Players Perception of the Chemistry in the Video Game No Man’s Sky

Abstract

Background

No Man’s Sky (NMS) is a sci-fi videogame about survival and exploration where players fly spaceships, search for elements, and use them to build, trade, and survive. Despite evolving around scientific concepts, NMS isn’t a serious game, and not all the scientific content in the game is presented with evidence.

Theory and Method

Looking at the interceptions between videogames and science, and moving to how science communication, both in theory and practice, can be explored within the videogame’s paradigm, a survey was developed to better understand how NMS players perceive the scientific content in the game.

Aims

Are players aware of the scientific content and how it is presented in NMS? Can they decipher it, question it and understand it under real-world rules? With the data collected from 124 respondents from 23 countries, we aim to better understand how an entertainment videogame can potentially help scientists, educators, and science communicators reach a growing, evolving, vibrant, diverse, and demanding audience.

Results

Players seem aware of the scientific content in NMS, with a positive attitude through it. But players showed problems identifying what is right and wrong, while also pointing to the idea that every videogame that deals with science should strive to treat it with evidence. 57% of the respondents answered that NMS motivated them to know more about chemistry, with more than 35% revealing that they learned something new and understood the role of some scientific fundaments in certain real-world situations like new energy sources, biomes, or the role of carbon and oxygen.

Discussion and Conclusion

With the growth of the videogames’ audience, educators, science communicators, scientists, and policymakers can find in the medium – in any shape or form – a fun and interactive ally to engage with younger audiences and promote dialogues that can be transformative around scientific topics.

Introduction

Videogames are widely popular, with more than 2500 million active players worldwide (Newzoo, 2020), and they are gaining relevance in everyone's day-to-day life, regardless of age or gender. They exist in plenty of fields, with diverse objectives and goals. And they can offer a rich and interactive way to explore and experiment (Utoyo, 2019). They can be fun and metaphorical, inviting players to embark on an easygoing journey even when dealing with complex topics (Granic et al., 2014). By connecting the dots between videogames and (informal) learning of science, we believe that in this multimedia space, scientists, educators, and science communication practitioners can look at videogames – in every shape or form – as an ally to communicate scientific topics to a wide and varied audience and promote dialogues around science. In this article, we present the results of a survey to look at how chemistry is shown in No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016), how players perceived it, and how an entertainment game could be an ally to communicating scientific topics with the public.

Why No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky, developed by Hello Games, was launched in 2016 and since its debut has received various updates and reached millions of players on various platforms. The community of NMS’ players is very active online (various groups on Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and other platforms), sharing all sorts of content and with some discussions being about the science in the game, the accuracy of the content like the name of elements, colors and how accurate or not is the world created by the developers. This gave us the idea that at least some players pay attention to how science is represented in NMS, and the motivation to know more about NMS and how players perceive the chemistry in it.

Videogames and Science

When we play, we’re usually looking to relax and find refuge from day-to-day life (EVGI, 2020). But videogames, like any other entertainment or art object, can be so much more than a means to find abstraction. Videogames, even the ones that aren’t designed from the beginning as tools for teaching or learning, are seeing new and sometimes unexpected utilization regarding their applicability to science learning, training, and experimentation, in a process that can be described and framed as tangential learning (Portnow, 2008; Floyd, 2008). Ubisoft created a virtual museum in Assassins Creed: Origins (Ubisoft Montreal, 2017) that can be used to know more about Ancient Egypt (Zagalo, 2018). NASA embraced Kerbal Space Program (Squad, 2011) a videogame where the player can build his spacecraft and space center (White, 2014). Squad, the team behind the game, then developed KerbalEdu (Squad, 2014) specifically to teach physics and math, aiming to motivate students to engineer creative solutions through experimentation. Other videogames like Minecraft (Mojang Studios, 2011) or Portal (Valve Corporation, 2007) emerged as objects with learning potential. Being Minecraft (Mojang Studios, 2011), the one with a broader area of implementation, from geometry (Förster, 2012); to literacy (Bebbington, 2014; Garcia Martinez, 2014; Hanghøj et al., 2014); project management (Saito et al., 2014); or chemistry (Hancl, 2013). Civilization III (Firaxis Games, 2001) is another example of a videogame that motivated people to “seek information outside school and the actual gaming” (Squire et al., 2008). And “since videogames present a great opportunity for tangential learning” (Hut, et al., 2019), researchers experimented with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017) in a geoscience study.

