The Echoes of Humanity

Note: This is an essay that I’ve imported from my old account.

The game Outer Wilds hold a very special place in my heart. I first encountered Outer Wilds when it was a student project in a very early release build, and when I was a simple-minded Grade 10 student. I enthusiastically engaged in the mechanics of the game and its narrative for hours upon hours. When I played the full release of Outer Wilds earlier this year, it spoke to me in a way that I haven’t forgotten since. By the time the final scene had come to a close, I was sitting on my bed, bawling my eyes out. I haven’t found any other game that’s made me as emotional and inspired me as much as Outer Wilds has.

Then earlier this month, I finally played the Outer Wilds DLC, Echoes Of The Eye. Once again, I was left in tears by the end. Once again, Outer Wilds reached in and touched my emotional core. But this time, Outer Wilds did not simply inspire me. It broke my heart, and asked me if I’m willing to put it back together again.

As a quick aside, I highly recommend playing Outer Wilds if you haven’t already. There will be major spoilers ahead for both the base game and DLC. Outer Wilds is a game best played going in blind. This essay will still be around if you go play the game first. With that being said, with this essay, I want to explore the themes that Echoes of the Eye presents and how it relates to the world that I find myself in today.

I entered an unknown region of space expecting it to harbour a particular planet, only to be enveloped by an unnatural darkness. The stars faded into black and the sun’s light vanished. A sound echoed in my head like two violins playing dissonant notes, imitating a piercing alarm. Suddenly, my ship collided with an object hidden in the dark. The reactor core erupted, cracking the ship in half and launching me away from the cockpit. My heart was beating out of my chest. I held my breath, just in case something out there could hear me. This was the feeling of visceral fear.

Getting a hold of my senses, I re-oriented myself using my thrusters and noticed a docking port in the distance. What was this metallic object I had collided with? It was obviously not natural, but far too advanced to be a construction by our species. It felt cold. It felt uncaring. Spikes protruded out from this Stranger in the dark, leaving a lingering impression that I was not welcome.

Entering the docking port, I planted my boots firmly onto the floor. The architecture of the bay flowed into a dark room. The light from my torch felt stifled; afraid to show me what could be inside. Stepping into the darkness, the light from my torch activated a green jewel placed on a wooden pole. The floor under me dropped, yanking me down with it. The wooden platform I was standing on lowered and swept onto a river of fresh, blue water. Looking up, I saw that the river curved upwards further, and further. The river kept curving until it looped back onto itself, forming one continuous stream of water. Looking out of the massive view port, I saw that structure I was standing was an enormous rotating ring. Enamoured by the design of this ring world, I noticed houses in the distance and steered the wooden platform towards them to investigate.

This beginning to the story of Echoes of The Eye blew my mind when I started playing. It was a gripping fear that I hadn’t experienced since I had first encountered the aggressive angler fish hiding in the fog of Dark Bramble. It makes you feel like you’re intruding, more than exploring. This sets the tone for the remainder of the DLC, and establishes the key role that fear plays in both the mechanics and the narrative.

Continuing on with the story, you partially uncover the story of the long dead Inhabitants of the Stranger. In classic Outer Wilds style, all you have in the beginning are thought-provoking questions with answers that require investigation and exploration to uncover. The Inhabitants use slide reels as a way of recording their history, but you find most of the slides have been destroyed or burned. The surviving slides show a very incomplete picture of the journey that the Inhabitants took from their star system to arrive at your star system. They came in search for a mysterious signal emanating from somewhere inside this star system. They came in search of The Eye of the Universe.

In the base game, you only reach a full understanding of what the Eye of the Universe is close to the end of the story. It’s referenced endlessly by the Nomai, a species that once inhabited your star system some 200,000 years ago. The Nomai came for the same reason as the Inhabitants; in search of the Eye of the Universe. They were a curious and kind species. They valued science. They valued mystery. But something about the Nomai that struck me as being much more special than I initially thought was that they valued decency over greed. The Nomai placed a value in the preservation of life wherever they found it, even over their need for resources. It’s this very fact that likely lead to your species, the Hearthians, even evolving in the first place. In the bottom of a water geyser on your planet, you find Nomai writings detailing a creature that is remarkably similar to your species in the game, likely being an early ancestor. Even though their need for resources was great, they opted for a different location which would have a significantly reduced impact on the surrounding life.

The Eye of the Universe is said to be an object older than the lifetime of the universe, though it’s exact age is indiscernible (if it is indeed finite). It is the final destination on the journey that is Outer Wilds. It’s a big reset button; ending this universe, and using your knowledge and experiences as a template to create a new universe with new laws of physics, starting with a new big bang. It’s unclear in Outer Wilds how many times this has already occurred or whether the cycle will repeat in the next universe. By the time you reach this realization, you’ve known long enough that the universe in Outer Wilds is coming to an end. Your sun is going supernova because it’s reached the final stage of its natural life. All the others stars in the universe are blinking out one by one as you play, leaving behind only a dark night sky.

The only way to continue is to let this universe die, and let the next one flourish by going into the Eye of the Universe.

As you progress through the story by uncovering more and more pieces of the slide reels, you begin to grasp the events that took place long before your species existed, and long before the Nomai ever arrived at your system. When the Inhabitants of the Strangers arrived in your star system and located the Eye of the Universe, they finally deduced what its purpose was.

And they hated it.

The Inhabitants burned down their own buildings that once stood for idolizing the Eye. The fabled Eye of the Universe that had brought them their golden era of space travel. They built a device to stop the signal emanating from the Eye so that no one else would ever find it again. They went into a simulation of their own design to hibernate and bide their time until they were the only ones left in the universe, so that their story was the only story that remained after all other life in the universe died out.

