's Sky fans will be getting some news to chew on very soon.