Researchers have also examined how commercial videogames portray technoscience and conclude that “technoscience and its practitioners are common fixtures within the story lines of modern videogames, and their presence in these games are often conspicuous and enthusiastic” (Dudo et al., 2014, p. 236). They also pointed out that more research is needed in the field, particularly about the role of informal gaming in inspiring future scientists. This is in line with the belief that the medium can inspire people to engage in scientific activities: girls who play videogames are three times more likely to study for a STEM degree (Hosein, 2019). On the other end, “the combination of accuracies and inaccuracies” in popular videogames can also have an impact on people’s self-learning and contribute to dangerous beliefs regarding for example health risks, as stated in a study on volcanoes and videogames (McGowan & Scarlett, 2021). Another problem identified by Rath (2015) is that gamers are exposed to multiple sources online, and players are poor at source criticism, which can contribute to an unstructured and erroneous learning process. At their core, commercial videogames aim to entertain. And to do so, they tend to manipulate real-world rules and build upon unrealistic concepts, everything in the service of fun. Without a supervisor or “teachers well versed in the scientific perspective of evolution”, the scientific portrait shown, for example, in the videogame Spore (Maxis., 1998) can lead to problematic misconceptions (Bean et al, 2010). Games in general present other serious problems that resulted in the World Health Organization (WHO) labeling “gaming disorder” as addictive behavior (World Health Organization., 2018). Problematic issues regarding women’s representation, gender violence (Beck et al, 2012), and sexual harassment in online games (Fox & Tang, 2017) have also been identified in the gaming community/industry.

Mainly in teaching/learning, studies show that students can learn science concepts through digital games by translating game learning to science learning (Martin et al., 2019). Serious games (Aldrich, 2005) and the promise of game-based learning (Prensky, 2001) have been studied throughout the times, and some gamification approaches suggest that story-based videogames can be, as pointed by Prestopnik and Tang (2015) a powerful tool to attracting participants to citizen science tasks. Outside the classroom, authors have analyzed videogames’ impact and how they can enhance science education by promoting inclusive education, civic scientific literacy, and global citizenship (Munoz & El-Hani, 2012). Hot topics like climate change can also benefit from videogames, mainly communicating with younger audiences (Ouariachi et al., 2019).

Science Communication and Games

Theoretically speaking, we can think of science communication as a discipline described and distinguished in three paradigms. The AEIOU model (Burns et al., 2003) understands science communication in three types of practice: public Understanding of Science (PUS), public Awareness of Science (PAS), and public Engagement of Science (PES). According to Lewenstein (2003), the characterization can also be made in three ways: deficit model, dialog model, and participation model. Around the beginning of the 2000s, public engagement of science and technology (PEST) (Pitrelli, 2003) gained force. This current of thought and practice started to look at the public as a substantial and active player in the communication process. In PEST, science communicators investigate strategies to promote dialogue between scientists and lay people and the public's participation in the knowledge construction. The context, the theme, and the scientific area may imply using different models and strategies to communicate with the public (Entradas et al., 2020). Science communication in this multimedia and interactive space should aim to promote dialogues between all the actors in the public space. These efforts can help individuals (or communities) make socio-scientific decisions that can contribute to their well-being as citizens, in hand with the science education goals outlined by Alberts (2022): to enable people to use logic, experiment, and evidence; to show to the public the scientific process to help them trust the scientific consensus; and to reinforce in people habits of problem-solving. Both in practice and research, connections between videogames and science communication are sparse. But in recent years the utilization and interest in using games as tools to communicate science have been growing, with climate change being a focal point (Foltz et al., 2019; Harker-Schuch & Grant, 2017; Farrell & Homatash, 2018) in citizen science projects. Due to the approximation to the science communication paradigm, citizen science can be seen as a development of it (Lewenstein, 2016), with both sharing goals and practices.

