Abstract
This article presents the tools, methods, and findings of an archaeological survey, excavation, and ethnography of abandoned human settlements within a digital built environment. In 2016, Hello Games (Guildford, UK) released the game No Man’s Sky, set in a procedurally generated universe approximating the size of our own. Future game updates disrupted planetary climate and topography, forcing human players to abandon their homes and farms and relocate elsewhere. As an archaeologist, I was able to apply archaeological principles within a digital/human habitation while also investigating what became of the players and their constructions as well as their in-game community. This approach may well lend itself to efforts in the preservation of these digital environments, and especially for player-created content.
Introduction
As an archaeologist of digital built environments (i.e., software), I focus on material evidence of human activity in these “immaterial” spaces. Open world games provide a rich environment in which to conduct this research.1 No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016) is an open world sandbox game that encourages players to explore and build in an “infinite universe” to create personal narratives. Players can roam the entirety of space, can visit planets and moons, and can ultimately choose to build settlements. Upon release, NMS was a very lonely game even though millions of players purchased it.2 The space is so vast that in the earliest version of NMS it was nearly impossible to find and meet another human player. The first time such a meeting happened, and it was a major news event for games media.3 Now that two players had met in the infinity of space, could an in-game civilization of players follow, and what might that civilization look like?
No Man’s Sky became more relevant to traditional archaeological approaches when studying the settlements of a community of hundreds of human players in a region of the universe now known as the Galactic Hub (Figure 1).4 This Utopian enclave adopted the game as a secondary habitation supplementing their residences in the natural world, spending hundreds or thousands of person-hours exploring, building bases and farms, and creating a robust community of players who shared wealth, resources, and knowledge. Established for over a year, the community was upended by the catastrophic event of a software update, version 1.3 (also known as “Atlas Rises”). The update literally changed the names, climates, and topographies of every planet in the universe without warning. The “paradise”-class planets—temperate, resource-rich worlds—occupied by Hub citizens were now extremely hot, cold, and/or toxic. Within a week, the community took the decision to uproot themselves and conduct a climate-induced mass migration to a more welcoming part of the universe.5 It was the first time that a large group of human players was displaced by a digital climate change event, creating an exodus within the game. Star map of the Galactic Hub region, June 22, 2018, showing the capital planet, Lennon, and related, human-occupied worlds.
After August 11, 2017—the date of the Atlas Rises update—players began abandoning their settlements. Many left messages behind for others to find. On the Hub’s capital planet of Lennon (renamed via procedural generation by the update to Drogradur NO425),6 the community held a farewell party leaving behind dozens of messages prior to heading for the stars (Figure 2).7 This was a digital equivalent of the Dust Bowl in the United States in the 1930s, farmers leaving Oklahoma to find their fortunes elsewhere now that the land was killed by drought and heat.8 View of Lennon’s portal surrounded by communication stations left by other players. The black-and-white icons are visible in space and invite people to find them. The green icon shows another human player, something once nearly impossible to encounter. During my work on Lennon, I would frequently see other players visiting as heritage tourists.
With the v1.3 update, I could now investigate patterns of human abandonment in a digital space, creating a gazetteer of these sites. I could record the contents of the messages left behind and document the state of the abandoned, ruined, and buried bases, reconstructing life in the Hub before the change. During my work, I could also communicate with the Hub’s current community, sharing my work on their abandoned homes, providing a kind of closure for those who were curious about how their homesteads look now. There was some urgency in this project as well, as the next major update, version 1.4 (aka NEXT), was scheduled to deploy on July 24, 2018, which would likely reset the universe again, potentially destroying all previous habitations from 2016 to early 2017. My project became a salvage operation with goals that included preserving a snapshot of a constantly evolving digital game (up to v3.10 as of this writing), but more importantly recording and preserving evidence of human player–created content that so often gets lost in software updates and retirement of games and platforms for both play and distribution.9 While the idea of preserving games as well as user-generated content is well-trodden ground in games studies, archeology might add new insight and methodology to how to approach this old chestnut of a problem.
