The Cosmic Significance of Outer Wilds

It’s 6:00 PM on a Saturday, one day in May 2019, and I’m going to play the puzzle game everyone says is good. My head and body are bathed in the fuzzy glow that only a light hangover from a cold Friday night of drinking can provide. Having just had some dubiously made dinner (likely consisting of low-quality carbohydrates and a fruity vape), I sink into the armchair that I had ‘taken’ from the street last month. “That girl had helped me move it”, I think to myself — the same one who no longer wants to see me or do anything with me, let alone clumsily drag upholstery through the winding pavements and steep slopes of Bristol. We’d seen her at the bar last night and I had told everyone it was mutual.

It is on Game Pass, so I’ll probably do the usual, play for ten minutes, admit it’s not for me, and go back to losing to 13-year-olds on FIFA. I look over to the small, single-glazed window perched over my bed. Contained within its frame are an array of stars, pins of light, nailed firmly into the fabric of the universe, holding up the deep black tarp of night for me to hide under. I look back to the fluorescent mirage of my monitor and open ‘Outer Wilds’ for the first time.

I’m never going to be the same again.

Outer Wilds is a game that I am reticent to talk about. I’m even afraid to play it again. For a piece of art to have this much of a hold over me is unprecedented. No game, no book, no piece of music has ever became so intrinsically linked to how I go about consuming media after I have absorbed it.

Some of the most critically acclaimed pieces of interactive entertainment released in the last decade can feel as if they are shackled by their medium. The specific narrative and technical qualities they aim to provide the player can be achieved to the most exemplary standard, and many would consider the ongoing burst of creativity from this once juvenile and nascent art form currently among the best in the entertainment industry. However, oftentimes, these achievements feel as if they are created in tension with being a video game rather than in tandem. It can feel as if the essential elements these works provide are separate from the unique experiential aspects only a game can offer.

Take The Last Of Us Part I and The Last Of Us Part II for example. A seamless, cinematic, and character-driven narrative may not be the optimal approach when aiming to have gameplay mechanics align with overarching themes and motifs. This challenge is perhaps most evident in ‘The Last Of Us Part 2’, where Naughty Dog sought to utilize gameplay to implicate and extend the theme of guilt within its narrative. The reliance on dialogue and deliberate characterization, central to emotional dramas, hasn’t yet evolved into a compelling gameplay feature. Given that combat is the primary gameplay element in ‘The Last Of Us’ series, it needs to be enjoyable; but, the discord between the fun derived from its play mechanics inadvertently betrays the intended feeling of guilt it is attempting to evoke in the player.

Outer Wilds is a perfect example of fiction excelling in its medium.

Every facet of its creation and gameplay feeds into wider ideas of ambition, curiosity, existential awe, and confusion at the seemingly unknowable depths of knowledge we are faced with when we stare into the deep.

Exploration flows through your fingers as worlds are examined. As you peel back the layers of mystery through deliberate actions, growing an understanding of the solar system’s underpinnings, you are welcomed by the game's own reverence of the cosmos.

I could gush about this game all day. But I truly do think that, as of now, it is the pinnacle of the video game medium. No game has taken on this vastness. Many games are BIG. Fewer are deep. None are as all-consuming as Outer Wilds. Yet, it manages to express these ideas in both macro and micro, whilst giving the player agency to participate with a tact and elegance that may never be matched.

For a piece of art to have this much of a hold over me is unprecedented.

There is a moment in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that I only felt the third time I watched it.

I was under a spell. The film's beautiful serenity begs people to watch it in a mind-altered state, but I had previously voyaged through sober, foolishly hoping to grasp some deep academic or intellectual undertone that only a mind free of intoxication could grasp.

I originally watched it aware of its place in cinematic canon – lionized as the best science-fiction film of all time and one of, if not, the greatest films ever made. Previously, though, I had thought this only the heady pretensions of a cinematic vanguard with a preference for the mechanical precision of a director who knew how to compose slow and methodical sequences of moving artwork. My earlier thoughts on the film were primarily of admiration at its sheer aesthetic accomplishment. Yes, I thought; it was a wonderful film, but not one that ever really pulled beyond abstraction to present a vision that matched its technicality.

For my money, it contains the greatest establishing shot in cinema. In the same way that you may frame a bank in a heist movie or a villain’s lair in a spy thriller, if Kubrick’s ambition is to tell the story of mankind from apes to magic space-embryos, then what better place to start than the Earth and its celestial companions locked in their gravitational waltz through the dark.