In contexts where science is the focal point, the use of videogames must consider that players can be immersed in the fun elements and ignore the scientific message or task (Prestopnik et al, 2014). To Cooper (2011), a balance between elements of fun and scientific content is needed. Research indicates that story-based games can be powerful in attracting participants to citizen science practices (Prestopnik & Tang 2015). Another study shows that digital games can be key to attracting Millennials to science activities, with increased awareness of community and domain knowledge (Bowser et al., 2013). Online science discovery games like Foldit (University of Washington et al., 2008; Curtis, 2015), GalaxyZoo (Galaxy Zoo Team, 2007), Eyewire (Sebastian Seung of Princeton University, 2012), and Phylo (McGill University, 2010; Curtis, 2014) are examples of valuable connections between games and science. In all these scientific games, the focus is on the construction of new knowledge in a variety of fields (Khatib et al., 2011; Lintott, 2008; Chang et al., 2014; Kawrykow et al., 2012).

In this context, one of the goals can be to join science communication forces of dialogue and participation with the engaging power that videogames seem to possess, to help people make sense of science and, ultimately, to make sense of the world – something that humans have been doing by creating constructs. The “social construction” (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) is born through interaction, dialogue, and shared experiences (Mead, 1934). This type of agreement also occurs when someone plays a game: the player is confronted with a set of rules and conditions that help him/her understand and make sense of the game and all the systems that compose it. For years, videogames were discredited and erroneously associated with negative and dangerous effects on people (De Aguilera & Mendiz, 2003; Ivory, 2013). But researchers have been showing how the medium can be a tool capable of generating positive impacts (Bedwell et al. 2012). Another example of this positivity is how the medium explores social constructs and how humans make sense of the world in projects for disaster risk reduction (Gampell et al., 2019). But game designers and scholars have also found that in the case of social constructs like race (Cheryl-Jean, 2016) or gender, the industry must be and do better, mainly regarding the under-representation and sexualization of female characters (Richards, 2016). On a more positive angle, gamers seem to be more tolerant than people that don’t play videogames at all (Milutina & Bobokha, 2021).

Objective

In this study, the main objective is to look at how the No Man’s Sky players perceive the chemistry elements in this entertainment videogame. Given that NMS isn’t a serious game, many scientific representations in it aren’t true. This aspect was an important one for us to choose NMS for this survey, and further, we’ll give more context about it.

Methods

Aiming to fulfill the objective to know how players perceive the chemistry in NMS, a quantitative research method, through an online questionnaire was implemented. Creswell (2003) states “quantitative research employ strategies of inquiry such as experimental surveys and collect data on predetermined instruments that yield statistical data” (p.18).

Sample

The questionnaire that will be better described below was implemented during the two last weeks of February 2021, when Hello Games launched a new update, which is an occasion when the number of active players increases. The questionnaire was published in three Facebook groups, in the NMS forum on Steam, and in the subreddit dedicated to the videogame. We’ve tried to reach as many players as possible, from different ages, and platforms. We concluded the data collection with 126 answers from 23 different countries.

Questionnaire

The questionnaire, done in Google forms, consists of 18 questions in total (ten of multiple choice, six of dichotomous answers, and two open answers that were prompted after certain choices) divided into four sections. The first one is with three questions to know more about the profile of the player (age, country, and the number of hours played of NMS). Then one section focused on the chemistry in the NMS and how players perceived it, with seven questions. And another five questions about science in videogames, with one open about what they learned – if they’ve learned something - while playing. And the final section with three questions, one open, about the chemistry in their day-to-day life. In questions 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, and 12 a scale of values was presented (Likert, 1932) from 1 to 5.

