Is it wrong to cause extinction level events in a video game?

A lot of people had a lot of thoughts when No Man's Sky was first announced. How many planets will there be? Will you be able to talk sexy to the aliens? Can I send death threats to the development team if any features get left out?

All I could think about were the dinosaurs.

The implicit promise for everything in No Man's Sky was individuality. Every planet unique. Every fish unique. Every bird. Every rock, tree, asteroid, blade of grass. In practice this wasn't untrue, it was more a glossing over of how little that matters; if I see two rocks outside my house, they just register as two functionally-identical rocks.

But those dinosaurs were still buzzing my brain, no longer part of a vertical gameplay slice for a PlayStation trailer. If the animals are unique, and the universe is shared across every copy of No Man's Sky, then there could only be a certain number of these specific dinosaurs in the game's universe. So, what if all of them died? What if a player decided to pull out their space laser and mow down every Daplokarus on Oria V, sending them the way of the North American Buffalo or the Mauritian Dodo?

Xenocide. Genocide. Extinction. Just wipe those leathery bastards right off the face of the planet. My "I do not support genocide" shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by the shirt.

Hello Games' Sean Murray scuppered the idea of causing extinctions on Game Informer's podcast, stating it was statistically unlikely to happen because planets are, you know, big:

We were always saying that like if you do something of significance then we'll try and like share that ... And so we always talked about doing that for creatures that you could like make an entire species extinct, and it's not that hard for us to implement, it's just that when we looked at it like in practice it's pretty much impossible, like 'cause people just think "I watched one their videos and I saw a bunch of deer; I would kill all those deer" you know wipe out all those deer.

They aren't thinking about an entire planet, like, an Earth sized planet filled with deer, and trying to track down every single one them, ya know?

So it's functionally impossible, which is boring. I mean it's good. It's good that you can't delete a living thing from existence. One more time I'd like to make it clear that I don't think mass murder based on species, race, political affiliation or planetary origin is a good thing. Please don't say otherwise on the internet.

What really stuck in my head was the space of future possibility No Man's Sky was hinting at, rather than what the game is actually capable of; the promise of a world, some day, where tiny living creatures existed on a collection of servers. And, crucially, where anyone could decide their fate. Artificial intelligence (the real kind, not the one grifters use to avoid paying artists) may never be able to attain human levels of reasoning, empathy and creativity, but something as smart as a fish or a dung beetle seems at least plausible.

Somewhere between Conway's Game of Life and the woman who served your coffee today is something real. A creature, rather than mere code.

If that existed, would it be wrong to kill it? If your answer is yes, then you have to consider whether it would have been wrong to kill its immediate ancestor, an equally complex but not quite sapient bundle of replicating thoughts. Step back again, and again. Is it wrong to put your boot into the primordial puddle that would give rise to humanity in a billion years?

Best not to think about it too much. I'm certainly not thinking about it too much.

No Man's Sky's shared universe would mean permanent extinction for an infinite number of imaginary species if they were anything close to being alive. Which they're not. But maybe one day.

Less nebulous -cidal actions in video games tend to be narrative driven. In Mass Effect you're introduced to the rachni, a murderous race of space insects that nearly destroyed all life in the galaxy one time. Mostly because they were hungry. Commander Shepard is placed in front of two buttons: press one button to release the rachni back into the galaxy and possibly doom everyone, press the other button to commit genocide.

In the end, only the Good Guy choice has any meaningful effect. The Rachni Queen swoops in later in the story to make your life a little easier, because that's how video games work.

Mass Effect also lets you decide whether the Krogan deserve a cure for the genetic plague inflicted upon them for being too good at having babies. This also matters without mattering too much. These are games about making big damn choices that had to be made, serious and life-changing events that we can all agree should never have gotten to this point, but here we are.

Grand strategy offers similar choices from a different perspective. Your Civilization civilisation may pass through a number of decisions about extinction along the path to victory. That country had to be wiped out, they were stealing our horses.

It's telling that these story genocides are always so grandiose, so important, and yet so quickly brushed past. The human mind isn't really capable of comprehending the simultaneous gravitas and awful indifference of this kind of event. It's horrible to hear that Country A wants to wipe out Country B, but it's impossible to measure that as part of your daily routine; it's upsetting to learn that we killed the last North Pacific Jumping Bee, but the result means nothing. We're not equipped, genocides and extinctions are monoliths, huge and meaningless. So we write stories about them that end up seeming huge and meaningless.

When a game isn't about such things, the killing becomes a comedy. Piling up an entire map's worth of bodies in Hitman or murdering as many NPCs as possible in Skyrim becomes a game in and of itself, because the software in question isn't built to handle the problem any more than we are. The simulation breaking feels more authentic than an actual genocide; my computer is just as existentially terrified as I am.

Those dinosaurs felt a bit too real in comparison. Something about the shape and intent of No Man's Sky—rather than the reality—continues to be worrying. Like we're headed towards an ethical question without realising it.

And I'd just like to make it 100% clear, on the record, I think genocide is bad. Me bringing it up so many times is proof of how bad I think it is.