It can be confusing to comprehend what is happening in the film when it begins. A few minutes of a black screen and some strange music until we are thrust floating into space, observing the Sun rise above our home with the moon’s dark crest peaking out the bottom of the frame. The magisterial proportion of a simple and ever-present process occurring throughout the universe – a planet and its moon rotating around their star.

It makes me feel cold.

Breaking down the safe haven of humanity into its purely material being, the sobering reality that our species and its history are all contained in this orb that is slowly rotating around another point in space-time. Kubrick is showing us he understands the cosmic. He knows how fragile we are. He has stared up at the night sky and not seen a future with worlds to be discovered, galaxies to be explored, friendly aliens to meet – no! He has seen that we are contingent beings with the ability to create tools that we can’t control, and you are right to be frightened.

I am 12. I trudge from my campus along the tree-lined path that seems to (in the opinion of my adolescent legs) stretch on for miles to the vast expanses of fields that my school had bought from the local council. It’s 4:00 PM November 2012 and the day has all but set. The last vestiges of sunlight are being smothered by clouds casting silhouettes as large as any structure man dare build. They watch over the pre-teen boys about to engage in ritualistic and structured violence.

The aimless slurs and gossip brush off my pale skin. The cold is getting to me though. I spy what might as well be a full moon peak out from behind a whispy behemoth, only to be engulfed by it once again.

‘Crouch, bind, set!’, my coach shouts as I slam my shoulder into another, my legs pumping against the soft, manicured ground. Nothing is giving way. I am not feeling it today.

I end the training with bloody knees and mud crusted on my shorts and the clouds have gone and I see the others walking back down the path. It is pitch black except for the celestial spotlight now freed from the behemoth’s jaws. I could go over and speak to them; I could be nice, kind, friendly, and… I lay on the ground for a bit so I can’t see them leave. I’ll just lay here a bit longer. Under the sky.

Breaking down the safe haven of humanity into its purely material being, the sobering reality that our species and its history are all contained in this orb that is slowly rotating around another point in space-time.

Outer Wilds has a very different approach to the cosmic.

When presented with the game’s opening frame, you wake up looking at the planets dancing around above– the existential dread of infinite space and time consuming your vision – yet, with a flick of a stick or a drag of a mouse downward – you are transported. A welcoming fire and a friendly-looking creature greeting the screen.

The vast indifference of eternity is replaced with the familiarity of life and its centrality.

Outer Wilds does not cast you as a newly awoken ‘stranger in a strange land’, rather, you are already home. You begin the game on Timber Hearth an established member of the ‘Hearthian’ community. These blue, four-eyed lizard inhabitants lovingly refer to you as a ‘hatchling’ and speak of shared history. Young children feel safe enough to play hide-and-seek with you; older members of your bite-sized world remember when you were a child and speak of how proud they are that you now get to journey off as a new member of their fledgling space program, Outer Wilds Ventures.

On your journey to acquire launch codes at the local observatory, you encounter the quantum shard.

In Outer Wilds, certain objects never stay put. Turn your head away from these shards and they will wriggle away, to a corner of the universe where no one dares look. The quantum moon lazily orbits on the river of your sun's gravitational highway only to be turned away from and eased out of existence as quickly as it came to sight.

In most games where a simulation or simulacra of orbital bodies and scientific principles are supposed to underpin a player's experience, these rules and mechanics are often implicit. In Starfield, a convincing image of planets and moons orbiting each other is presented to the player, but these are digital illusions merely putting on a convincing marionette performance. Similarly, in games like No Man’s Sky or Star Citizen, there are gravitational and flight models designed to imitate the feeling of traversing distances through a vacuum, but ultimately games set in space are selling a feeling, not simulating a distinct set of defined physical relations.

In Outer Wilds these rules are explicit.

If you overshoot a planet you will fly into the sun; you can lock yourself in the gravitational orbits of planets and sail around them; the center of Timber Hearth allows you to float in zero gravity because the forces acting on you are equal in all directions; and, yes, if you are not looking at a quantum object, it exists in multiple positions at once.

