This Game Gave Me an Existential Crisis

The eye is a quantum object but it doesn't move around. If it did then the cords you get would only lead you to one of its locations but when you get there it never moves.

CAN WE APPRECIATE THE FACT THAT THIS VIDEO IS 22 MINITES LONG (almost)

Max, Im a brazillian guy and I love games (principally Outer Wilds). Im thinking to start a channel on Yt to post abt analysis of games and my first video would be of Outer Wilds. I loved your video and was thinking if I could inspire my texts with it

From the first sentence, our solar system is not 4 light years in diameter. Not even close. It's about 4 light years to the nearest star other than the sun, but that is not the radius of our solar system. Our actual solar system diameter is less that 1/1000th of one light year, just under 10 billion km

Outer Wilds did what I expected from No Man's Sky.

Those final words of the video really resonated with me. Going through a existencial crisis myself, i found confort and food for thought in your work. Thank you so much ❤

This game is my absolute favourite, I've never felt so profoundly impacted by any piece of media in my life. It has altered my overall world view; I think about its messages at least weekly and I played it 3 years ago. If I could recommend just 1 game for the rest of my life, I would choose Outer Wilds.

This is the only game I ever played that made me cry, not a single tear but absolute floods. I don’t know why, but as my wife and daughters slept I sat on the sofa balling my eyes out at 1:30am. Something about that moment, creating a new universe. Being so immersed and frankly terrified of what was going to happen at the end. Like a pure joy of sacrifice to create so much. It just completely broke me.

When I started the final loop I had everything thought out. My ship log was full, I understood the story chronologically and knew what I was supposed to do to end the game. But for some reason when I took out the warp core in the Ash Twin Project my brain glitched for a moment and I thought I had stopped the loop (which was correct but...) and that now I had all the time in the world to get to the Vessel. I walked calmly back to my ship and flew to Dark Bramble, flew – or crawled – past the anglerfish thinking I wasn't in a hurry. A Sunday walk. Just when I had put the coordinates in it hit me, that just because I removed the warp core the sun was still going to explode, duh! Without that little brain fart I'm sure I would have failed my first attempt to get to the Eye because my hands would have been sweaty and shaky. Happy brain accident. When I played the DLC ending the game was far more stressful and I probably only had seconds left when I warped out of Dark Bramble. Both times I cried in the end. And still after all this time I search for new videos of people playing it for the first time in the hopes of being able to experience Outer Wilds again through someone else's eyes. This is my favourite game of all time and at the same time it fucked me up real good.

I didn't quite experience the same "existential crisis" feeling upon eventually figuring it all out, but what I did realize is that it's okay to not have all the answers nor understand them completely.

Perhaps it all doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but everything exists anyway, regardless of the reason.

Knowing this, it just comes right back to the original point; live and let live, yet accepting the struggle and inevitability (of death) gives meaning to life.

Whoever created Outer Wilds knew exactly what it meant to also not create the game, and all the motivation needed to justify creation... was an observer; us.

🎆🙇‍♂️

I’m an optimistic nihilist. If you don’t believe in God (which I don’t) it’s pretty much the only answer that will keep you from a) going insane by the banality of life b) just offing yourself c) staying in bed 24 hours a day.

Life, in the big picture, is meaningless. But the flip side of that is we can give life any meaning we want. If you find purpose in trying to bed as many people as possible, good for you. If you want your legacy to leave this planet a little better than you found it, that’s cool too. And if you’re a dick, you can use your life to always feel pleasure, no matter who it impacts.

I remember there was a moment in the game where I had most of the clues, but I hadn't yet connected the coordinates and the ship, basically I had most of the information, but I couldn't figure out what I am supposed to do to save the universe, that's the goal right? So in one of the cycles with nothing to do, I just chilled on one of the planets and looked at the sun for the next 20 minutes just thinking about if maybe what I should do isn't to save the universe, but stop the loop and let everyone die. Luckly before I went through with it, I found that last piece of the puzzle, but I still vividly remember that feeling of just sitting alone, looking at the sun and realizing there's nothing I can do to save this solar system. Truly the greatest game I have ever played.

The first thing out of your mouth is that our solar system is 4 light years in diameter? How on earth can I take anything else you say seriously? This is unwatchable from the start.

uh just realised
the solar system definetely doesn't have 4 ly in diameter, you may have messed this upwith astronomical units, which's the distance from the earth to the sun, which's like, 8 light minutes

Astronaut archaeologist.

As an atheists he developed a mythological meta-narrative through this game to cope with his nihilism. The irony

No game has made my jaw drop while my brain couldn't comprehend to pick it up during specific points or endings. Like, being mind blown is an understatement and I firmly believe it's the unique medium video games give us - Experience. We don't watch it, read it or hear about it. We are "there." We get to experience whatever is happening as close to being there can be. All it takes is immersion.