Research Questions
Based on what I had already observed from playing over 100 hours of No Man’s Sky prior to beginning formal archaeological research, I had two overarching questions: (1) did the behavior of a human population forced to migrate because of a catastrophe within the game mirror that of the natural world, and (2) did my approach to the archeology of human occupation in a synthetic space differ from archaeological approaches used in the natural world?
Methods
The Legacy Hub (née Galactic Hub) is a landscape of systems and planets in a portion of the Euclid Galaxy of No Man’s Sky, which was settled by hundreds of people beginning in October 2016, two months after the game launched.10 The Legacy Hub is composed of 18 regions consisting of dozens of star systems each containing between one and seven planets, some of them with moons. Each system and body within that system contains a unique identifying address composed of a 12-character numeric code, which is then translated into glyphs for use in fast-travel portals. Residents of the Legacy Hub kept detailed records about their homeworlds and nearly always published a public address along with photos of the landscape as well as the homes and farms that they built for themselves and to share with others.11 My research was originally meant to document only the abandoned capital planet of Lennon, but with the deadline of July 24, 2018, looming, it became imperative to complete my archaeological investigations of as many of these Legacy Hub heritage sites as possible. My data and documentation serve two purposes: (1) to support answers to my research questions about human settlement and abandonment in a synthetic universe and (2) to serve as a salvage excavation to preserve as much information as I could gather on behalf of the Galactic Hub player community.
Location
Because the universe of the game is the actual size of our own natural universe (albeit contained within a server farm), it is easy to get lost and is nearly impossible to stumble upon ruins of an abandoned human settlement. While the capital planet of Lennon was easy to find and record, other systems, planets, and bases needed external signposting. The Galactic Hub had created a page on their Wiki, which listed planets with abandoned bases, each with their own links and pages.12 Many of these contained dedicated addresses that could be converted into glyphs via the open source tool, nmsportals.github.io (Figure 3). nmsportals.github.io tool displaying portal coordinates and glyphs, which can then be used for fast-travel.
With the Hub, I was given a list of known sites thought to be important by the community’s leadership. Because the Atlas Rises update release date loomed with the threat of changing landscapes and destroying/burying sites, I organized the site list in the order of ease-of-access. The first sites to be found were those often visited and recorded by players on reddit and ones with easy-to-discover locations within relatively short distances of the capital planet, Lennon. Fortunately, I was able to visit and document each site on the list.
Upon arrival in an abandoned system, I scanned it through my head-up display (HUD) to identify the location of the old player base. When conducting this research in 2018, the game permitted only one base per system, so if the base survived, it would appear on its original planet as either a flag icon or a colored beacon icon (Figure 4). After achieving orbit above an abandoned planet, icons for communication stations would appear, indicating messages left behind by other players (Figure 5). Clusters of these icons indicated an area of archaeological importance, typically either a base or a portal. On some occasions when bases could not be scanned from space, arriving at these clusters would reveal the presence of a human-built structure. Special icon and notification of the location of a player’s base. Player base identification and communication station indicators on the abandoned capital world in the Legacy Hub.
After landing near a base, I would record the coordinates given by the local signal booster (if present), or I would construct my own in order to confirm the precise location of the base not only on the planet, but also in the universe. This is not unlike assigning a set of GPS coordinates to an earthbound feature. Translating these into glyphs, I would enter both the numeric and glyph versions of the site’s address into my log for that particular planet, treating it as a discrete site within the landscape of the Legacy Hub. These addresses enable future visits by heritage tourists—a phenomenon that already exists in No Man’s Sky—and allowed me to return to each of these sites after v1.4 deployed in July in order to see what damage, if any, occurred based on the software update.
Mapping
Depending on the site, I created between one and three maps of it.
