Philosophy | Video Games
No Man’s Sky: Finding Meaning in a Universe Without Rules
Condemned to Be Free Among the Stars…
No Man’s Sky was perhaps the most feverishly anticipated game of 2016, and when it arrived, it crashed and burned like a meteor. A game that’d started out as an indie labor of love created by less than a dozen people had, thanks to some fantastic trailers, three years of word-of-mouth excitement, and a lot more hype from Sony’s marketing team than anyone had anticipated, mushroomed into what was expected to be the gaming event of the year. When the game turned out to be the small indie title that’d been intended from the start, missing many of the features that’d been breathlessly described, players were initially outraged.
But its developer, Hello Games, didn’t give up. They kept quietly improving the game, adding more and more features, expanding its open universe, and finally creating a title that not only fulfilled all the original hype but far surpassed it, all without ever charging an extra penny for the new content. The gaming world gradually took notice, and No Man’s Sky has gone from a cautionary tale to one of the greatest hits in video game history, a critical success and a lesson on following our dreams no matter what.
One of the more common launch complaints about the game, however, went deeper than rushed development or missing content: it was that there’s “nothing to do” in the game. This seemed like an odd thing to say, given that there’s a virtually infinite number of planets to explore.
What do we mean, both in gaming and in everyday life, when we say there’s nothing to do? What is it that gives our experiences value? And what can No Man’s Sky teach us about finding meaning in the universe?
A World We Never Made
When it comes to creating an explorable video game world, there are essentially two design philosophies: meticulous, theme park-style design, and procedural generation. Theme-park designs are much more common because they allow the creator to shape the player’s experience and control the pace of the story. The player starts off in a certain village; they talk to the village elder and learn that a captive needs to be rescued; they head north through a monster-filled forest to the abandoned castle where a ferocious dragon waits. Or perhaps the player wakes up with amnesia in a futuristic city; cyborg assassins immediately smash through the windows and the player fights them off; they find a clue on one of their attackers that leads them to an underground club and its shady owner…
This sort of game design is as old as storytelling itself, but procedural generation is comparatively newer. With it, the program has a list of rules, or algorithms, about how to create its world and it does so, largely without human input. There needs to be one village contained within every fifty-mile radius; forests cannot border deserts; any land below a certain height is considered underwater. The advantage is that a vast world can be created without having to painstakingly construct each and every detail, but it also means that even the creators don’t really know what’s out there.
Most story-driven games, even large, open-world games like Skyrim and Elden Ring, are still designed by hand, so to speak; this year’s long-awaited God of War Ragnarök won acclaim for its intricate level design. The most famous procedural games, by contrast, tend to be survival games without much of a plot unfolding behind them. One of the most famous procedural games is Minecraft and, these days, we have No Man’s Sky.
A vast world can be created without having to construct each and every detail, but it also means that even the creators don’t really know what’s out there.
No Man’s Sky has quintillions of star systems, but there are just a few dozen types of planets. Each world might have anywhere between one and sixteen animal species, but they fall into recognizable categories: mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, arachnids, and a few others. If you’ve seen one desert wasteland or tropical paradise, some early critics complained, you’ve seen them all. A universe that simply exists, they argued, without any larger purpose to guide people through it is a meaningless universe.
But you could say the same thing about our own universe.
Were the stars made, as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn asked, or did they just happen? Do we live in a theme-park universe or a procedurally generated one? What we make of the beautiful desolation of No Man’s Sky might say something significant about what we make of life itself.
Trudging Up That Hill
When it launched, No Man’s Sky lacked many of the linear trappings of video games. There were no boss monsters to fight and very little in the way of monsters at all apart from an occasionally aggressive animal and the omnipresent “sentinels,” armed flying robots who patrol the otherwise deserted planets like overzealous park rangers. There were few missions and little to do other than see the universe, and just one goal: journey to the center of the galaxy. Although a story did unfold along the way, it did nothing to relieve the game’s existential dilemma. It only heightened it by asking players to consider what might keep them going if they found out that everything ends and nothing they do will ever matter.