Procedures of Data Analyses

Recurring to descriptive statistics we can quickly observe tendencies regarding some aspects of the presence of chemistry in NMS, but a discourse analysis looking specifically to the open answers to find content words and recurrent themes can also help to understand better which chemistry topics these NMS’s players learned, understand or if they’ve discovered or became familiar with new scientific themes while playing.

Results

Results will be shown using text description and a set of graphs to help compartmentalize a portion of the data collected. Of the 126 respondents, 66,7% have 27 or more years old, 25,4% are in the group age of 20 to 26, and 7,9% have between 13 and 19 years old. The respondents are from 23 different countries, with United States of America (51) and Brazil (23) being the two most represented countries in this study. From Europe we’ve registered 24 answers. 50% of the players played NMS for 200 hours or more, 21,4% played between 100 and 200 hours, 16,7% (50-100 hours), 8,7% (20-50 hours), and 4% (0-20 hours) (Figure 1). According to the game creator, to finish the main solo campaign in NMS an average player will take between 40 and 100 hours (Game Informer).

Figure 1.

The number of hours playing NMS by the percentage of respondents.

The first section of the questionnaire that we named “The elements in No Man’s Sky” started with the Yes or No question “While playing NMS, did you make sense of the presence of chemistry in it?”, in which 91,3% of the respondents answered “Yes”. To the question “What did you feel about the presence of chemistry in No Man’s Sky?” in which players had 5-levels to choose, from 1- Frustrated to 5-Excited, 46% selected the level 4, 23,8% the maximum-level and the lowest two levels combined for less than 6% of the answers.

The next three questions were related to the representation of chemistry in NMS, more specifically how players perceived it. When asked “How accurate is the chemistry in No Man’s Sky?”, from “1-100% wrong” to “5-100% correct”, 45,2% answered in the middle of the scale at level 3. While 5,6% stated that the chemistry in the game is 100% correct and 3,2% that it is 100% wrong. Using the same scale, we then asked, “How accurate are colors, names and logos of the chemical elements in No Man’s Sky?” and the answers were relatively like the ones in the previous question: 42,9% in the middle of the scale, with 10,3% pointing that these aspects are 100% correct, and 3,2% choosing the level 1 (100% wrong) (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

How players perceived the chemistry in NMS.

Again, with the same scale, we wanted to know more about a specific mechanic in NMS “How accurate is the process in which you can create new elements by refining one or mixing two or more elements?”: 37,3% answers in the middle of the scale, 3,2% believe the process is 100% correct, and 9,5% think its 100% wrong. In these three questions, the mean is situated at the level 3. To the “Yes or No” question “Regardless of the scientific accuracy, was the presence of chemistry important to make sense of the world in No Man’s Sky”, 67,5% answered positively. And before moving to the next sector, we asked another 5-level question (1-strongly disagree to 5-strongly agree) “In videogames where science has a role – story-wise, systems, mechanics, other – should those scientific aspects be accurate and respect real-world rules?”, and we’ve got 23,8% at the maximum level of agreement, 32,5% at level 4, 24,6% at level 3, 11,9% at level 2 and 7,1% of answers in the “strongly disagree” level (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

In videogames where science has a role, should the scientific aspects be accurate and respect real-world rules?

The third section of the questionnaire started with a 5-level (1-strongly disagree to 5-strongly agree) sentence “Science is a theme that I look for in videogames”, in which 33,3% of the respondents choose the middle of the scale, with 31% at the fourth level, 15,1% at the top-level of agreement, and 20,6% (12,7% at level 2 and 7,9% at level 1) in the disagreement side (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Science is a theme that I look for in videogames.

Regarding the potential to promote conversations around science, we asked (1- Never to 5-Often), “Did you talk to friends, parents, or teachers about the science in No Man’s Sky?” and 36,5% of the respondents answered “Never”, followed by 23% at level 2, 19% in the middle of the scale, 13,6% at level 4, and 7,9% answered “Often” (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Did you talk to friends, parents, or teachers about the science in NMS?