A 22-minute long outer wilds video? Wasn't even feeling like it, but I feel obliged to click

You should play The Samaritan Paradox and Whispers From The Machine

Our solar system is not 4 lightyears in diameter. The planet farthest away from the sun would be Neptune and it's just 4.5 billion kilometers away from the sun, which is a distance that light needs 4.3 HOURS, not years, to pass. There is a theory about the Oort Cloud, which would be a vast number of objects circling the sun with a distance up to 1.6 lightyears, which would mean that the solar system is 3.2 lighyears in diameter at the most. The Oort Cloud is hypothetical though, and not proven. The next star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 lightyears away from the sun.

Regarding the significance of our life: Significance has nothing to do with physical size, and awareness of how big the universe is does not need to make us feel insignificant. One of the first people aware of the vastness of the universe was Immanuel Kant. He also had no doubt about the absolute significance of humanity in every person - not as mere physical objects (as such, we really are insignificant), but as moral subjects. So as long as you see yourself as more than just a phyical object, there is no need for any existencial crisis.

The passage where Kant expressive this (quite beautifully) is the conclusion of the criqitue of practical reason: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe). The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaching into the infinite."

So, it's not about any consciousness, but specifically reasonable consciousness and therefore: Consciousness with the capacity to morality. (Another way to put it is expressed at the end of "Schindler's List", when Schindler mourns that he could not save more jews, and one of the suriving jews responds in saying: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." A moral act has absolute significance just by virtue of it's morality. The physical consequences (or lack thereof) matter not in the slightest. So a being with capacity to morality has absolute dignity, which can never be reduced or outhweighed by any number or sizes of physical extensions whatsoever.

The video is 22 min long(ish). Well played :)
I have a fear, that i will not have enough time in my life to do things i want. Outer wilds helped a bit with this.
(I'm french sorry for bad english)

Holy shit that was an experience. Thanks

you can imagine sisyphus happy; doesn't mean he is

30 seconds in. the way I think of "perspective" is that your whole world is in your mind. it doesnt matter how small the actual size of a mind is as consciousness is more important than even grand scale things. whats important is what radiates near your conscious mind - as in, dont bother to take on the world, universe etc, till you amend your localized issues - and the further away something is the smaller it looks regardless of actual size. if you perambulate around youll find an infinite amount of things but their size is still relative to your viewing mind's eye

Just so you know, consciousness has quite literally nothing to do with collapsing the wave function. It's never meant that, and no scientists believe that. That's just a myth that non scientists seem to believe for some strange reason. Lay people think "observation" means "a sentient being looking at it", when that's not what it means at all. You can't measure something without interacting with it. The way we measure individual atoms and molecules is to bounce other atoms or molecules or even photons off it. And that inevitably pushes the thing we're trying to measure in a different direction, at a different speed. Even photons can push atoms this way. Technically when we look at something with our eyes, we're simply absorbing the photons that bounced off and object and moved it (imperceptibly small distances, when it comes to macro size objects being pushed by photons, but still moved all the same). But yeah at quantum level, at atomic level, bouncing things off the atom we're trying to measure pushes it a lot.

Imagine it like someone is throwing a baseball and the only way to find out where the baseball is and where it's going and at what speed, is to throw another baseball at it so they collide in mid air. That will inevitably change the direction and speed the first baseball is travelling in. So of COURSE observation changes the behaviour of individual molecules and atoms and photons, because we cannot measure a thing without physically interacting with it.

Observation happened long before the first life in the universe was born. Observation happens regardless of whether it's a human (or other sentient being) or a completely lifeless computer/machine that's not some kind of sentient AI or anything like that. It happened before life ever existed, and it'll continue to happen long after life goes extinct in the universe. It happens everywhere in the universe, not just locally to earth.

It has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. "Observation" is a pretty terrible name for it really because it's led to so much confusion, and so much BS quantum "woo" where people try to use quantum mechanics (when they don't understand it and aren't even physicists) to try and claim it proves that "souls" exist and all sort of similar hippie new age nonsense.

And people misunderstand what the schrodinger's cat thought experiment means. It wouldn't literally happen, for one thing. Schrodinger came up with it to highlight how ridiculous he thought that interpretation of quantum mechanics was. But quantum mechanics doesn't happen on a macro level like that anyway, he just made it like that to make it more relatable and understandable.

I've only watched the first minute of the video, but I have to comment: these numbers sound WAY off. The size of the solar system, the size of the galaxy, the size of the universe; none of them are that large.

Maybe the meaning of life is the friends we made along the way.

All the conclusion Max and other atheists can come upon is essentially Anti-nihilism, Guts's philosophy, which is all well and nice until time for dying comes and you are suddenly left with no excuses.

Just another perk of being atheist, I guess.

By the way Camus was an idiot, he claimed the life is absurd and that is normal thing, while ignoring what Tertulian said many centuries ago, which just undermines every scientific and logical attack on religion.

"Credo Quia Absurdum Est"

(That is shortened version, but it checks out)

The size of the universe seems big to us and therefore we seem like nothing in comparison, yes. But why would we expect God, the creator of the universe, to view His own creation in the same light? Is the universe big for God? If He created it, why would the scope of it matter? And beyond that, why would the scope of the universe matter with regards to how He chooses to relate to us? Asserting that God would not care about us or for us because "the universe is big and we are small" has no logical correlation.