Pen-and-Ink
It was easiest first to hand-draw a map in my paper notebook of sites that had multiple items of archaeological interest in various spots around the globe. I drew the base (or another fixed point) on the center of the page with north at the top. Standing at this fixed point, I then rotated 360° clockwise from north, stopping to mark icons as they appeared. These icons indicated a walking time to them. I indicated the compass position and time on the map as well as any other landscape features (e.g., mountains, ridges, floating islands, and water).
Time-Maps
After completing my investigation of a site, I created a digital time-map in Adobe Photoshop CS5 based on my paper map. The time-maps had the key feature (typically a player base) in the center, with comm stations, portals, and other areas of interest marked within a compass rose. Because planets in No Man’s Sky v1.3 only have cardinal directions and no reliable Cartesian grid, archaeological and landscape features are relative to the fixed point. I know that the site of a base is fixed and can create a reliable map indicating time, distance, and direction of travel to other features, which may or may not remain in the future. To the best of my knowledge, this is a new kind of map, differing from those ancient maps listing how far one can travel in the course of one or more days. The fixed point of the base is treated as the planet’s pole, and all directions stem from this immovable location (Figure 6). Sample time-map showing the location of a base, portal, and communication stations.
State Plans
On rare occasions, I found base locations with dozens of communication stations and other features (e.g., beacons, save-points, and signal boosters).13 For these, I took overhead photos via drone (either my starship or through the game’s Photo Mode, which allows players to position a camera in the sky ca. 50 m above the surface). Exporting to Photoshop, I oriented the image and identified each of the features by consecutive numbers on a plan (Figure 7). These numbers tied into numbered rows in a spreadsheet that contained information about what was pictured, who placed it, and any other data of note. Sample state plan indicating numbered communication stations.
Photography and Videography
I used the photo and video capabilities of Sony’s PlayStation 4 console to document each site, activating NMS’s Photo Mode when necessary. All photos/videos were saved initially with a date- and time-stamp. I then renamed each file to indicate the order in which the file was created, the name of the planet/base, and a brief description of what was depicted.
I recorded each site first with No Man’s Sky’s HUD active. The HUD displayed the name of the planet along with other environmental data, very much like including a scale when photographing artifacts or a chalk/whiteboard when photographing site features/trenches (Figure 8). I photographed and video-recorded each base within its landscape from a distance and also from overhead to get a feature’s footprint. Following that, I recorded interiors including various views of rooms and their contents, as well as any other unique identifiers (e.g., base IDs and Trade Terminal IDs) in order to gather as much data as possible within each frame. After completing the initial recording, I repeated the process in Photo Mode, which removes the HUD from the frame, providing clean images and video. The human and emotional decision-making of siting a structure cannot be overlooked; HUD-free photography and videography helps with the interpretation of how players choose to site buildings within the landscape. Also in Photo Mode, one can adjust the time of day, which allowed me to record sites in daylight and in starlight, as well as with raking light should a feature require it. Sample site photo including the data from the head-up display.
I took two types of site videos: (1) walkthrough14 and (2) flyover.15 On occasion, bases and other features were buried, so it was important to show the relationship between the built structure and the planet’s new topography. A buried base (or buried comm stations) indicated a change in the landscape that can only occur through major software updates from Hello Games. Finding a buried human settlement indicates that it was built pre-update. Finding buried comm stations shows that the settlement was also visited pre-update.16 In the instances where I needed to excavate, I filmed the excavation with the HUD turned on.17 On certain occasions where the base or its landscape was glitched, I would record what happened during a flyover in order to demonstrate the nature of the glitch.18
Georeferencing
I was able to implement a program of georeferencing on a handful of occasions. Some archival records of player bases in the Legacy Hub contained photos of the bases in their original landscapes pre-v1.3. I then recreated those photos during my site visits, ultimately lining them up as Photoshop layers to create composite images of past and present. In some cases, the results led to additional excavation of hidden features (Figure 9). Sample of on-site georeferencing on “Dancing Bear.”
Excavation
I often needed to excavate features and/or bases in the Legacy Hub. This was achieved in two ways: (1) using the game’s Terrain Manipulator tool and (2) performing a game-save.
