On March 28, 2011, a man who calls himself Kurt J. Mac loaded a new game of Minecraft. As the landscape filled in around his character, Mac surveyed the blocky, pixelated trees, the cloud-draped mountains, and the waddling sheep. Then he started walking. His goal for the day was simple: to reach the end of the universe.
Nearly three years later, Mac, who is now thirty-one, is still walking. He has trekked more than seven hundred virtual kilometres in a hundred and eighty hours. At his current pace, Mac will not reach the edge of the world, which is now nearly twelve thousand kilometres away, for another twenty-two years.
In the four years since its initial release, Minecraft has become a phenomenon that is played by more than forty million people around the world, on computers, smartphones, and video-game consoles. It is primarily a game about human expression: a giant, Lego-style construction set in which every object can be broken down into its constituent elements and rebuilt in the shape of a house, an airship, a skyscraper, or whatever else a player can create.
Minecraft’s universe is procedurally generated, meaning that an algorithm places each asset—every hill, mountain, cave, river, sheep, and so on—in a unique arrangement every time a new game is loaded, so that no two players’ worlds are exactly alike. Markus Persson, the game’s creator, planned for these worlds to be infinitely large: if a player kept walking in a single direction, the game would create more of the world in front of him, like an engineer forever laying track for an advancing train.
But, at extreme distances from a player’s starting point, a glitch in the underlying mathematics causes the landscape to fracture into illogical shapes and patterns.
‘Pretty early on, when implementing the “infinite” worlds, I knew the game would start to bug out at long distances,’ Persson told me. ‘But I did the math on how likely it was people would ever reach it, and I decided it was far away enough that the bugs didn’t matter.’
In March 2011, Persson wrote a blog post about the problem in the game’s source code and the mysterious area where Minecraft’s world begins to warp and disintegrate, a place that he calls the Far Lands. Around that time, inspired by the legions of Minecraft players who record and broadcast their adventures, Mac started a YouTube channel to document his virtual exploits. As he cast about for a fresh angle to distinguish his episodes from those of other YouTube Minecraft-casters, he came upon Persson’s post. It was exactly what Mac had been searching for: he changed the name of his YouTube channel to Far Lands or Bust!, and he set off to see them for himself.
‘In my ignorance, I thought the journey might take a year or so,’ Mac tells me. ‘Had I known that the Far Lands were so many thousands of kilometres away, I might have been more hesitant.’
In his essential book about video games, Trigger Happy, the writer and critic Steven Poole argues, ‘The jewel in the crown of what video games can offer is the aesthetic emotion of wonder.’ This is achieved most readily, he writes, via the awe-inspiring places and scenes that video-game designers build on our screens, ‘cathedrals of fire,’ in his memorable phrase.
Few who have, for example, stepped blinking from the murk and grime of Oblivion’s city sewers into the virtual kingdom of Cyrodil’s brilliant white sunlight would disagree with Poole’s assertion. Here, miles of verdant countryside blanket out from your feet; hills, valleys, and mountains that stretch away into the distance, inviting not only exploration, but also wonder.
There’s a unique sense of awe to being a tourist in a place that’s simultaneously vivid and virtual. It’s a feeling that video games elicit with wonderful regularity. It’s there when you crest a hill on horseback in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time while the sun sets and windmills wheel in the distance; it’s there as you climb one of the stratospheric stone giants in Shadow of the Colossus, as you haul yourself upwards by grasping fistfuls of the moss that grows on its back; it’s there in the sand-buffed structures found within the desert scenes of Sony’s appropriately named Journey, objects that provide touch-points of humanity in an otherwise arid and forsaken desert. Video-game designers often seek to propel us through their worlds, laying down a crumb trail of objectives designed to hold our attention. But sometimes, the worlds they create cause us to put down the to-do list, to stop and stare at this forest, that horizon, those fields, these spaceships.
Video games allow us to enter into the roles and vocations of people unlike us; likewise, they enable us to visit and explore places that would be unreachable any other way. In their bounds we are able to satisfy the fidgety human desire to explore, to seek out the new and, perhaps ultimately, to call the new our own.
Their appeal is to be found in time, the way we can lose ourselves in the tasks they set before us, the rhythms of their interactions and rewards that lead to chronoslip. But it’s also to be found in the spaces that they make available to us, the openings they provide into new planes of landscape and reality.
The honest sense of success that accompanies an achieved goal is crucial to the video game’s appeal. But so too is the journey. In 1881, Robert Louis Stevenson articulated the idea in his book Virginibus Puerisque, writing that ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.’
Stevenson, who two years later would publish his travelogue drama Treasure Island, would find the maxim borne out in fiction as well as life—as too do we video-game explorers, questing hopefully through virtual domains more than a century later.
