IT TOOK Kimmo Proudfoot days to save up for an Asp Explorer. With a hyperspace jump of 35 light years, the Asp can cover vast distances in 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, which was made by Frontier, a studio based in Cambridge, UK. The game sets players loose in a 1:1 simulation of our galaxy that is generated by algorithms fed with real data. Many players busy themselves with trade, piracy or bounty-hunting. But the intrepid ones spend their time exploring.
Proudfoot moderates an online forum dedicated to exploration in the game. It lets players share images and videos of beautiful or unusual things they encounter.
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 due out next year, is set in an algorithmically generated galaxy with so many planets that – so its makers claim – visiting them all would take longer than our sun’s lifetime, even at the rate of one a second.
But it is not just space sims that have sightseers. As graphics have become ever more realistic, photographers have started to document virtual worlds.
Leonardo Sang, a graphic artist and photographer based in São Paulo, Brazil, realised that his love of photography could spill over into the games he plays. “Sometimes I just roam around and look,” he says. Sang is part of a growing community of virtual photographers. Duncan Harris – whose Dead End Thrills website contains hundreds of carefully composed screenshots – has become well known. And there is a Flickr group dedicated to video-game tourism.
One of Sang’s favourite shots was taken in Dying Light, a game set in a zombie-ridden post-apocalyptic world. The image shows an alleyway speckled with light and shadow. “It has this Mediterranean feeling, a little tapestry market,” he says. Virtual photographers such as Sang particularly enjoy the freedom of open-world games. Sang will happily spend hours wandering the streets in a game such as Grand Theft Auto V – set in a fictional version of Los Angeles – just looking for subjects that will make a striking composition.
Endless exploration
The algorithmically generated world of Minecraft is so vast that you could walk for 20 years among the hills, valleys and rivers and never reach the edge. One explorer who set out in 2011 is still walking. Other players prefer to churn through several random worlds in a sitting, looking for those where algorithms have spawned exotic geographical features. For several years, communities of Minecraft 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.
In Elite, 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. There is a lot to see. 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,” Proudfoot says. Since that first trip, he 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.”