No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated spacefaring video game. You explore the universe, maybe find a nice place to settle down, build yourself a home, and drift off into the eternal digital bliss of a digital anthroposphere.
What makes this game special is that, like the real universe, the places you can explore are veritably endless. That's because they weren't designed in advance; it doesn't exist until you go there. The universe is generated in real-time, as you play. It's not created by a designer, it's created by an algorithm, using fractals to scale things far in and far out with equal levels of detail. That's how procedural generation works. Until it doesn't.
One day, the developers of this game decided it needed an upgrade, so they augmented the procedural generation algorithm. They gave the worlds more detailed weather patterns and more complex lifeforms, taller mountains, deeper oceans, more richness, more diversity. But every time you fix something, you risk breaking something else. And that's what happened here. A story as futuristic as intergalactic space travel itself:
Displaced No Man’s Sky fans are now using a galactic Zillow
Sep 25 2020, Polygon
After finally finding a planet that reminded him of Earth with a mellow breeze, he settled in and spent more time building his own personal base. Then, he logged into No Man’s Sky to find that the newest Origins update had changed his planet to be more like a tepid, hell-like wasteland.“I was one of these people on the hunt to find the perfect Earth like planet, and after spending soooo many hours hunting for it, then spending so many hours building a few big builds on it... it all seems for nothing now.”Long-time community members have organized a new system to find beautiful homeworlds for a fresh start. Macneill runs a group called No Man Sky’s Habitable Planets. The group was originally intended for nomads who were okay with uprooting for a new home, but Origins made their mission much more urgent for many players.“Looking for a new planet to call home? This group is dedicating [sic] to exploring the vast universe for the most perfect and habitable planets,” the Reddit page reads. “NO STORMS NO SENTINELS!!” “The goal was to have enough planets in our page so that someone could ideally just search what they want ‘green grass, blue skies’ and a planet with their desired features would come up.” Macneill told Polygon over Reddit.Another player who is looking for a new home after aggressive fauna swarmed her base with the Origins update, now has a home in a world that looks abandoned. Fortunately, she can now just go on the Habitable Planets project and scroll through a selection of planets.“It’s a little like Tinder,” Emily laughs. “I’m like, brown water? Ew, no. Mountain ranges? I don’t want to deal with that. Purple planet? Yeah, that’s cute, swipe right!”
Written a couple days earlier, a developer lamenting their consternation over destroying entire worlds worth of human endeavor with a single update:
“People have made their homes, they’ve lived in this universe,” Murray said. “I would be working on things like making mountains taller, and you’d see online that somebody has dedicated a planet to a lost loved one and built a base for them. And I’ve got my head in my hands thinking, ‘I’m going to destroy that planet if we do this.’”Murray said that “some of the biome diversity,” will change universe-wide, but that “the fundamental shape of the terrain will stay the same on existing planets.”
Funny, as I read this, as a real person in the real world, all I can think about is that it sounds a lot like what's happening right now because of the climate apocalypse - the northeastern portion of the United States is one of the fastest changing climates in the world, with my town in particular having seen 2 different 500-year storms in the last 10 years (Irene and Ida), both dropping over 9 inches of rain in one day, which is almost triple what we see in any given month. Superstorm Sandy knocked down 100-years worth of trees in one day. If I lived in No Man's Sky, I would be looking for a new planet by now.
Post Script:
I finally figured out why the healthy fascination with random number generators (RNGs) here on Network Address; something tells me they're important, and will become a critical part of our world in the coming years, and here is one good example of why.
Randomness has a lot to do with the variety seen in procedurally generated worlds, which goes all the way back to rolling dice for Dungeons and Dragons. The game starts with a "random seed" from which the initial conditions of the algorithm are set in motion.*
*And when you hear "initial conditions" you should think complexity theory and emergent behavior.
This is great for making totally unexpected and exciting virtual worlds, but it's also foretelling of the epidemic of electronic drugs that is today ensnaring our elderly citizens, armed services veterans, and new mothers via social media. We should have learned our lesson with machine gambling aka slot machines, but we didn't, and so we now have this:
Procedural generation is often used in loot systems of quest-driven games, such as action role-playing games and massive multiplayer online role playing games. Though quests may feature fixed rewards, other loot, such as weapons and armor, may be generated for the player based on the player-character's level, the quest's level, their performance in the quest, and other random factors. This often leads to loot having a rarity quality applied to reflect when the procedural generation system has produced an item with better-than-average attributes. For example, the Borderlands series is based on its procedural generation system which can create over a million unique guns and other equipment.
The randomness is an illusion, because absolutely minute parameters of the algorithm are changed in order to take advantage of the way our brains are hardwired. You can act like you're more powerful than the algorithm, or you can think that because you know how it works, you won't be a sucker. But then you would be wrong.
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| A procedurally generated penis bouquet in No Man's Sky. |
For Further Reading on Electronic Drugs:
Random Instantiation Generator, Jun 2021
Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll, 2012.
Jesse Schell: When games invade real life, DICE Summit, 2010
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