ABSTRACT
Hello Games is a small indie company founded by four game developers in 2008. The main selling point for No Man's Sky is the kind of imaginary world it offers to gamers: a procedurally generated universe. No Man's Sky uses algorithms to create practically every natural feature in its game world. The game also employs the common game mechanics of resource gathering and crafting. Gaming culture is full of stories about gamers finding unexpected bugs or surprising exploitations of intentionally designed rules and systems. Media ecology theory has argued for many decades now that the character of a culture's tools of communication encourages certain developments and discourages others. For one thing, procedural generation offers something new in comparison to older media: functionally limitless imaginary worlds. But due to procedural generation, software can continue to produce something indefinitely given the appropriate hardware resources.
