Buttonmasher is Douglas Heaven 's monthly column about video games, and how the way we play is changing

Infinite entertainment? Hello Games

I’ve crashed on an alien world. As its sun goes down, I listen to strange animals call to one another in the distance. For a long time I don’t want to leave my broken ship, overwhelmed by the mind-boggling vastness of the computer-generated universe that I know surrounds me. It’s a wonderful feeling.

No Man’s Sky, released last month, was the most hotly anticipated game of the year. Made by Hello Games, a small studio based in Guildford, UK, it drops players onto a randomly selected planet at the edge of a universe in which there are 18 quintillion others – and invites you to start exploring.

The sights are striking. Players have shared thousands of snapshots online, every one looking like the cover art for a 70s sci-fi novel. I’ve seen floating boulders, cube-shaped hills and rock formations that worm their way across the landscape like snakes many kilometres long. I’ve found plants made of platinum, eagle-sized butterflies with pterosaur wings and sausage-bodied dogs with too many legs.


On a yellow moon with an atmosphere so toxic that it ate into my suit, I startled a family of big-eared Ewok-lookalikes. They ran around in circles making weird noises until I walked away.

There are other games with vast worlds you can get lost in but they’re hand-crafted – look around and the handiwork of a human designer looks back. But you wander the worlds of No Man’s Sky knowing that nearly everything you encounter has never been seen by another human – and probably never will be.

World fatigue

The effect is dizzying. But it wasn’t enough. After three years of hype, it took just a few hours for players to start complaining that the game was boring or was missing features they had seen in early trailers. Many asked for refunds. What went wrong?

“The reaction hasn’t been too surprising to me,” says Gillian Smith, who works on procedural generation at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. People had a kind of romantic fascination with the game, she says. “Everyone’s curious about what it means for a computer to create a universe.” For many people, expectations were simply unrealistically high– infinite entertainment from a one-off purchase.

The thrill of planet hopping can wear thin Hello Games

“All of the screenshots that came out to promote the game were phenomenally beautiful,” says Smith. But of course these shots were hand-picked to show the best that the game could produce. Not every world looks like that – and you don’t see such variety when moving from one planet to the next. “You need to explore a lot of worlds to find those interesting places,” she says. But after a number of them – 20 or 50, wherever your threshold lies – the thrill of planet hopping fades.

The hype revolved around the idea that with billions upon billions of planets, players would never run out of things to do, that the game was so vast it would never be fully explored. “We’ve seen the bankruptcy of that language,” says Kate Compton, a games researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who worked on Spore, another over-hyped game in which creatures and planets were procedurally generated.

Part of the problem is that procedural generation systems work with the ingredients they are given. Basic forms can be combined in a vast number of ways, but the second or third time you encounter a snake-like rock formation or six-legged animal it undermines any initial feeling of amazement.

Planet personal

“The first sighting is always exciting,” says computational creativity researcher Michael Cook at Falmouth University in the UK. If you’ve never seen flying eels before or a creature with giant antlers, they feel wonderfully alien. “But the joy of seeing these new forms for the first time is what makes them so memorable, and we get tired of seeing them.”

So where does that leave computer-generated games? For Cook, No Man’s Sky marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. “I think the aesthetic of big numbers is dead.”

A vast computer-generated playground may instil awe, but size alone is not enough to sustain interest. “What actually gets us to engage with something is how well-crafted it is and how well it resonates,” says Smith.

Cook wants to see generators used to create tailor-made game experiences for individual players. Imagine if No Man’s Sky responded to the way you played it to make sure the 50 planets you see are the 50 it thinks you ought to visit, he says.

Rolling back from billions of planets to just one could be even more satisfying. If each player was given a single bespoke planet, could a computer generate it in such a way that it gave you a feeling of attachment or ownership?

Playing your own game

Games that tailor experiences to players have been around for a while. For example, zombie shooter Left 4 Dead has an AI game director that tweaks the action as you play. It looks through a catalogue of scenarios – what type of enemy, how many of them, what direction they will come from – and picks what it thinks will keep your heart thumping.

Combine an AI director with a catalogue of computer-generated material and we could start to see games built for individual players. Researchers are also working on systems that can automatically generate characters and stories. Ultimately, computer-generated games could drop us into tailor-made worlds that respond to how we play.

Or maybe we’re just getting carried away again. “It’s not clear to me that people really want to have the experience they think they want,” says Smith. “We’re not all good improv actors.”

“If you threw me into a virtual environment with characters that could respond to anything I said, I’m not convinced I’d drive that experience in an interesting direction,” she says. “Do we really want an awkward cocktail party experience in a game?”

We’re sure to find out eventually. In the meantime, I’m going to fire up my spaceship for a little more alone time.