Buttonmasher is our monthly column about video games, and how the way we play is changing

Explorers are hunting for unique or beautiful places in games, like this alley in Dying Light Leonardo Sang

It took Kimmo Proudfoot days to save up for an Asp Explorer. But he had places to go, and no other ship would do. With a hyperspace jump of 35 light years, the Asp could cover vast distances in just a few hops. Even so, not many attempt the 1200-light-year trip to the Orion Nebula.

“It was a long and arduous voyage, but I eventually made it,” says Proudfoot. “As I toured the area I was filled with awe at how beautiful it was. It’s a bit like the feeling you get watching a good sunset, but orders of magnitude more mesmerising.”

With 400 billion stars to discover, exploration is a popular pastime in Elite: Dangerous. The game drops players into the cockpit of a ship and sets them loose in a 1:1 simulation of our galaxy, generated by algorithms fed with real data. Made by Frontier, a studio based in Cambridge, UK, Elite was released on PC in December 2014 and on Xbox One last month. Many players busy themselves with trade, piracy or bounty hunting. But the intrepid ones turn their backs on the action.


Since that first trip, Proudfoot has travelled to dozens of nebulae and even visited Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. But it is a small Earth-like planet with icy rings that he spotted out near Barnard’s Loop that sticks with him. “I’m sure I was the first person to see it,” he says. “It’s an image I have never forgotten.”

Elite: Dangerous: you too can boldly go Kimmo Proudfoot

Proudfoot moderates an online forum dedicated to exploration in the game. Players share screenshots and videos of beautiful or unusual things they encounter – Earth-like planets, black holes and the occasional unidentified artefact drifting between the stars. They swap tips on the best ship upgrades for deep-space travel. They ask for directions.

There’s a lot to see. Proudfoot reels off the numbers. If each of Elite‘s half a million players explored 1000 star systems this year, there would still be 399,500,000,000 stars left undiscovered. “At that rate, it would take 800 years to map them all,” he says.

Elite is one of several games with a computer-generated playground so vast that players will never come close to seeing all of it. No Man’s Sky, a space simulation game to be released next year, is set in a randomly generated galaxy containing so many planets that – according to its makers – visiting them all at the rate of one a second would still take longer than the lifetime of our sun.

Even in Minecraft – where players can roam randomly generated landscapes – you could walk for 20 years and not reach the edge. One player who set out in 2011 is still walking, partly just to see what’s there.

Planetarium provides a parade of unique worlds Daniel Linssen

But the thrill of discovery comes in small packages, too. Planetarium is a game that presents players with a different randomly generated planet every time they click their mouse. Each new planet spins slowly on the screen for a few seconds – some have clouds, some have moons, some have short descriptions of their alien life – and then it’s on to the next one. As with Elite, players share interesting worlds they have discovered online. There are over 200 trillion possible planets in the game, says developer Daniel Linssen, who is based in Sydney, Australia. “Every time you click it’s very, very likely no one else will ever see that planet.”

One of Linssen’s inspirations is Minecraft. “I’m really interested in getting this feeling of being lost, of being in this huge world, into games.” Like others, the first time he played Minecraft, he decided to wander in one direction as far as he could. “At the time I just had this huge sense of wonder,” he says.

Some players spend hours exploring a single Minecraft world, walking its hills and valleys, following its riverbeds. Others churn through several worlds in a sitting, looking for ones in which the algorithms spawn especially exotic geographical features.

For several years, communities of explorers have shared pictures and stories about the randomly generated landscapes the game conjures for them. One group styles itself as the internet’s largest community of virtual cartographers. Players can also ask for “seeds” – inputs to the generation algorithm – for specific worlds. “Looking for a large continent with a variety of biomes,” writes someone called Ghostise.

Wanderers hunt for unusual landscape features in Minecraft

“Minecraft and Elite are about taming the wilderness together so that everyone can benefit from the knowledge, Lewis and Clark style,” says Michael Cook, a game developer and artificial intelligence researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London.

But even simulated space can make you uneasy. Proudfoot has often found himself with the jitters when far from civilisation in the game. “I have encountered vast fields of brown dwarf and T Tauri type stars that are unsuitable for fuel-scooping,” he says. Not being able to refuel can mean detours of thousands of light years or running out of fuel altogether – left to drift between the stars. “This inevitably adds to your sense of isolation and dread.”

Explorers can earn huge sums by selling information about the regions of space they visit, such as what planets have valuable resources or which stars might be used for refuelling. But many, like Proudfoot, explore for the sake of seeing what is out there. He used to love visiting new places in the real world. “If money was no object, I would probably spend the rest of my life travelling,” he says. “However, we all have jobs and bills to pay.” Elite scratches an itch.

But any game can have its sightseers. As the graphical realism in games has improved, photographers have started to visit these virtual worlds to take screenshots. Leonardo Sang is a graphic artist and photographer based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. A few years ago, he realised that his love of photography could spill over into games. “Sometimes I boot up a game and play it as any other player would,” he says. “Sometimes I just roam around and look.”

Virtual photographers such as Sang particularly enjoy the freedom that open-world games give the player. “You can go where you want,” he says. Sang will happily spend 2 to 3 hours in a game like Grand Theft Auto V – set in a fictional version of Los Angeles – just wandering the streets looking for subjects that might make a striking composition. “The city feels so alive,” he says. “A whole city just for me.” Even in the middle of a mission, he has his eye out for opportunities. “I’ll stop to simply look at stuff,” he says. “I look at the scenery, at objects, at how a room is decorated – and take photos.”

Leonardo Sang’s shot of a helicopter in Battlefield 4 Leonardo Sang

One of Sang’s favourite shots was taken in Dying Light, a game set in a zombie-ridden post-apocalypse. The photo is of an alleyway speckled with light and shadow (see top). “It has this Mediterranean feeling, a little tapestry market,” he says. “It’s somewhere I’d love to visit.” Another favourite – a photo of a helicopter flying over a hazy mountainside – comes from Battlefield 4, a multiplayer military shooter (see above).

“Usually I take photos alone,” he says. “I can’t really do it in multiplayer because I get killed or people get mad at me because I’m just standing around.” In this case, however, he decided to drop into the game using a spectator mode that let him watch the action without taking part. He found a mountain covered with trees and mysterious red smoke. “While I was analysing this view, the helicopter showed up looking for people to kill,” says Sang. “It was the element I needed!”

Sang is part of a growing community of virtual photographers. Duncan Harris – whose Dead End Thrills site contains hundreds of carefully composed screenshots – has become well known. And there is a Flickr group dedicated to video game tourism. Many photographers, like Sang or Iain Andrews, are drawn to the striking or surreal architecture often found in games.

Some, like Casey Brooks, put together fictional photo essays spun around a game’s minor characters. For Robert Overweg, who specialises in capturing creepy glitches – scenes where buildings float or people stand knee-deep in the road – games are the new public spaces. This month, Overweg’s photos are on display at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Another of Sang’s projects is a series of shots taken from the backseat of cars in racing games. The black-and-white photos capture the mood of a long road trip and show that racing games do not have to be about racing, says Sang.

“There’s more to games than explosions and guns,” says Sang. “There are multiple ways of experiencing them. Game worlds can be so vast and so detailed and so well-crafted that you can experience it the way you want.”