Hand-Excavation
Because Atlas Rises altered the topography of every planet in the universe, the new mountains/hills/rocks would often cover up significant archaeological features, most notably bases and communication stations (Figure 10). To excavate, I activated the game’s Terrain Manipulator feature of the mining tool, increasing the diameter of the hole to be dug, and then fired the tool in the direction of the buried comm station or base without the risk of damaging either. The overburden would disintegrate, leaving a tiny hole a few meters deep. Continued excavation would remove additional rock until the station or base was found and recorded. In rare instances, the buried feature would lie beneath the bedrock, which could not be excavated. In those cases, I would mark the location of the feature on my map and then move on. Semi-buried player base, “Langley.”
Game-Saves
Committing an explicit game-save while at the site of a buried (or suspended) base will often relocate the entire base to a flat building site elsewhere on the planet, restoring the structure to its complete and original form (Figure 11). The issue here is, of course, that moving the base removes it from its context although the communication stations remain behind to mark the original site of the base. The restoration and relocation enables the base to be visited by heritage tourists or through chance arrival and also takes the guesswork out of what the base used to look like. On the other hand, the contemporary ruins are destroyed even though they are reassembled by the game someplace else. In communicating this to the Galactic Hub community and the people responsible for documenting Hub heritage, the Hub’s chief executive and founder, Syn1334, and his officer in charge of Hub heritage, Zaz Ariins, both communicated on behalf of the Hub community that they were fine with the accidental base relocation.19 For the leaders of the Galactic Hub, it is important to them that their community and heritage tourists see these structures as they were originally built, even if they now appear in a new location, albeit on their original planet. (a and b) Player base, “Horner,” in its original context (top) and relocated/excavated (bottom).
No Man’s Sky
NEXT launched on July 24, 2018, and further destroyed Legacy Heritage sites or buried them out of reach under the bedrock, which can no longer be excavated. All that remains are the images, video, maps, text, and community dialogue surrounding the original settlements, which are now archived via the Archaeology Data Service (see this article’s Appendix for DOIs of each recorded site).20
Field Reports
At the conclusion of investigating a Legacy Hub base, I wrote a field report for it, which contained the following elements:
Site Narrative
The narrative summarized the work conducted and described why a site was investigated and what was interesting about it when compared to other sites in the survey.
Anatomy
Understanding that the planet under investigation would likely change with v1.4, the “anatomy” of the planet hosting a base included daytime and nighttime climate, sunset/sunrise times, planet size, details of pre-v1.3 exploration (names/dates of explorers), as well as the presence/absence of flora and fauna and notable natural resources, plus notes on system-wide economy and conflict, all of which could be important in a player’s decision to site a settlement.
Landscape
I wrote descriptions of the local landscape surrounding the base, putting the base’s site into a wider context, and to compare it against text and images recorded by the base’s original architects and earliest guests. These descriptions also prepared me to view any changes to these planets in v1.4.
Base Description
Writing a room-by-room description of a player base enabled me to think more carefully about its construction and content and supplemented the photos and videos I took of the base both inside and out.
Communication Stations
Most of the bases and worlds I visited contained one or more communication stations containing messages from the base’s architect and from visiting players (Figure 12). I created a spreadsheet to note color, player name, message, and any special notes about the station and its location. From this data, I was able to trace players’ movements throughout the Hub and could also identify trends in communication between players. On the capital planet, Lennon, the density of comm stations required me to lay out a grid to assist me in mapping, identification, and recording (Figure 13). Sample communication station. (a and b) Comm stations near the portal on the capital of Lennon (Drogradur NO425) with an overlying grid (above). Detail of the central cluster of communication stations at Lennon’s portal (next page).