I’m in my third year of senior school and it is the coldest winter of my life. I sit at one of the single-person desks laid out on the mezzanine of my school library. The windows that usually afford me a pleasant view of the arboretum are frosted over. My earphones are blasting the score to Interstellar. I like sitting up here at my perch in the Library, away from the stinging winds of England and the cutting words from the rabble of sixth-formers down below. I need to pick an extra-curricular activity for next term. Instead, I’m playing Clash Royale on my baby blue iPhone 5c.

I decide to take Astronomy. Some friends are taking Japanese but the disastrous memory of French lessons coupled with a new alphabet sends my head into a spinning linguistic vertigo. I know the teacher as well, he covered for my math teacher when she took a two-month leave after mysteriously turning up to school with a nasty bruise under her left eye. He seemed smart.

He was smart and astronomy was fun. The two other boys that joined me were nice and pleasant and every Wednesday evening in spring 2015, I sit face to face with the cosmos. I learned about gravitational waves; that the burning ball of fire in the sky that gives every human life is mortal; particles can exist in multiple positions at once until observed; that Europa has water oceans under its ice, capable of supporting life; and, that… at the end of everything… is nothing. The universe dies.

The days pass and I finish the astronomy course. My astronomy teacher, a gateway to the cosmos, leaves my school to spout hate at people less fortunate than him. Luckily he didn’t win the county election. He comes third though and I feel less safe that year. Maybe he isn’t as smart as I think.

...and, yes, if you are not looking at a quantum object, it exists in multiple positions at once.

Outer Wilds' use of the quantum is incredible insofar as it understands the quantum world is a problem not just for physical systems but for meaning itself.

If quantum theory is in principle supposed to be universal it should be applicable to all physical systems. This includes physical systems that are large and complicated. The mathematical object that quantum mechanics represents for physical systems is a wave function. These representations are complete (everything there is to say about a given physical system is contained within the wave function). In the examples of simple single-particle systems, the wave function can manifest as a straightforward function of position. A particle's wave function located in region A would have a nonzero value and a value zero everywhere else (the same being true for a hypothetical particle located in region B). A particle's wave function that is in a superposition of being in regions A and B has nonzero values in both and a value of zero everywhere else.¹

As quantum mechanics formulates, laws of physics are only interested with regards to the wave function of physical systems' evolution through time. For this reason, it is strange that standard versions of quantum mechanics have two extremely different types of physical laws, one when the physical system is not being observed and one when it is. In the former category, the laws usually manifest as linear differential equations of motion. All experimental evidence points to the understanding that such laws govern how the wave function of all isolated microscopic physical systems evolves. However, one may doubt that such laws make up the true equations of motion for the totality of the physical universe. The reason is twofold: (i) Physical laws are completely deterministic. Yet, this is not the case for quantum particles that are in a superposition – there appears to exist an unavoidable element of chance. (ii) Linear differential equations of motion predict that the measuring devices will also be in a superposition. When including the role of an observer (one who views a measuring device to see the result) what should occur is that this observer will also exist in a superposition – believing that the measuring device records both region A and B. This is not the case though. The absence of such a superposition state when measuring quantum mechanical phenomena is the ‘measurement problem’. After all, what is at stake is the incongruity of fundamental physical laws. Both physicists and philosophers should consider it deeply unsatisfactory.²

Outer Wilds knows this is unsatisfactory. It knows that there are contradictions and there are missing gaps in different theories and theorems and that no one civilization will understand it all and even with the weight and history of ‘pre-cursor’ races and appeals to the divine, people will disagree on what is and isn’t certain and even what’s important. People will create conspiracies and misread the intentions of those just as confused as them and things might not go well, we might not reach the summit of our ambitions, and this, all of this, the fear, the doubt, the frustration, will exist in perpetuity like the planets that harbor the conscious universe, dissatisfaction circling around again and again and again…

What Outer Wilds understands even better is that playing music around a campfire is a good way to pass that time.

Outer Wilds' use of the quantum is incredible insofar as it understands the quantum world is a problem not just for physical systems but for meaning itself.

I am nestled in warm sand listening to the waves caress the shore. It is the summer before I leave home and I am between a sand dune and the person I love.

Some ways behind me I can hear the joyful laughter of teenagers sitting around a makeshift barbecue, the light from its fire providing enough illumination that I can see her face through the night.

We lay under the black tarp of night but I’m not hiding anymore and the stars seem brighter than usual.

1 Omnès, R., 1994, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2 Albert, D., 1994, Quantum Mechanics and Experience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.