Also .... this game was a masterpiece, indeed.

Its funny, the ending of the outer wilds always gave me an immense sense of dread, a reminder of my irrelevance in this unfathomable expense that is the universe, and for a while I couldnt fully resolve my feelings on the matter, until i came to a similar conclusion to yours, the chance of our existence is so slim already, since we happen to exist, might as well try our best with it, whatever form that takes for us, or as you said : lets find out how grand a life we can live by choosing it!

Thank you. As someone who went through the same thing while playing this game, it feels comforting to see people share this emotional reaction.

Man I thought you know earth is flat and space is fake... Disappointed

A friend of a friend helped build this game. After i finished this game, i told my friend to applaude his homie and his team. Stellar game

Wow. Just... wow.

The DLC is also great.

Love your videos, but as quick note, the presupposition that God cares "exclusively" about this pale blue dot is groundless for both the atheist and the theist. It is a false dilemma to suppose that if God existed then he would care exclusively for this planet. I think the atheist these days carries over the groundless presuppositions of the religious fundemantilist instead of re-evaluating the situation from scratch. The size of the universe can hardly testify that God doesn't exist, on the contrary. Nor does it testify to God either caring or not caring about planet earth, much less whether he does so "exclusively" or not. We need to be more modest in our assertions.

the solar system is not 4 light years in diameter wtf

Shame I cannot play this. Too many phobias triggered by this game. Black holes, big gaseous planets and large, deep, dark places.

"Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was an imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish and their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality."

-- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

BE AWARE spoilers can very much ruin your experience. Knowledge is everthing in this game if you know you lose the experience

i wanna say something, but have you played the DLC Echoes of the Eye yet?

I think you have a slight misunderstanding of why the Nomai were unable to locate the Eye of the Universe.

Spoiler warning for Echoes of the Eye (DLC)

While your interpretation isn't a bad guess, we learn in the DLC, that the Eye of the Universe had it's signal blocked by the Owlks, which explains why the structures the Nomai built to locate the eye were unsuccessful, they were searching for a signal that was no longer being emitted. This is also the reason the probe was able to find it, despite the probe no possessing any conscience.
As for why the Nomai were unable to warp directly to the eye, but instead warping into Dark Bramble, while this hasn't strictly been confirmed, I believe the Nomai, to they dismay, didn't pick up on the eye's signal directly, but rather the signal being projected through Dark Bramble, as we also see happen to our scout if we launch it through a seed.

Stranger

The message I took from Outer Wilds (not "The" Outer Wilds, as the devs are quick to point out) was that all things ultimately end, and our struggles may seem fruitless, but there is lasting value in the pursuit. Outer Wilds echoes this message on a few different levels:
On the personal level, death is inevitable and each of your "lives" accomplishes very little. Many of them produce more questions than answers. However, they build upon each other, each one bringing you just a little bit closer to your goal.
On the societal level, the Nomai died believing their project had failed, their entire society wiped out before accomplishing their goal. Everything they'd been striving toward was for naught. However, their work ultimately made it possible for someone who came later, for you, to complete their search. Without the work they had done, the universe would have simply gone cold.
On the cosmic level, the universe eventually and inevitably goes cold and dies out, but we are able to take a little bit of the previous universe through to influence a new one to follow.
Ultimately, these messages are a comfort in the face of our inevitable fate. We die, but the work we do echoes into eternity. The choices we make, the actions we take, the connections we form, influence everything that comes after us in ways both small and grand.
It it worthwhile to strive, regardless of whether or not we expect to see some ultimate success within our lifetimes.

A couple of notes on the video:
- You ask why "God" would care about our tiny little slice of the immense universe. Questions regarding the existence or non-existence of God notwithstanding, for the Christian interpretation of God, this is part of the wonder: that the same omnipotent God who created everything that exists, who orchestrates the movement of the planets and galaxies as well as every microscopic subatomic particle in all of creation, simultaneously cares deeply about the intimate nature of your life and soul specifically. We often apply human limitations to our interpretation of God, including the idea that our attention must be divided as more things are added to our list of concerns.
- I believe your interpretation of the Nomai's difficulty locating the Eye is somewhat incorrect. The Eye is a source of quantum uncertainty, but itself appears to have a static location in orbit around the Hearthian sun (which is why the Probe was able to determine a specific set of coordinates).

Finished the game last night and I'm stuck in a new loop: binge watching all the videos about it that I had to avoid in order to not spoil the game.
Everything was worth it tho. There is no getting over this game. I'm just amazed a game so special in all the right always even exists.

I’ll never get how looking at ourselves compared to the universe gives people existential crisis’. We are literally able to comprehend everything we have found within the universe, that is beautiful; all the while not being under the control of something else. We just exist and if that isn’t absolutely beautiful I don’t know what is. Death is not scary, dying is.

It's interesting how the game mechanics allow you to explore and uncover the story in a non-linear way. This ends up framing the experience somewhat differently for different players.