To the question “Did No Man’s Sky make you feel motivated to know more about scientific topics?”, 57,9% answered “Yes”. And to the question “Did No Man’s Sky help you understand some concepts about chemistry?”, 35,7% answered positively. An “Yes” answer in this question prompted a short textbox for the respondents to give us at least one example of a concept that No Man’s Sky helped them understand. Most of the answers collected were full sentences, with only five single-word answers: centrifuges, iridium, isotope, gravity, and metallic alloys. The responses show us that players have taken notice of elements, formulas, and symbols (Figure 6): “Helped me in knowing more elements and their molecular formulas; “Discovered new elements”; “The concept of some chemical’s reactions”; “The chemical symbols and understanding isotopic molecules”; “Variation of chemical components”. Players also mentioned radioactivity (“Radioactivity of Tritium (H3) as a means to fuel the fusion”) or the role of oxygen in a variety of aspects (“Oxygen is part of almost everything”, “multiplying certain elements with only oxygen is possible”, and “multiplication of bacteria/mushrooms with oxygen”). Players also mentioned aspects related with distances (“How vast our universe is” or “the most impressive thing to realize was the distances. A simple few second flight from one point to another would take actual months to cover on foot”), stars (“Different star types produce certain elements”), or aircraft construction (“Using carbon nanotubes for aircraft construction because carbon is strongly bonded element and light in weight”).

Figure 6.

Word cloud of the responses collected after a positive answer to the question “Did no Man’s Sky help you understand some concepts about chemistry?”

The last section of the questionnaire started by asking “Did No Man’s Sky help you understand the role of different chemical elements in real world?”, with 36,5% of the players answering “Yes”. Regarding short answers/words, in this question we collected only three: refinement, crystal formations, and rarity of elements. Overall, players pointed to aspects related with fuel sources, energy, or biomes (Figure 7). More specifically regarding the role of carbon and biomes (“Carbon is a base of everything”, “Understanding that life is in fact carbon based. Any planet with any type of flora or fauna has a source of carbon”, and “The abundance of carbon through the universe. Also, how biomes effect on local wildlife”). And they’ve also expanded on ideas regarding fuel/energy sources (“The importance of uranium as an alternate source of energy”, “The effects of tritium’s combustible properties”, and “Using di hydrogen as fuel, it’s really combustible and produces a lot of energy when fissioned”) or about “the difference between salt and sodium”. Players again mentioned ideas related with fuel sources and the importance of certain elements (“The different types of fuels”, “Carbon and ferrite are the most useful resource that you can build anything with, even living things are made out of carbon”).

Figure 7.

Word cloud of the responses collected after a positive answer to the question “Did No Man’s Sky help you understand the role of different chemical elements in real world?”

In the end, we asked “When you think about chemistry or listen to words like ‘chemistry’ or ‘chemicals’, is usually a good or a bad thought?”, and 87,3% of the respondents answered “Good”.

Discussion

In Europe, the average gamer has 31 years old (Europe’s Video Game Industry., 2020), while in the United States of America the 18 to 34 age demographic is the most representative (Entertainment Software Association, 2020) of people that plays videogames. In Brazil, 66% of gamers are between 16 and 34 years old (Pesquisa Game Brasil., 2020). These three big regions were the most represented in our sample and the responses collected are somewhat in line with the demographics that try to characterize gamers in those countries and continents. According to the hours put in NMS, our sample of players knows the game very well and they are comfortable with the presence of chemistry in the world of NMS, with more than 20% of players “excited” with the chemistry and only 6% inclined to the “frustration” side. And, by looking at the last question in the questionnaire, it is safe to say that our sample doesn’t suffer from chemophobia, which can be a decisive factor in how they responded. Considering recent studies revealed that nearly 40% of Europeans have this kind of irrational fear of chemicals (Saleh et al., 2020).

