The vastness of the universe in No Man’s Sky raises a question: What are you really here for? Photograph Courtesy No Man's Sky / Hello Games

If reality is a game—a vast, snow-globe-y sort of experiment that plays out according to the hard rules of physics and the loose rules of story—then it is, in contemporary game-design parlance, a persistent one. We enter it when it is already under way, and we hope, for the sake of our children, that we exit before it’s finished. There are advantages and drawbacks for those who, like us, have arrived to this game relatively late. While we benefit from the invention of penicillin, of airplanes, of the Internet, we also suffer antibiotic resistance, looming climate disaster, online comments. And one pleasure enjoyed by our forebears, now largely denied to us, is the thrill of cartographic discovery. Our world is mostly mapped, its common species mostly named. For a while, video games filled the gap, presenting new, uncharted virtual lands to satisfy players’ wanderlust. Soon enough, though, commercial guides to these places followed, denying even virtual explorers the chance to get there first.

No Man’s Sky, a video game built by a small team from Guildford, England, and launched on Tuesday, changes all of that. It presents a cosmos made up of innumerable algorithmically generated planets—far more than its designers have ever seen, and enough that every new player is able to start on a world untouched by any other. After repairing and refuelling the tiny, trashed Kubrickian spaceship that lies smoking in the dust by your side at the start of the game, you are able to leave this planet for the next, and the next, and the next. Everything you discover en route can be named and catalogued, a delight for anyone with a talent for descriptive, whimsical, or smutty neologisms, or for anyone who, like me, has simply longed to name a solar system after a departed pet gerbil. (Rest in peace, Colin.) Once christened, the name is uploaded and seeded to every other player’s game, where it resides forever.

The chance that another player will ever encounter your discoveries is statistically unlikely, however. Sean Murray, one of the game’s creators, told me in 2014 that, even if you were able to visit a new planet in the game every second, our own (real) sun would die out before you could see them all. It’s an unfathomable boast. The vastness of it all is inconceivable, even when it’s displayed right there in front of you on the game’s map, as a buckshot constellation. The mind collapses when confronted with so much geography. Endless variety blooms from the algorithm that created this universe, and that builds it out in real time. I’ve visited planets with crimson soil and blue grass. I’ve toured gaseous moons hazy under yellow clouds. For an hour, I was lost inside a warren of caverns, anxious and frustrated until a rock mouth opened to a hundred-foot-tall cathedral of rock, busy with fireflies. I’ve swum water worlds.

The flora and fauna on each planet have evolved according to its characteristics, notably its atmosphere and proximity to a star. The result is a cornucopia of original life-forms: floppy-eared dogs with stegosaurus tails, twenty-foot-tall deer with leathery backs, lanky crabs. Ten million species were discovered in the game’s first twenty-four hours, more than have been found on Earth. With all of this diversity, one does not weary of the thrill of breaking a fresh planet’s atmosphere—cinematically, to the post-rock thuds and wails of 65daysofstatic’s soundtrack.

The grandiose business of star-hopping through a near-infinite universe is No Man’s Sky’s headline appeal, but the moment-to-moment business is far more mundane. I have spent a great deal of time and effort touring planets in search of mineral deposits—knolls of gold, shrubs of plutonium, copper monoliths—and harvesting them. These supplies can be used to fuel a spaceship or upgrade a space suit, or they may be sold at the trading outposts found in each star system (provided you can sneak or fight your way past the patrolling pirates). Space here is capitalistic. Every trinket and resource has a value on the open market. Profits can be used to make offers on other traders’ spaceships, preferably ones with larger hulls in which to store plunder and muscular thrusters with which to speed travel. At every stage, you are jostled along by reports of your ongoing accomplishments—thirty thousand steps taken, fifty alien words collected, ten pirate ships dogfought.

It has been said that video games are best understood by the verbs they invite. No Man’s Sky is built on four primary actions: explore, fight, trade, survive. They are familiar verbs, for players, but, couched in the near-endless variety of this playpen, they remain brightly alluring. Repetitiveness is inevitable, but, each time I punctured a new stratosphere, my store of patience and interest was renewed. But, while Sony’s marketing for the game has emphasized the promise of infinite content, its most memorable trick is to make the player feel impossibly small, lonely, and lost. No Man’s Sky does not allow for direct social interaction between players, at least for now. (The creators say this would result in too much server strain.) There are three alien races to befriend, via conversation and small acts of kindness—a gift of some iron ore, or perhaps a fragile promise to wed one of their species. But there are no cities on these planets, only a huddle of huts and a helipad, at most. There are no madding crowds, no true kinship. As the hours whirl by, a deeper question begins to form: Why am I here?

The overarching goal of No Man’s Sky, if you choose to heed it, is to journey to the center of the universe in search of meaning, a mission that has the added benefit of drawing the game’s players toward a meeting point. Alternatively, you can pursue the secrets of the mysterious Atlas, a divine presence that, in the game’s words, offers “guidance, purpose, meaning, and significance in an uncaring galaxy.” (It is, of course, possible to ignore both paths, bumbling along with no greater goal than sight-seeing and binomial nomenclature.) In the tradition of Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and all the others, No Man’s Sky seeks, in a simplistic yet honest way, to consider the philosophical questions of existence through the lens of science fiction. Its final answer may be, inevitably, lacking. But the game needles its way much closer to an answer to another conundrum: Why do we explore? There’s the thrill of novelty, sure, but in some baser part of the brain, below the realm of language, the game demonstrates that we are also drawn to the promise of finding somewhere better. As No Man’s Sky’s design seems to suggest, we can never be satisfied. The grass is always greener, even when it’s bluer.