Posting/sharing the reports as soon and as publicly as possible sometimes received feedback from Hub residents. For example, I received the following unsolicited oral history from “Mr McDillard” about his Legacy Hub site:21 As a quick info drop: This planet was once a lush, temperate, water-rich paradise. The vast ocean was dotted with large continental land masses, forming many island chains. High mountains climbed dramatically out of the deep oceans, creating a breathtaking landscape. After the update, the planet was transformed into a harsh wasteland, but with equally beautiful geological formations. As you know, our bases were all wiped after the update, but we had the option to reload our bases if we were able to find a base computer. I was committed to keeping my original base on the original planet it had been established, even if the landscape had changed. I spent weeks trekking across the planet, until I happened upon a Base Computer atop the overlook where it stands today. I couldn’t be happier with the new location, although I do still miss the oceans. The comm balls mark the location of my previous base, as well as a new neighbor I had gained along the way. He didn’t seem very active, so I suspect he never bothered to recover his old base. My previous base location used to be at the top of a cliff, with a view of the ocean below. Part of a larger island chain, the cliff led to a large plateau which curved in a crescent, creating an enormous bay. I hope that helps!
The takeaway from this oral history is that the digital archaeologist can compare this information against the site as it appears in the present day and can use it to fill in any lacunae in the historical and archaeological record, complementing surveyed and excavated evidence. With archeology of the recent past, access to living contributors is also crucial, especially with the history of digital things and environments, which while very personal and individualistic, can get lost in the sheer volume of other voices and digital constructions.
Player-created game archives were important as well. In most of my site visits and report writing, what I discovered and recorded matched the narrative of the original settlers of the worlds I visited in the Legacy Hub. On at least three occasions, however, my work was supplemented through archival research that required me to revisit the sites and perform actual excavation of the bases below ground level to uncover additional parts of these structures (e.g., Horner, Langley_83_Alpha, and Sosashibukay).22 Use of archival materials allowed me to conduct georeferencing and to supplement the narratives of these structures through reading first-hand accounts by the builders and by some of the first visitors to these sites.
Results: General Trends in Settlement, Abandonment, and Communication in No Man’s Sky
Disaster-Driven Human Migration
In order to interpret how and why the human Galactic Hub community made their exodus post-upgrade apocalypse, I sought to explore how and why people abandon and resettle in the natural world after suffering a major disaster. For No Man’s Sky, this disaster fits the rubric of a “catastrophism”: the “sudden, typically unpredicted natural disaster that leads to abrupt changes in a culture of lifestyle that has been stable for a long time. Following such catastrophes, an entirely new social, political or military order can emerge….” (Nur & Burges, 2008, p. 2). What happened with the overnight biome reset of the Atlas Rises update was not unlike the quick, catastrophic strike of a major earthquake. Historian Will Durant is attributed to have said in an interview with Ladies Home Journal (1946) that “civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” In this quote, we see a blend of earthquake science and archeology and how one affects the other. So it is with human populations in digital built environments. Disaster ruins are created at the press of a button.23
When studying a disaster-caused abandonment of any place, there are several factors to consider that will help understand how a human population responded to the event: event magnitude, event frequency, event duration, event speed of onset, areal (geographic) extent of the event, spatial dispersion of the event, temporal spacing (periodicity) of the event, and time of onset of the event (Bawden & Reycraft, 2000, pp. 1–2). When applying these factors to the diaspora of the Hub population, we can plug in the following: (1) the software update affected 100% of the geographical area within No Man’s Sky; (2) the software update event happens on average once per year (Atlas Rises in July 2017, NEXT in July 2018, and Beyond in July 2019 all reset the biomes and destroyed settlements); (3) the updates cause immediate destruction, the effects of which are felt for months afterward; and (4) the updates happen overnight. Based on these data and the fact that the universal reset repeats, Hub players and their leaders are better prepared to plan for another such event if they are given enough notice by Hello Games. The first occurrence of the reset caught everyone off-guard, much like an earthquake. The player community can now treat this “digital disaster” more like they would in planning for a hurricane or similar, having learned from past experience.