This is just the question we’ve been asking ourselves for thousands of years, with the issue coming to a modern-day head in Albert Camus’s classic essay The Myth of Sisyphus. It, much like No Man’s Sky, asks what meaning can be found in a universe with no larger purpose, one where we are, as his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “condemned to be free.”
It only heightened it by asking players to consider what might keep them going if they found out that everything ends and nothing they do will ever matter.
Should we embrace hedonism like Don Juan, he asks, and live for the joy of each moment, even while knowing how fleeting it is? Should we devote ourselves to some form of art, creating illusions that melt away like snowflakes even as they come into being? Or perhaps we could set out as conquerors to sear the history books with our name, only for those books to be lost to time. “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
You could devote yourself to any of these things in No Man’s Sky. You might watch the sunrise from a different planet each day, or create an elaborate base to rival any Gothic architect. You could recruit a squadron of pirates and become the terror of the skies. But a procedural reset (something that’s happened a few times alongside major updates) could erase all of that and leave you starting over in a brand-new universe. Should you choose to finish your trip to the center of the galaxy, you’ll lose those things anyway. And the story offers no solace: nothing lasts forever, it says.
The Myth of Sisyphus concludes with its most famous example of what Camus calls an absurd life, the life (or, in this case, the afterlife) of Sisyphus as he faces an eternal punishment of rolling a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down once he’s finished. By embracing the absurdity of his task and choosing to live in defiance of its futility, Camus says, Sisyphus can find peace. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he concludes.
Making Our Own Fun
Can video game players exploring a lush galaxy devoid of human design or innate purpose find that same sense of happiness? Some could, enough to draw a loyal base even during its troubled launch, and pockets of meaning and purpose began to emerge from the vacuum. Players shared their discoveries and gradually came together to form virtual civilizations, complete with border disputes and interstellar wars. Cities rose from the desert floor and mining rigs spanned the oceans. The game became a tribute to humanity’s talent for bringing order to chaos.
But others felt like they were, well, endlessly rolling a boulder up a hill. And one of the things Hello Games aimed to do was change that.
As more and more No Man’s Sky updates arrived, the universe started to become a little more structured, more like a traditional game. A series of early missions introduced players to sympathetic allies and sinister rivals while regular expeditions and multiplayer missions united players under a common banner. The underlying nihilism of the launch story remained, but now it was tempered by a brewing conflict between cosmic entities and a flicker of hope that perhaps the inevitable might be overcome.
No Man’s Sky, you might say, had found religion.
Long before existentialists were making hay out of questions about being and nothingness, religion was wrestling with the same issues. Does life mean anything, and, if so, what? Monotheism takes the stance that we live in a theme-park universe designed by a Supreme Being whose divinity gives it purpose. Deism, meanwhile, says that the world was procedurally generated by a deity who, having flipped the switch, has already moved on to other things. Many pantheistic and animistic systems, from Greek mythology to Shinto, hold that the universe is older and greater than the gods it contains. Zen Buddhism says we live in a procedural universe with no purpose: in other words, we’re all living in No Man’s Sky.
Is there, indeed, “nothing to do?” Was Camus right, do we have to settle for finding contentment in rolling the boulder? Can we smash the boulder and make our own fun? Is there beauty to be found in nature, even if it didn’t come from anywhere and doesn’t lead anywhere? Is it a paradox to say that, if life is meaningless, then we’re free to find our own meaning?
Human history has, in large part, been the history of people trying to find the answer to these mysteries. And, in all the twists and turns of an indie space game that grew into the comeback story of the decade, we can see both the developers and players confronting the same questions.
Thank you for reading! Each Friday I’ll be posting a new article covering science, philosophy, psychology, pop culture — pretty much everything I think is interesting and worth talking about. If you’d like a sneak preview of this month’s upcoming articles, you can always find them on jeffereymoore.com.
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