Regarding how players perceived the chemistry in the NMS (how the elements are represented with their names and symbols) our results show us a tendency to answer on the middle of the scale, which is a fair state in this case because the chemistry in No Man’s Sky has some aspects that are true (for example the nomenclature of the majority of the elements) to the in real life rules and others that are wrong (like dioxite being notated as CO2). In NMS players can create new elements by combining different types of elements in a process the game calls “refining”. In a simple scientific definition, refining is the process of purification of a substance or a form. So, the refining mechanic in NMS is scientifically wrong. Our respondents again showed a tendency for answers in the middle of the scale, with 37,3% of answers at level-3 out of 5.

Using the same scale, we then asked, “How accurate are colors, names, and logos of the chemical elements in No Man’s Sky?” and the answers were relatively similar to the ones in the previous question: 42,9% in the middle of the scale, with 10,3% pointing that these aspects are 100% correct, and 3,2% choosing the level 1 (100% wrong). Again, with the same scale, we wanted to know more about a specific mechanic in NMS “How accurate is the process in which you can create new elements by refining one or mixing two or more elements?”: 37,3% answers in the middle of the scale, 3,2% believe the process is 100% correct, and 9,5% think it’s 100% wrong. In these three questions, the mean is situated at level 3. These results alerted us to the findings in McGowan and Scarlett study (2021), where the authors pointed to the potential danger that this mixture of accuracies and inaccuracies can have on the process of self-learning. Also, an aspect that needs to be considered when thinking about entertainment videogames as tools – complementary or not – to communicate science. Being that the main objective of the study is to find how players perceived the chemistry in NMS, results show that despite the motivation factor to know and learn more, players aren’t fully capable of critically analyzing the scientific content - its accuracies, and inaccuracies - which is in line with the findings from Bean et al. (2010) and Rath (2015). Guidance is needed to utilize entertainment videogames in scientific contexts. From their conception, entertainment videogames aim for fun, therefore they do not strive for scientific evidence. As stated by Prestopnik et al. (2014), without the right balance between the elements of fun and the scientific content, players immersed in the entertainment, ignore the scientific messages.

For the 67,5% of the NMS players that participated in this study, the presence of chemistry was important to make sense of the world and systems created in the videogame. Again, and getting back to the McGowan and Scarlett study (2021), our respondents tend to agree with the idea that videogames where science has a role, these scientific aspects need to be accurate and respect real-world rules. More than 50% of the respondents were on levels 4 and 5 of agreement, against less than 20% of answers on the highest levels of disagreement. In scientific games, this shouldn’t be a problem since they are designed with a focus on the construction of new knowledge, but in entertainment games, scientific evidence isn’t one of the main requisites. Despite that, entertainment games are and can be used for scientific purposes and in distinct domains like geosciences (Hut et al., 2019), medicine and health (Fordham & Ball, 2019), or chemistry (Dietrich et al., 2021; Hancl, 2013). The fact that more than 50% of the NMS players in our study showed a positive tendency toward the idea of science in videogames being treated with scientific evidence, is, on the one hand, an interesting call for game designers/developers and, on the other, a sign that the audience is demanding for newer things. For science educators and science communicators, this tendency can also indicate that videogames can indeed be a helpful tool to start conversations around scientific topics. Studies have shown how the medium can be crucial to reach younger audiences’ attention to hot topics like climate change (Ouariachi et al., 2019), or help promote civic scientific literacy (Munoz & El-Hani, 2012).

Even in the same line of thought, science is a theme that 33% of the gamers in our study look for in videogames. While 20,6% are on the opposite side. Being the community so active, we wanted to know if gamers talked about the science in NMS with teachers, parents, or friends: 36,5% answered “never”, while 7,9% stated that they “often” have conversations about the scientific aspects present in NMS. This aspect – the potential to promote conversations around and about science – is one of many that can be tackled in future studies due to the growing audience and the fact that a high percentage of young gamers engage in communities and play with other people either online or in person (Boers et al., 2019). Educators and science communicators can also use digital games to attract younger people to engage in science activities (Bowser et al., 2013).