Another major difference between migrating human populations in the natural world versus those in No Man’s Sky was the fact that identifying and managing natural resources was easy within the digital space. In NMS, the Hub community explored the synthetic universe for a few weeks, returned to report on what they had found, and then voted on where to resettle based on the highest concentration of livable planets and variety of resources. Because the game is truly universe-sized, there is no competition for space and resources and no population displacement or the attendant politics in resettling a migrant population within someone else’s borders (Black, 1998; Marfleet, 2006). Disaster migration within No Man’s Sky when compared to people fleeing war-torn countries is little more than an inconvenience, yet the players took their situation seriously and created and executed a plan to move their community with as little hardship as possible.
When dealing with abandonment of settlements in No Man’s Sky, one must consider two facets: (1) the form of abandonment and (2) reasons for abandonment. Based on my observations, I can assign one of three classes to abandoned settlements. The first class of sites is that where the base has completely disappeared, yet communication stations remain as a proof that a structure once existed (e.g., Dancing Bear, Figure 14). For some players, investment in their bases necessitated that they be deconstructed and loaded onto high-capacity freighters, which would then fly to a new site in Galactic Hub 2.0. Construction of farms and other architecture is quite expensive, so in some instances it was cheaper for players to disassemble and move a base. Such is the case with player hollyworks’ pearl farm24 consisting of 16 hydroponic domes and 256 mature albumen pearl plants, a valuable cash crop. A Class 1 abandoned site, “Dancing Bear,” showing comm stations as evidence of the location of a player’s settlement, now completely disappeared. The comm stations float in the air, which shows that the topography of the planet changed. Normally comm stations float c. 1 m above the surface, but these require a starship to visit because they are so far above the planet’s current surface.
The second class contains those habitations that remain fully intact and are situated on the landscape as they were when their builder departed (e.g., Panda’s, Figure 15). This kind of abandonment occurred for one of two reasons: (1) the player felt it would be easier to rebuild the base in the new Galactic Hub or more frequently (2) the player had already built newer bases elsewhere. In No Man’s Sky (up to version 1.3), players could build multiple bases, one per system, but because of the way the game was designed, they themselves could only see their most recent, active base. Other players, however, could visit older iterations of bases now abandoned by the same player over time. My work in documenting these abandoned bases became increasingly important to the player community as the player-builders were nostalgic for their earlier constructions.25 The Hub’s community-at-large viewed these earliest structures as part of their in-game cultural heritage, as evidenced by searching on the term “heritage” in the Hub’s Wiki, which returned not only individual sites designated as heritage structures, but also entries for the Galactic Heritage Archive and Legacy Heritage Archive with rules for designating sites as well as etiquette to follow when visiting heritage sites.26 A Class 2 abandoned site, “Panda’s,” showing a complete player base situated in the landscape without any damage.
The third class of sites contains those bases that are either buried (all or in part) or suspended in the air as evidence of a changed topography because of the Atlas Rises software update (e.g., Valhalla, Figure 16(a) and (b)). (a and b). A Class 3 abandoned site, “Valhalla,” as it was originally (above) and as it was after the Atlas Rises update (next page). Note how the landscape changed from lush to desert and that the topography changed, which left the base suspended and disarticulated.
Reasons for site abandonment vary from player to player. All chose to leave in order to be a part of the Hub’s relocation and resettlement, opting to remain within the community instead of remaining alone in a wasteland. Their original homeworlds largely had been turned toxic and unlivable with poor (or absent) resources and predatory fauna where once had been an Eden. Most players left their bases as is, never to return. Some players (e.g., hollyworks), deconstructed their ruined bases for raw materials to use in rebuilding their homes in the new Hub.
Other than bases, most players opted to leave behind communication stations, literal messages-in-bottles for other players to find and read (Figure 17). Aside from bases, comm stations are the only player-created artifacts able to be seen and engaged with by other players. The comm stations’ colors (base and trim) can be customized, although most players chose to stay with the default orange. Some of the more advanced, active players in the group opted for custom colors, making these easy to identify from world to world as I followed their Hub explorations and visits.27 Communication stations are like single-tweet bottles for messages to other players. People who construct these are limited to a 30-character message. A communication station found at the abandoned base “Langley” indicating that the architect has relocated to the “Hilbert” region of Galactic Hub 2.0, established after the Atlas Rises update.