In contrast to Columbus, Drake, Dampier, and all the other drivers of the age of discovery, with their bulging galleons bulging with supplies, Mac prepared for his hike through Minecraft in only a basic way. He gathered the materials to craft a sword, for protection, and a pickaxe, for digging rudimentary shelters to hide from the game’s lethal nocturnal terrors.
‘Most important, I brought a compass,’ he says. ‘The compass always points toward the original spawn point. That way, I would know that, as long as I walk in the direction opposite the needle’s point, I am headed in the right direction.’
Mac has filmed his entire odyssey, breaking it up into separate YouTube episodes, across multiple seasons.
‘The YouTube format serves the journey well, allowing the viewer to experience the entire adventure along with me,’ he says. ‘Also, if anyone had doubts as to whether or not I was making this trek to the Far Lands without cheating, they could go back and watch all of the footage.’
But Mac soon realised that he would have to fill each episode with commentary, both to engage his audience and to stave off loneliness.
‘The series transformed into a sort of podcast, where the topics I talk about might have little to do with the journey itself,’ he says. ‘Of course, it is always exciting when Minecraft regrabs my attention with a perilous cliff, a zombie attack, or a memorable landscape, and I remember the journey I’m on.’
By one measure, Mac’s endeavour is motivated by the same spirit that propels any explorer towards the far reaches of the unknown. Today, we live in a world meticulously mapped by satellites and Google cars, making uncharted virtual lands some of the last places that can satisfy a yearning for the beyond, as well as locations where you are simply, as Mac puts it, ‘first.’
‘My viewers and I are the only people to ever see these places exactly as they are,’ he says. ‘Once we walk past, we will never see them again.’
While the premise of walking in a single direction through a video game for hundreds of hours may seem banal, Minecraft has a special ability to create unscripted character drama. In almost every one of Far Lands or Bust’s three hundred or so episodes, each of which lasts for about thirty-five minutes, Mac encounters something of note.
‘On June 6, 2011, in episode thirty-two, I tamed a wolf,’ he recalls. ‘He quickly became a fan favourite and my only companion on the trip. Unfortunately, on the final day of the season, Wolfie, as I’d named him, mysteriously disappeared during a break.’
Mac presumed that Wolfie had been glitched out of the game, and his disappearance lent a sour note to the season finale. But, in an unlikely plot twist, Mac was reunited with Wolfie during the first episode of season four, and the pair continued the journey together.
When Mac began his quest, he was employed as a web designer, but as his channel attracted more viewers, he started generating enough advertising revenue to quit his job and make virtual exploration his sole career. In a way, his viewers have become his patrons, funding his trip in exchange for reports and updates, which are interesting enough to elicit their continued support. The channel’s success—today, it has more than three hundred thousand subscribers—has been such that Kurt adopted the pseudonym Mac to conceal his identity from fans who might try to locate his house, in the Chicago suburbs.
Persson is an avid supporter of the Far Lands journey.
‘It was one of those things that kind of slowly crept into my awareness,’ he told me. ‘I heard about it from various places and eventually got around to watching an episode.’
Mac met Persson in Paris, in 2012, at the game’s annual conference, where the pair shook hands.
‘I think, despite no longer being involved in Minecraft’s development, Notch is very amused at the various ways people have chosen to play his game,’ Mac says.
Persson watches Mac’s videos while working. ‘I find it strangely calming and Zen-like,’ he said. ‘It makes for an excellent background to programming. It’s not something I would ever attempt myself, though. I don’t think I have that kind of personality.’
In June 2011, Mac partnered with the charity Child’s Play, which aims to improve the lives of hospitalised children by providing toys and games to more than seventy hospitals worldwide.
‘The viewers have always motivated me with their generosity,’ he says. ‘It has allowed the series to become more than just about reaching the Far Lands in a video game, but actually making a difference in the real world.’
The charitable cause also gave Mac a reason to withhold how far he has travelled, in order to maintain a sense of mystery.
‘I now only ever press F3 to display my coordinates when certain fund-raising goals have been met,’ he says. When the first fund-raising goal, $8,200, was met, on November 14, 2011, Mac discovered he had travelled more than two hundred and ninety-two thousand metres.
‘After the next goal, twenty-nine thousand two hundred and twenty dollars, was met, on August 12, 2012, I pressed F3, to find I had travelled six hundred and ninety-nine thousand four hundred and ninety-two metres,’ he says.
The date and time of Mac’s arrival in the Far Lands is much debated. It’s agreed that in a completely flat Minecraft world it would take a player 820 hours of continuous walking to reach the edge of the universe. But Mac is playing in a world that’s interrupted by mountains, oceans, and other obstacles, all of which affect the pace of his travel. And he often stops to admire his surroundings.
