Why an Archive: Archaeogaming in No Man's Sky

This page is the reasoning behind a choice made in Privacy: contributions to this site (system surveys, confirmations, geography, public Tessera stories) are kept as a public archive. Keeping things is never neutral, and "legitimate interest" is a claim that has to be argued, not just written down. This is the argument.

It is a working thesis, stated plainly so that it can be criticised.

1. The object: a universe rewritten under its players

No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated galaxy, and it is not stable. It has been rewritten several times while people were living in it.

On 11 August 2017, the Atlas Rises update (version 1.3) changed how planets are generated. Player settlements woke up on worlds that were no longer the ones they had been built on: one base was left hanging in midair, another was buried under a hillside, its temperate climate turned into a frozen wasteland. The NEXT update (2018) reset the universe again (Reinhard 2021).
Its generation was also unified across platforms after launch, so a galactic address that once resolved to one system on one platform can resolve to a different system on PC today.
This site's own data shows the same thing at a smaller scale: records made before later regenerations, Origins (2020) among them, describe places that no longer exist as they were seen.

Where both readings of a place are known, this site does not quietly drop the older one. It keeps the earlier system, marks it as a historical record, and treats it as conserved digital archaeology rather than as an error to correct.

That is the situation archaeology knows best: the thing observed is gone or going, and the only trace is the record someone made of it. A place in a procedural universe survives by being copied out of the generator before the generator changes underneath it, not by being protected from the change. Reinhard calls what happened in 2017 a kind of digital climate change, and the image is exact: the land moved, the people who lived there did not.

2. The field: archaeogaming

Archaeogaming applies the methods and the ethics of archaeology to video games, both as physical artifacts and as places that can be surveyed from inside (Reinhard 2018; Mol et al. 2017). It is no longer a curiosity. It has a literature, field projects and public data archives.

The starting point is usually the 2014 excavation of the Alamogordo landfill in New Mexico, where Atari had buried hundreds of thousands of unsold cartridges in 1983, the "E.T." games among them. An interdisciplinary team, Reinhard included, recovered about 1 300 games: a video game, dug up like any other buried artifact (by most accounts, it was still not a very good game).
No Man's Sky itself has been surveyed. Reinhard's No Man's Sky Archaeological Survey (2018) recorded the abandoned settlements of the Galactic Hub, the game's largest player community, after Atlas Rises: maps, photogrammetry, inscriptions, 3D prints of in-game architecture, and work with the community's own leadership (Reinhard 2021). The records are openly archived at the Archaeology Data Service (Reinhard 2019), exactly as a dig's would be.
The method travels. From a games-research department rather than an archaeology one, Smith Nicholls and Cook surveyed player-made traces in Elden Ring (2022), then built a game around the claim that procedurally generated content already invites archaeological reading (2023).
The scale is the problem. Aycock (2021) warns archaeology of a "coming tsunami" of digital artifacts: far more born-digital material than anyone is equipped to study, most of it disappearing before anyone tries.

Different fields reached the same claim by different roads: a procedurally generated place is worth treating as a site, not merely as content. On that view, a player's survey is a field record and a community catalogue is an excavation archive. Players are the only people who can do this work, because they are the only ones who were there.

3. Why it cannot wait

Games disappear, and not only through neglect.

The game preservation community has been sounding the alarm since at least 2009: media rot, hardware dies, servers close, and nobody is clearly responsible for keeping any of it (Monnens et al. 2009).
Newman (2012) shows that obsolescence is not an accident: the industry actively retires old games to make room for new ones. A live game like No Man's Sky does the same thing to itself, update after update. The version you played is superseded by the one you play now.
Rothenberg (1999) argued that betting on any software surviving is the wrong bet, and that what lasts is a representation simple enough to be read by tools not yet written. That is why this archive stores plain addresses, names and dates rather than anything that needs the game to run.
UNESCO's Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage (2003) recognises born-digital material as heritage in its own right, and warns that it is at risk of being lost.

An observation of a procedural place that was not written down before the next update is lost for good. There is no second chance to make it.

4. Most of this archive is not personal data

The strongest privacy argument is not a legal basis. It is that, for most of what is kept, none is needed.

The GDPR does not apply to anonymous information, "which does not relate to an identified or identifiable natural person" (Recital 26). A galactic address, the name given to a planet, the state of a system: these describe places in a game, not people. A contribution that carries no identity is, as far as the law is concerned, a fact about the game.

So the first rule of this archive is design, not justification: make sure that what is kept is about places, and that who brought it is not kept at all. No accounts, no identities, no profile to build. Tessera goes further and anonymizes in the browser, before anything leaves (see Privacy of Tessera).

