No Man's Sky is an existential crisis simulator disguised as a space exploration game

At Recode's annual Code Conference in June, venture capitalist Elon Musk made the provocative argument that reality is not reality at all, but a massive simulation built on top of some other reality. "There's a billion-to-one chance we're living in base reality," he said. Musk's idea isn't a new one: Philosophers and science fiction authors have been toying with versions of it for years. But part of what made Musk's notion interesting was that it rested entirely on a simple extrapolation from the trajectory of the video game industry. "Forty years ago we had Pong," he said.