‘Some say it will take more than three thousand episodes to reach my destination at my current rate,’ he says. ‘But I never really take the time to think about it myself. My mantra has always been that this is about the journey and not the destination.’
Nevertheless, Mac is already beginning to see clues that he is on course.
‘I’ve started to experience some of the effects of travelling so far from spawn,’ he says. ‘Items and entities are somewhat disjointed from the terrain around them, causing a jitter as I walk.’
Some people expect these problems to increase as Mac walks farther from his starting point, and some think that the game will be unplayable long before he reaches the Far Lands. Mac is philosophical.
‘We will see when we get there,’ he says.
This urge for players to explore the extremities of existence has been a part of video games since the very beginning.
In 1961, members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club created Spacewar!, one of the first video games that ran on the university’s hulking $120,000 PDP-1 mainframe computer. Spacewar!, like so many of the video games that would follow, took place in the cosmos. The setting was, in part, a practical decision: it was far easier for the earliest computers to render the blank canvas of space than the comparable complexities of rocks, hills, or cities. But, for games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Defender, there’s more to the choice of space as a backdrop than utilitarian function. Space has always fascinated storytellers, and with the birth of the video game, humans finally discovered a way to explore its farthest reaches from the crunchy comfort of terra firma.
Early video games kept the stories simple, but it wasn’t long before these representations of space offered more than merely a place to defend humanity from an alien threat. Through video-game simulations, which have become ever more sophisticated with technology’s advance, we’ve had the opportunity to visit the otherwise unreachable and, increasingly, to discover truths about our own galaxy.
One of the first truly ambitious simulations of space was Elite, a spaceship game created in 1984 by two university undergraduates, one aged nineteen, the other twenty, working out of a cramped dormitory in Jesus College, Cambridge. In the game, players tour the universe in a dogfighting mining vessel; the program employed vector mathematics to create vast swaths of space, filled with line-art asteroids and spacecraft, which tilted and spun as if their blueprints had popped into three-dimensional life. Every time the game loaded, there was a digital equivalent of the Big Bang: unimaginable vastness was created from almost nothing.
‘In the early 1980s, a typical home computer would have just thirty-two kilobytes of memory—less than a typical e-mail today,’ David Braben, the programmer who created the game with Ian Bell, tells me. Rather than manually plot star systems by typing the coordinates of stars and planets into a database, Braben tried using randomly generated numbers. This method reduced the amount of designer time required to birth a universe, but at a cost: every time the game was loaded, its suns, moons, planets, and stars would be in a new arrangement. To overcome the randomness problem, Braben used the Fibonacci sequence as a seed from which identical galaxies would be generated each time the game was played, all within a computer program a fraction of the size of a photograph taken with a mobile phone today.
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.
Video games replicate this heady recipe for anyone with a controller and the necessary hardware. From familiar building blocks (quite literally, in the case of Minecraft’s brick-like construction) they create unfamiliar places with unfamiliar vistas that are, nevertheless, somehow real. It’s telling that the latest video-game consoles have the built-in ability to take and share in-game photographs, an acknowledgement that visitors will want to capture a scene or a moment for posterity, to make their discoveries public and shared. Today, virtual places rival our world for beauty and diversity. There are the whispering deserts of Red Dead Redemption and the icy plains of Super Mario 64. There’s Majula, a numinous clifftop homestead in Dark Souls II, a location seemingly chiselled from the rock over centuries by a ceaseless virtual wind. There’s Mass Effect’s citadel, a colossal deep-space station as memorable as any city centre, and there are the buckshot islands of the Caribbean, exquisitely rendered as if from Treasure Island’s descriptive pages in Assassins’ Creed: Black Flag.
All of these places can be visited without the drag of real-world travel: the cumbersome luggage, the unreliable trains, the rude public, the sore feet. These vivid places have been compacted onto discs and hard drives, facilitating a kind of tourism and exploration that are convenient and danger-free. Can virtual discovery match the thrill of real-world exploration? As with success, the imitation is powerful, compelling and, crucially, cheaper and more accessible.
In the Taiwanese café, Rong-Yu may not have been drawn back to League of Legends by the promise of discovering some new virtual vista. After all, Summoner’s Rift was a place he had visited many times before. But, like the traveller returning to a beloved locale, he would have grown to know the place, its contours, its plains and bushels, and, like the places we frequent in our daily existence, it would have become reassuringly familiar.
Perhaps this is the crucial point. The human urge to travel and to discover new places is almost universal. But behind that urge is a deeper need to arrive and, once there, discover a place that we can call our own and a place in which we belong.