Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (11 page)

More recently, Braben has returned to the game of his youth for a sequel,
Elite: Dangerous
. This time, he used astronomy rather than the Fibonacci sequence to arrange his galaxy.

‘I wanted to make the galaxy as accurate as possible so that the results of that exploration would make sense to people,’ Braben says. ‘In the game, every single star in the real night sky is present, some hundred and fifty thousand of them, and you can visit each one. Even the clouds of stars that make up the Milky Way are included: some four hundred billion stars, their planetary systems, and moons are present, all waiting to be explored.’

Whereas Kurt J. Mac chose to walk to the edge of
Minecraft
in order to discover things that no other eye has yet seen, in
Elite: Dangerous
the appeal for players is to be able to reach the stars that frame nighttime on earth. Indeed, the positions of the stars in the game have been drawn from the numerous publicly available sky surveys, which Braben and his team at Frontier, the Cambridge-based game developer, collated and merged. They used procedural models based on physics to fill in gaps where data was missing or incomplete.

‘As you move farther from earth, the data becomes increasingly sketchy, but the galaxy still runs by the same rules,’ Braben says. ‘The hundred and fifty thousand star systems are taken from real-world data. But once you move beyond a few hundred light years, we can only see the very brightest stars individually, so we use procedural techniques to augment the data.’

In Braben’s eagerness to replicate not only the vastness and wonder of space, but also its accurate layout and structure for us to explore, we can see something of the power that video games have to democratise exploration, tourism, and even space travel. No matter who you are or where you live, if you have access to a computer and the means to buy the video game, you can visit previously unimaginably distant places from the comfort of your home or Internet café. The draw is obvious.

But, in
Elite
’s case at least, Braben has found a secondary benefit to his work, a different kind of discovery altogether: the computer simulations have begun to expose flaws in our scientific understanding of the universe.

Floor van Leeuwen helps run the Gaia satellite project, which aims to chart a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy. According to van Leeuwen, models of space such as those seen in
Elite: Dangerous
are crucial to expanding our understanding of the universe.

‘Computer simulations have played a very important role in astronomy for many decades,’ he said. ‘The kind of problems encountered in astrophysics are almost always well outside what can be represented through simple clean equations.’

Models are created by taking data gathered by recent space missions and using this to improve and test simulations such as that found in
Elite: Dangerous
. Van Leeuwen believes that it’s in the disparity between real-world observations and computer simulations that advances are most readily made.

‘Astronomy is a field where you find a continuous exchange between new observations and modelling,’ he says. ‘The conflicts that show up are generally due to simplifications made in the models, for which new observations can provide improved guidelines. There’s a continuously evolving and developing understanding of space, in which both models and observations play important roles.’

Elite: Dangerous
has thrown up a number of conflicts between its model of the Milky Way and previous astronomical assumptions.

‘Our night sky is based on real data—it is not a hand-drawn backdrop as you might expect,’ Braben tells me. ‘But the Milky Way and many of the stars around it are simply too bright and too uniform when compared to the real observable night sky.’ Braben knew that the Milky Way appears somewhat dim when viewed from earth because of obscuring space dust, but he was surprised by the quantity of dust and absorbent matter that the team needed to add to the game world in order to match the real-world perspective.

‘It appears as though our planet actually sits within that dust cloud, which is why the Milky Way appears so faint,’ he says.

For Braben, it’s also interesting how the dust cloud causes the night sky to drastically change appearance when you move only a hundred light years or so out of the galactic plane.

‘At first, we see the familiar constellations begin to distort;
some become unrecognisable quite quickly,’ he says. ‘Once you travel a hundred light years or more perpendicular to the plane, those constellations are long gone, and the galactic centre reveals itself more and more as your view emerges from the dust.’

Elite
’s model has expanded Braben’s understanding of planet formation and distribution. Braben boasts that his games predicted extra-solar planets (‘These were pretty close to those that have been since discovered, demonstrating that there is some validity in our algorithms’), and that the game’s use of current planet-formation theories has shown the sheer number of different systems that can exist according to the rules, everything from nebulous gas giants to theoretically habitable worlds.

There may not be any practical application for Braben’s game and its findings, but he nevertheless believes that it has significant value aside from science-fiction entertainment.

‘The dust-cloud theory only became apparent when all the stellar information was included in the simulation,’ he says. ‘It shows that we can learn new things simply by looking at space holistically, rather than one element at a time.’

Elite: Dangerous
collates a great deal of up-to-date astronomical information into one publicly available simulation, but Braben believes that its true importance lies not in the accuracy of the model or its predictions but in its value as a story about the universe in which we live, the flowering sense of awe that, contrary to most narratives, grows with understanding and familiarity, rather than diminishes.

‘If there is any practical application, then it’s largely educational,’ Braben tells me. ‘But, most important, the game creates a sense of wonder based on what is truly out there.’

In
Minecraft
, Mac has attempted to walk to the end of the world. In
Elite: Dangerous
, Braben has attempted to gather up the galaxy and squeeze it onto a desktop computer’s hard drive, thereby making new discoveries about our solar system that challenge assumptions. In both cases the men are using the games as a way to explore new territory, to feel the thrill of the pioneer, pushing at the boundaries of our knowledge.

There is another video game that could never be fully charted or explored, one that has been specifically designed to be unimaginably vast, so that every player who enters its reality might always feel that sense of joy that comes from discovering something new, of being first.

Sean Murray, one of the creators of
No Man’s Sky
, cannot guarantee that the virtual universe he is building is infinite, but he is certain that, if he’s wrong, nobody will ever find out.

‘If you were to visit one virtual planet in the game every second,’ he says, ‘then our own sun will have died before you’d have seen them all.’ He smiles, conspiratorially: ‘This means I can say that the
No Man’s Sky
universe is infinite and nobody could possibly prove me wrong.’