In our questionnaire, 57,9% of the respondents assumed that playing NMS helped them find the motivation to know more about scientific topics. 35,7% affirmed that the time spent with the game was helpful to understand chemistry concepts. And 36,5% of the players answered that NMS help them understand the role of different chemical elements in the real world. In this discussion we’ll put focus on the aspects that are more related to science communication aims, such as the ones presented by Kappel and Holmen (2019), rather than on learning/teaching outcomes – first because those outcomes aren’t the focus of the study; second, the data collected can give us hints about players feelings, motivations or even perceptions, but we didn’t measure (qualitatively or quantitatively) if they learned something while playing NMS. In their framework proposal, Kappel and Holmen (2019) identified in the literature eight aims of science communication efforts, independently of the model: 1) “Improving the population’s beliefs about science”; 2) “generating social acceptance”; 3) “generating public epistemic and moral trust”; 4) “collect citizen’s input about acceptable/worthwhile research aims and applications of science”; 5) “generating political support for science”; 6) “collect and make use of local knowledge”; 7) “make us of distributed knowledge or cognitive resources to be found in the citizenry”; and 8) “enhance the democratic legitimacy of funding, governance and application of science or specific segments of science”. In this exercise, we are fundamentally looking to find if and how an entertainment videogame (No Man’s Sky) can be a useful tool for science communicators and scientists trying to improve the population’s beliefs about science (chemistry). According to the respondents in our questionnaire, while playing NMS, players discovered:

“New elements” and “the importance” of some of them; that “every element has a symbol”; that life is “carbon-based” and planets “with any type of flora or fauna has a source of carbon”. Players also found “how biomes effect local wildlife”, “how uranium works”, “how vast the universe is”, and about “gravity” and “radioactivity”. They also understanded “the complexity of handling different types of substances”; that cobalt can be “a conductor of electricity”; and “the difference between salt and sodium”. Our respondents pointed that they’ve learned about the existence of “isotopes”, “the versatility of hydrogen”, “the effects of tritium’s combustible properties”, “the importance of uranium as an alternate source of energy”, and about “different types of fuels”. NMS’ players in our questionnaire also answered that “the most impressive thing to realize was the distances. The concept that a simple few second flight from one point to another would take actual months to cover on foot”. Or that “using carbon nanotubes for aircraft construction and repair because carbon is strongly bonded element and light in weight”. Players also found that they can “merge elements to create a new element” and “chemicals being refined to increase purity”. Elements (20 times), carbon (17), oxygen (15), fuel (5), and concept (5) were the words most frequently used by the respondents.

Again, we must highlight how problematic can be the mixture of accuracies and inaccuracies (McGowan & Scarlett, 2021). Our respondents have mentioned aspects – as if they were correct – that are scientifically wrong. Ideas like refining as a process to combine multiple elements to create a new one, or that the molecules in game are well represented. We also need to consider and note that a questionnaire implemented in the realm of internet, social media, and gamers forums, isn’t protected against internet trolls (Buckels et al., 2014; Shin, 2008) and that help us understand some of the answers collected.

Conclusion

This study looked to find how players perceived the chemistry in the entertainment videogame No Man’s Sky. According to the data collected, some players can’t correctly judge the scientific content present in the videogame; even with 36% of the respondents stating that NMS help them learn about chemistry and the role of chemistry in real-world scenarios. A test that measures learning outcomes is needed to fully understand these points. It must be noted that our sample revealed a positive attitude towards chemistry, with 57,9% of the respondents pointing out that NMS motivated them to learn more about chemistry; some players also stated that NMS was a vehicle for conversations around science with friends, parents, or teachers. In the science communication paradigm, a tool that has the potential to motivate people to learn and to ask questions, can enhance science education and promote civic scientific literacy. With the correct frame and guidance, NMS could potentially be a fun and engaging vehicle to promote science.

With an audience that is growing and is diverse in age and gender, videogames, in every shape or form, are a type of media that in the right context, can be useful to expand the conversations about and around scientific topics. Through interactivity, storytelling, and other techniques, video games resonate with people. Their potential to engage with the audience, mainly with younger generations, can be transformative. Scientists, science communicators, and educators can find in entertainment video games a vehicle to disseminate scientific content and motivate people to know more about science.