Without exception, the 430 messages I found left by other players were either factual or positive (the most copious numbers of communication stations were left at Lennon,28 Pepper Dusk,29 and Holly’s Blue Moon Paradise30). Factual inscriptions include player names, date of visit, and at times an address either of a base or the name of an Earth city where a player was from. Positive messages included words of thanks for farms/resources, compliments on the quality of a base’s architecture, and words of welcome from the Hub community.
The disposition of comm stations followed one of three options: (1) clusters encircling player bases (e.g., Ty Beecham’s Pearl Island31), (2) single stations noting planetary features (portals, trading posts, and other significant locations, as on Schrödinger’s Rat Race32), and (3) portal parties (players arrive at a planetary portal at a pre-arranged date and time to leave messages as a group to mark a specific event). The most famous portal party was the farewell party at the Galactic Hub’s old capital of Lennon, which was held on August 20, 2017, immediately prior to migration.33
Abandonment in No Man’s Sky followed three notable trends: (1) deconstruction and relocation of a base, (2) other bases built by the player who is no longer able to see the original base, and (3) a base no longer accessible after the Atlas Rises v1.3 update. For those who chose to relocate via options 1 and 2, abandonment largely happened for two reasons: (1) the climate and topography changed to extreme cold, heat, or toxicity, thereby killing natural resources and making day-to-day survival nearly impossible (or certainly impractical) and (2) loss of community. The Galactic Hub’s census put the original population at around 200 players by the time of Atlas Rises (the census of the New Hub is now over 400 with more players arriving daily in anticipation of the v1.4 update).34 The community thrives together, and according to the Hub’s founder and chief executive, Syn1334, only a few players remain in what is now known as the “Legacy Hub,” these players largely being new arrivals to the region prior to joining up with the main group post-August 2017.
Considering the changed landscapes of planets in the Legacy Hub, in several instances I discovered communication stations and bases either buried underground or suspended in the air. Although I knew the addresses of settled Hub planets, the challenge lay in locating them. The mechanics of the game allowed for hints, icons displayed in the HUD for comm stations and bases, which in the case of buried built heritage equated to little signs stating, “dig here.” Their current disposition in the spring and summer of 2018 showed the original landscape (Figure 18). Comm station positions showing past topography at Ty Beecham’s Pearl Farm.
On occasion, several comm stations would align with an invisible mountain slope or ridge, making it easier to see what a planet might have once looked like. As described earlier, on a few planets, I was able to conduct some exercises in georeferencing, aligning the camera to reproduce images of bases and landscapes as they were 1 year ago, effectively demonstrating how the landscape changed over time and why the bases and comm stations appear as they do now (Figure 19). Georeferencing of hollyworks’ pearl farm on Holly’s Blue Moon Paradise.
Conclusions
To return to the two major research questions stated at the outset of this article: Did the behavior of a human population forced to migrate because of a catastrophe within the game mirror that of the natural world?
In No Man’s Sky, there was less panic and more organization than one sees in the natural world, namely, because in the latter people are often fighting for their lives, making sure their needs are met (food, water, and shelter). It is difficult to equate the two kinds of disasters largely because digital disasters are experienced by people of some privilege, yet each player’s feeling of home and their investment of time and materials into building places of their own still carry emotional weight and are archaeologically significant. People protect what they love, and it hurts to lose those places one is close to. Players posted to reddit after each update to lament what they had lost. Player zfreakazoidz wrote that even though they had found the “perfect planet” in the new update, they “miss my old base that NMS erased.”35 Player Huntaer1 posted, “My old base. Still haven’t found it yet. Oh well still have my screenshot.”36 Crashdown77 wrote, “Came back to my old home planet from version 1.38, the former paradise planet is now irradiated and everything is gone, but my exocrafts were still around hanging in the mid-air….”37 Player MrUnnoticed posted an image captioned, “Final salute to my old foundation home,” prior to leaving for a new base in the Hub.38 These farewells to ruined bases are rarely maudlin, yet players felt enough attachment to them to post publicly about their in-game homes. After posting, they moved on and rebuilt elsewhere. 2. Did my approach to the archeology of human occupation in a synthetic space differ that much from archaeological approaches used in the natural world?