The Inhabitants of the Stranger valued glory. They valued resolution. At a stark contrast to what I loved most of the Nomai, the Inhabitants valued themselves over the independence of all other life. It’s easy to see that the Inhabitants are dominated by their unwillingness to confront the inevitable progress of the universe. Inside their simulations, you are greeted by being hunted and forcibly removed (sometimes in a gruesome manner). Even though you are the first alien to step foot on their ship, they never face you with curiosity or intrigue. They’ve so become consumed by their fear of what you represent, a presence that reminds them that their past has not been left behind.

It’s important to note why, along with the how. Why they burned most of their slide reels containing the explanation of their journey. Why they blocked the Eye’s signal so that no one else could find and activate it. Why you find them reminiscing over slides reels showing their home planet, even though the ship’s interior and their simulation were made to resemble it. Those can only be answered by telling you the full story of how the Inhabitants of the Stranger arrived at the Hearthian system.

Long ago, the inhabitants of a planet far away pointed their telescopes at a signal they thought to be older than the universe itself. Hearing this call from a distant corner of the universe, they began constructing a ship of massive proportions to carry them and sustain them on the long journey to this signal. In building this ship, they cut down the trees on their planet. Not some trees. They cut down all of the trees on their planet. They mined every bit of mineral they could. They dried up every river, every lake, every ocean. In this process, they had destroyed everything on their planet in search of a signal that promised them glory.

Here, everything clicks into place. Here, we learn what lies underneath the fear that dominates over the Inhabitants.

They could not stand the image of destroying their dear home just to reach a dead end. So they burned every piece of evidence of what they did. They could not face that if the Eye were activated, their only legacy would be the destruction of their own beautiful home world. So they blocked the Eye’s signal from reaching anyone ever again. Even in their simulated hibernation, the destruction of their planet is ever present in their collective consciousness. They relive the same moment in perpetuity, continuing their downward spiral into fear and cynicism. Their surroundings are just a reminder of what they lost, brought on by their own zealotry and greed. It is an act that is never forgotten. An act that is never forgiven.

When I think about the Inhabitants, I don’t just see a fictional story about aliens with antlers that build fantastical spaceships. To me, the story of the Inhabitants reflects the world in which I find myself in today. Today, I see a society which largely values economic, social, and political domination rather than the protection of life. Where most of our goods come from the harshest exploitation faced by people that we don’t see, and the destruction of land that we we have not touched with our own bare hands. Yet this does not remain as such. As time marches on, it will be our own communities and our surroundings that will suffer the consequences of this wanton destruction. Not as some divine karmic retribution, but as a simple product of removing the important supports that our environment relies on, and suppressing the rights of individuals for profit.

Our economic system as a whole depends on the means for producing endless growth, measured by the productive output of the masses. Often enough, this does not lead to an increase in the value of the lives that we lead. Simply, it is to feed into an economic system predicated on consumption for the sake of consumption, giving the appearance of growth where there is none. All of this, at the cost of our environment, and the lives of other human beings. Here, the concept of “economic growth” becomes our supposed glory, as the Eye of The Universe is to the Inhabitants. The full extent of this comparison stretches even further.

To the Inhabitants, the Eye of The Universe was the subject of their story. An end goal which took priority over any values about preserving their home planet. For the Nomai, the Eye was an object of study. Even in their quest for the Eye, their values of protecting life were not so simply sacrificed as it was by the Inhabitants. Every idea proposed by one of their members faced fair scrutiny before any action was to be taken. When you hear people talking about “the economy” as a type of entity with its own will and agency, this is purposefully done to frame “the economy” as the subject of our story, rather than an object which exists to be manipulated for building a better society. This overarching framework with “economic growth” as a glory to be achieved, and “the economy” being the subject of our story is one which actively exacerbates the problems of ecological collapse and the exploitation of workers.

I often wonder whether the Inhabitants represent our future; humanity’s future. If we would be reduced to a species that endlessly relived our shameful past, with no vision for how to build a better future. Certainly, there is a proportion of people that already live in this mindset, and view the future with cynicism and fear. But to view the world through this lens of cynicism is not simply a non-action. If solving the problems of the world is like going through a door slightly ajar, then the insistence on being fearful or cynical shuts the door and locks it tight. Every possibility for the future then collapses into a singular state; transforming from a probability to a certainty.

In the way that Outer Wilds approaches this topic, I’ve found a commentary that I find expressly important in my life, and to unpacking the world I see around me today. The idea of this supposed glory that connects us and the Inhabitants, how framing it as the subject of our story rather than an object of our story exacerbates the issues created by the pursuit for this glory, and the role of fear and cynicism play into the way decisions are made by the Inhabitants, as well as by us.

As I see it, we have to evaluate what we really consider to be important in this life, not to simply chase glory where we find it. I find that there is a value in holding onto noble principles, as the Nomai held onto their most important virtue; preserving life. Their species carried that legacy with them hundred of thousands of years past their death. It’s in the way that both the fictional main character and you, the player, remembers that species. We have the chance to tell the future a beautiful story with hope, not one which we must purposefully hide or feel ashamed of.

Outer Wilds has taught me one really important lesson. Though fear is a natural response, the immobilizing fear of what the future entails is not to be indulged, but to be conquered. In Outer Wilds, to be overcome by fear is to rob yourself of the experience of a lifetime. In our world, to be overcome by the fear of our future is to rob ourselves of the beauty of tomorrow’s world.

Originally published at https://medium.com on December 31, 2021.

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