No Man’s Sky is
a video game quite unlike any other. Developed for Sony’s PlayStation 4 by an unfeasibly small team (as small as four members in the beginning, now only a dozen) at Hello Games, an independent studio in the south of England, it’s a game in which every rock, flower, tree, creature, and planet has been procedurally generated to create a vast and diverse play space that players can explore. ‘We are attempting to do things that haven’t been done before,’ says Murray. ‘No game has made it possible to fly down to a planet and for it to be planet-sized and feature life, ecology, lakes,
caves, waterfalls, and canyons, then seamlessly fly up through the stratosphere and take to space again. It’s a tremendous challenge.’

Not only is this vision a technological challenge, it also bears the weight of unrivalled expectation. It’s the game of so many childhood dreams. For Murray, that is truer than for most. His ‘eccentric’ family travelled a great deal when he was a child. He was born in Ireland, but the family lived on a farm in the Australian outback, away from civilisation.

‘At night you could see the vastness of space,’ he says. ‘Meanwhile, we were responsible for our own electricity and survival. We were completely cut off. It had an impact on me that I carry through life.’

Murray formed Hello Games with three friends, all of whom had previously worked at major game-making studios, in 2009. When the team began to discuss what kind of game they would like to make, Murray returned to those formative memories under the stars.

‘Those motions started to surface, the feelings you had as a child but which are only rarely displayed in video games,’ he says. ‘We talked about wanting to explore the vocations that we wanted to be when we were kids. These things were the most emotive for us.’

Hello Games’ first project,
Joe Danger
, explored the life of one of these childhood dream roles: becoming a stuntman. The game was, according to Murray, ‘annoyingly successful’ in the sense that it locked the team into a cycle of sequels that they had formed the company to escape. During the next few years, the team made four
Joe Danger
games for seven different video-game platforms.

‘Then I had a midlife game-development crisis,’ says Murray. ‘How many games did I have left? You do the math when you sit
down to embark on a new project: will this be the next five, seven, ten years of my life working on this game? It changes your mindset when a single game’s development represents a significant chunk of life.’

With that existential crisis in mind, Murray decided it was time to embark upon the game he’d dreamed of as a child, a game about frontiership and existence on the edge of the unexplored.

‘We talked about the feeling of landing on a planet and effectively being the first person to discover it, not knowing what was out there,’ he says. ‘In this era in which footage of every game is recorded and uploaded to YouTube, we wanted a game where, even if you watched every video, it still wouldn’t be spoiled for you. And we wanted those discoveries to be meaningful in the sense that they could be shared with other players, all of whom existed in the exact same universe, rather than their own random dimension.’

All of that life and landscape is, as in
Elite
, generated from a ‘seed’ number (
Elite
used the Fibonacci sequence, while
No Man’s Sky
derives its universe from one of the team’s mobile phone numbers). In contrast to
Minecraft
, whose arrangement is different for every player, this ‘seed’ ensures that the universe is identical for every player, thereby giving the explorative experience meaning in the context of sharing. When a player discovers a new planet, or climbs that planet’s tallest peak, they are able to upload the discovery to the game’s servers, their name forever associated with the location, like a digital Christopher Columbus or Neil Armstrong.

‘Players are even able to mark the planet as toxic or radioactive, or indicate what kind of life is there, and then that appears on everyone’s map,’ says Murray.

Experimentation has been a watchword throughout production. Originally, the game was randomly generated.

‘The game would randomly pick the colour of the sky, then the terrain, and so on,’ he says. ‘Only around one percent of the time would it create something that looked natural, interesting and pleasing to the eye. The rest of the time it was a mess and, in some cases where the sky, the water, and the terrain were all the same colour, unplayable.’

So the team began to create simple rules, layers of systems that interact and emerge.

‘We have certain rules about the distance from a sun at which it is likely that there will be moisture,’ explains Murray. ‘From that we decide there will be rivers, lakes, erosion, and weather, all of which is dependent on what the liquid is made from. The colour of the water in the atmosphere will derive from what the liquid is; we model the refractions to give you a modelled atmosphere.’

Similarly, the quality of light will depend on whether the solar system has a yellow sun or, for example, a red giant or red dwarf. ‘These are simple rules but combined they produce something that’s natural, recognisable to our eyes,’ he explains. ‘We have come from a place where everything was random and messy to something which is procedural and emergent, but still pleasingly chaotic in the mathematical sense. Things happen with cause and effect, but they are unpredictable for us.’

Not everything in
No Man’s Sky
is unpredictable, however.

‘We want to create a universe that functions on its own,’ he says. ‘It’s up to you as to how you interact with the universe thereafter, but it functions without your input.’

For example, animals have daily routines, drinking in the lowland lakes during the daytime before retreating to the hills to graze. Likewise, hulking freighters plod through space to their own timetable.
No Man’s Sky
is, like so many games, a nest of interlocking and parallel systems.

‘They follow trade routes, visit planets and have smaller ships that peel off to gather resources. It’s not possible to simulate that behaviour for an entire universe, so we have fractal patterns they follow which are deterministic and parametric: they will always be the same.’

This combination of the predictable with the unknown is what makes exploration and discovery such a joy to humans. For the Elizabethan explorers, with their proud ships and dwindling supplies, there was the predictability of the world’s systems wherever they went (the ebb and flow of the tides, the cycling of the sun and the moon, the power of the wind, the logical places to find meat, vegetables, and fruit). But this familiarity was coupled with the promise of the unknown: the strange animals, the unpredictable local tribes, the unseen sights, and the rare pleasure of filling in a previously obfuscated area of a hand-drawn map.