This article examines the generation of digital outer space natures in the space exploration game, No Man’s Sky. Using procedural generation, No Man’s Sky offers nearly infinite planets, flora, and fauna on the fly. With the rapid development of gaming technology and tools, game developers and others are attempting to diversify the representation of various forms of nature in gaming content and to expand the use of games in behavioral change, education, conservation, and other fields. Many scholars argue that games offer promising ways for various publics to understand their place and their interconnectedness with microbes, ecosystems, planet Earth, and beyond. We examine how No Man’s Sky struggled to coproduce digital outer space natures at the two scalar extremes of the vast expanse of outer space and of the embodied player relating within complex biomes. Our results from an in-depth, qualitative analysis of the initial version of the game, of player world-building experiences in No Man’s Sky, and of subsequent developer modifications to the game demonstrate that nonscalability theory is useful for studying what digital outer space natures do in games. We also argue that nonscalability theory would benefit from a more robust engagement with the digital. No Man’s Sky was initially scalable to such an extreme that it made players into objects without an origin story, broader purpose or way to build meaningful relations in the game. For a brief period, this game undermined players’ interplanetary colonial imaginaries. Subsequent updates to the game introduced a limited scope of nonscalability, but only to the extent of satisfying gamers’ desires to become more impactful agents of exploration. We see great potential for analyzing the role of innovations in computing and game design in linking multiscalar digital, outer, and earth spaces, which as other scholars have shown, bear significantly on our understanding of multiple worlds and natures.
The Vermont Monitoring Cooperative (VMC) collaborated with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation on a forest health data pilot project. The goals of this project are to expand digital holdings of forest disturbance mapping back in time, and to demonstrate ways that that data could be integrated into the existing VMC holdings. There were four main components this project. The first component of this project was standardizing historical forest health data for the state of Massachusetts. The second component of this project was aggregating the current forest health data and generating damage occurrence heat maps for high impact species. The third component of this project was exploring datasets with seasonal dryness and wetness indexes for use in forest health analysis. The final component of this project was to generate a list of researchers who have conducted forest health related research and field work in Massachusetts to compliment the aerial survey data.
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