All Alone in No Man's Sky

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.