I started with traditional methods with which I was familiar and then adapted them to the environment in which I worked. It is perhaps the wrong question to consider similarities and differences between working in natural and digital spaces. The question should instead be, “how can I best answer the archaeological questions from a particular site (natural or digital), communicating those answers in a rapid and intelligible way?”
One must also realize that for humans there is no purely digital habitation. These synthetic worlds contain the fruits of digital labor, yet the human occupants remain bodily in the natural world. The digital built heritage they construct is also housed in the natural world. The digital world is blended; players talk and write outside of the confines of a game even though the subject is usually the game-as-shared-experience. Any future archeology of digital things must consider not only the interior of digital built environments, but also the context in which they were constructed, and how people engage with software as members of affinity groups and larger user communities. These digital spaces also impact the environment of the natural world, the topic of which should be thoroughly studied: at what environmental cost do we create and sustain digital habitations? For this No Man’s Sky archaeological investigation of human settlement in a digital space, it was enough to see if one could conduct meaningful archaeological research there. Future studies can go deeper.39
Returning to the issue of recording and preserving player-generated content within interactive digital environments, the specific methodology employed in No Man’s Sky must be adapted for other games and their unique mechanics. What I was able to do in NMS, I am unable to do in Super Mario Bros. The takeaway must then be to determine what research questions need to be asked, and then how to use existing game mechanics and ancillary technologies to extrapolate answers to those questions. Generally, image- and A/V-capture and report writing (narrative and analytic) are the lowest-hanging fruit, but the innovation of the researcher(s) will create an additional opportunity for recording and interpretation of data. Ethics and transparent communication are also key regardless of the project; the human communities within and around any game must be consulted, if only to receive consent by the researcher to conduct their ethnography. Although archaeologists traditionally deal with long-dead cultures and physical artifacts buried in a material world, the questions of human and nonhuman relationships and the relationships of individuals and communities to their built heritage and the landscapes that support it are universal and lend themselves easily to an archeology of digital spaces.
The recording and interpretation of the community within digital games continues to tell a very human story, one where the art and architecture can disappear almost without a trace overnight. This threat of disappearance when games are abandoned and platforms shut down makes the archeology of ephemeral digitalia all the more urgent and accelerated when compared to its earthly counterpart. Ancient pottery remains protected when it is locked within a sandy matrix until recovered through excavation. Digital artifacts created by players have no such protection. All that will remain of the Steam Workshop and the creative output of its tens of thousands of creators when the platform shutters will be images and videos on YouTube, reddit, Twitch, and other places, until those, too, are retired and replaced. At least with archiving this data through a sustainable and “perpetual” space as I have done for the Galactic Hub through the Archaeological Data Service, the data will (theoretically) remain long after game wikis and community reddits are gone, able to be referenced by players and researchers alike for memory, nostalgia, and scholarly reference. It is not enough to preserve a game. The humanity surrounding its creation, use, modification, and abandonment provide essential context and must be saved as well.
Footnotes
Appendix. List of No Man’s Sky Data,Metadata,Media,and Site Reports (Recorded April 5–July 6,2018).
The following list records the names, dates, and locations of sites recorded during the survey and excavation of the 30 Legacy Hub settlements in No Man’s Sky. All data, metadata, media, and site reports have been ingested into the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) platform for archival purposes and to make this information available as Open Access to researchers, No Man’s Sky Galactic Hub community members, other archaeologists, and the general public.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
