No Man's Sky

If you haven’t heard about No Man’s Sky, take a break from here and go watch any of the plethora of YouTube videos about it.

Reviews of the game have not been kind, and frankly, I can’t blame them. From a gameplay perspective, it truly is a pretty repetitive game. At the time of this writing, I still haven’t finished the game, but I honestly can’t say I’ve found any of the story to be all that exciting either. Inventory management is a pain in the neck, and trying to manage recipes is just downright frustrating.

Yet I love this game.

Sure, there are a lot of valid reasons to rag against it, but I contend that there are enough reasons to love it that I would still encourage anybody to pick up a copy.

There are two main things that keep drawing me back to this game. First, the game is very aesthetically pleasing. Between the music and the textures of outer space, the designers made a truly peaceful game, even amidst the few bits of combat that do exist. I personally enjoy exploring each new planet and seeing what each has to offer in ways of flora and fauna. (I also envy the heck at whoever came up with the game’s font!)

More importantly, what truly astounds me every time I power on my console is what made the game famous: the sheer vastness of the game’s universe. Using procedural generation, the developers were able to build a universe with over 18 quintillion planets. That’s 18 with 18 zeroes behind it. An article from Polygon.com broke it down this way: “It would take about 7.3 billion persons, all working from birth until death, visiting a planet every second of their lives in this game, to see 18.4 quintillion worlds combined.”

Let me put this in perspective. In the early 1970s, a small group of people banded together to work on a super simple game involving two paddles on either side of the screen and a small ball bouncing back and forth between them. You know this game as Pong. Pong is a super simple game with very little graphics, next to no sound, and a replay value that would be laughed out of all modern video game reviewers’ offices.

Fast forward roughly 45 years, a small group of people (about the same size as Pong) creates No Man’s Sky: a game so big that most of the game’s universe will NEVER be visited even by all the combined people playing the game.

WHAT?!

On the timescale of humanity alone, 45 years is almost nothing.

Which brings up this question: if humanity can exponentially grow this much with technology in just 45 years, what will the next 45 years bring?

Or 90 years?

Or 2000 years?

Granted, it is possible that humanity is not able to sustain this momentum, but for fun, let’s say it can. And honestly probably will so long as guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos exist. Speaking of Musk, I recently listened to an interview / Q&A time he did with Re-Code at Code Conference 2016. One attendee posed the question that, essentially, if humanity is able to keep the momentum of constantly refining technology and AI that it is possible we could create a reality for somebody to “live in” indistinguishable from a true “base reality”. That said, what are the chances that we are truly living in that base reality and NOT in a simulated universe created by the more highly advanced version of humanity?

I don’t know about you, but that thought definitely keeps me up at night.

Musk provided a few thoughts on this. First, he humorously noted that those sorts of conversations between his brother and him have been permanently banned while they’re relaxing in a hot tub. (Practical advice!) The other thing he noted is that if humanity continues its trajectory of technological advancement, it is certainly plausible that humanity could create a simulation indistinguishable from base reality. Think “The Matrix” or “The Truman Show” here. His only rationale against this trajectory is that humanity experiences a cataclysmic event that effectively ends the world.

Do I have an opinion on this? Kind of. Let’s face facts though: we truly have no way of knowing that we’re living in a Matrix-like reality, so I don’t really find it all that helpful to share my opinion. (Plus, it would make this blog post 8x longer!)

So we’ve come a long way off the beaten path from talking about No Man’s Sky! It is honestly hard to recommend as a game, so my only encouragement is to at least rent it or borrow it from a friend. I still love it and look forward to continuing my journey to the center of the galaxy.