Sunshine Sketches of a Little Home Planet: What No Man’s Sky Tells Us About Our Place in the World
“Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe.” — Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Reactions to No Man’s Sky, a space exploration game that sees players traversing a procedurally-generated universe, have been mixed. But beneath the scores and grades, past the labels of ‘boring’ and ‘repetitive,’ lies a very humbling experience. At least, it was for me.
Above is a picture of the planet I started on in No Man’s Sky. It’s where my journey began, next to a broken spaceship on a yet-be-be-named planet with a slightly hostile environment. Before playing I’d read about the game’s user-populated encyclopedia of planets and solar systems and yet I was still caught off guard when it was my turn to make an entry. I named the planet after the small town in which I grew up, Mariposa.* And I named the solar system after the province in which my hometown resides, Ontario.
* For the purposes of this public post I’ve borrowed a useful pseudonym for small Ontario towns.
I didn’t think much of that choice at the time but looking back, Mariposa was a pretty fitting name. Like a small town, my starter planet was lacking in things to do and while I was still getting my bearings in this strange place my only means of escape (the spaceship) was unavailable. This made the first quest in the game an easy prompt to follow: gather the resources you need to fix your ship and escape the gravity of this seemingly barren place.
Small towns are funny though. The more you look, the more you find. I spent a good deal of time exploring Mariposa, spelunking its caves, feeding its few friendly creatures, outrunning its nastier ones (from the outset I was determined to avoid killing anything that I didn’t absolutely have to). And it really was a beautiful place to explore with scenic hills, sprawling valleys, and deep underground caves. But as I explored I knew all the while — just as I knew as a kid in a small town— that there was a whole universe out there waiting to be explored.
Throughout my explorations I’d been gathering the resources I needed to fix my ship and eventually I had it fully repaired. Had I been in a more introspective mood for that inaugural flight, I probably would have realized that the experience was not unlike driving out of Mariposa on my own for the first time.
As I broke free of the planet’s gravity I couldn’t help but feel the need to look back on where I’d come from. So I aimed for the nearby moon (which I named after an even smaller town just outside of Mariposa) and landed on a cliff where I could hopefully see the crash site where I’d first started. The image below is what I saw.
It’s hard to put into words the sheer scale of No Man’s Sky. It has 18 quintillion distinct worlds to explore. But already — one planet and one moon in — I was having a moment where I was struggling to come to terms with my place in this universe. On the ground in my virtual Mariposa I thought I’d seen and experienced so much of it. But looking back, I barely got to know the place. Before leaving the solar system I tried to find my crash site one last time but, as they say, you can never go home again. I left after a few vain attempts to find the beacons I’d set up, the markers that let me know where I’d been.
People who’ve met me know that I love games that persuade and even compel us to tell stories about them. Whether you’re a kid excitedly telling your parents about that time you outraced Ingo and won Epona, or you’re a veteran of WoW telling your friends about your first big raid and how your party barely pulled it off, there’s something about games that bring out the storyteller in all of us. No Man’s Sky has this quality too but in a way that’s, well, humbling. The game’s nearly endless array of planets that only I will ever see, its landscapes, vistas, and caverns only I will ever experience, its outlandish and endearing creatures that only I will ever meet — all stories that only I can tell and yet that is simply life as one person amongst billions. It doesn’t take 18 quintillion planets to figure that out but it makes for one sublime game to really drive that message home.
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Currently in No Man’s Sky I am so far from Mariposa that I simply cannot return. In fact, I can’t even locate it on the map. It is somewhere out there orbiting one of the many, many, many stars. For all intents and purposes the only record of that place is a few screenshots and my slowly fading memories. And this post too — this short, self-indulgent story.
Below I’ve included screenshots of other planets I’ve visited, other towns that have no people to call them home. It’s likely, given the scope of the game, that these images are the only record of their existence, unwritten stories about different starting places.