What remains personal is small, and named: the first in-game discoverer's pseudonym attached to a system, anything a person typed about themselves in a free text field, and the abuse-triage hashes described in Privacy. The rest of this page is about those.

5. The legitimate interest, in three steps

For the part that is personal data, the basis is legitimate interest (art. 6.1.f GDPR). The European Data Protection Board asks for three things before that basis holds (EDPB 2024). Here they are, answered.

1. Is there a real, lawful, precisely stated interest? Yes: preserving a record of a game world that is being rewritten, for the community and for anyone who later wants to study the game, its history or its universe. It is not commercial. This site earns nothing and sells nothing. Its purpose is the record itself.

2. Is the processing necessary, with no less intrusive way to reach the same goal? For places, nothing personal is needed, so nothing personal is kept (section 4). The one pseudonym kept by design, the first discoverer of a system, is the exception, and it passes the test for a reason specific to this game: the game itself shows that name to every visitor of the system, without asking anyone. Repeating it adds nothing that was not already published, and leaving it out would erase what the community treats as the core of a discovery. It is kept as a fact about the system, not as a fact about a person.

3. Do the interests of the people concerned override it? We think not, because of the safeguards, which are what the balance actually rests on:

no accounts and no identity attached to any contribution;
anonymization before sending wherever the tool allows it;
a request, at every free text field, not to write personal data in it, and human moderation of what could be published;
a way out: a Tessera story can be removed with its destroy key, and anyone can write to us to have personal data removed from a contribution;
and no surprise: this page, and the privacy pages, say all of this before you contribute, not after.

On the archiving articles. The GDPR gives archives and research specific room: article 89 allows processing for historical research purposes with safeguards, minimisation first of all, and article 17.3.d lets such processing refuse an erasure that would seriously impair its purpose. Recital 158 reserves "archiving purposes in the public interest" in the strict sense for bodies that have a legal obligation to keep records, which a fan-made site is not. So we do not claim to be a public archive. We claim historical research, under article 89 safeguards, and we use article 17.3.d sparingly: in practice, a request to remove personal data from a contribution is met by removing the personal data, not by refusing.

6. The ethics of the field, not only the law

Archaeogaming has its own ethics, and it holds us to them. Dennis (2016) asks archaeogamers to treat the communities they study as participants with standards of their own, not as material. Graham (2020) argues that since archaeogaming is defined by archaeologists' identity, its ethics must be the ethics of archaeology: care for the people connected to a site, not only for the site.

Concretely, that means three things here:

players are contributors, not subjects: they decide what they bring, and nothing is collected behind their back;
the record serves the community it came from first, and is open to it;
what we keep is what a careful field archaeologist would keep: the site, the date, the observation, and as little about the observer as the record allows.

7. Limits of the thesis

It covers observations of the game world, not private lives. If a contribution turns out to contain personal data in a free text field, it is the contribution that gets corrected, not the principle.
A hash or a pseudonym is not nothing. That is why we keep as few as possible, and say where they remain (see Privacy).
Forgetting is a value too. Mayer-Schönberger (2009) argues that digital memory made remembering the default and forgetting the exception, and that this shifts power away from individuals. We take that seriously: it is why logs expire, why most of what we see is never stored, and why the destroy key exists at all.
Archive and erasure pull in opposite directions. The Tessera destroy key lets a depositor erase their story permanently, with no review and no appeal, and we do not weaken it: an archive able to override that choice would need a registry of who holds what, which is exactly what this design refuses to keep. The cost to the record is real, and we name it rather than hide it. The archival profession has been having this argument since the right to erasure became enforceable (Székely 2014), and we do not claim to have closed it either.
This page is a position, not a legal opinion. If one is ever needed, it will be asked for and linked here.

8. A last word

The game moves on. A galaxy that is rewritten every few years deserves what any vanishing site deserves: someone who wrote down what was there, carefully, without writing down who was looking.

Yes, it is a strange hobby: doing field archaeology on a universe that rewrites itself, for free, in my spare time, with no shovel. Some people collect stamps.

References

Archaeogaming

Aycock, John. "The Coming Tsunami of Digital Artefacts." Antiquity 95 (2021): 1584-1589.
Dennis, L. Meghan. "Archaeogaming, Ethics, and Participatory Standards." The SAA Archaeological Record 16, no. 5 (2016): 29-34.
Graham, Shawn. "An Approach to the Ethics of Archaeogaming." Internet Archaeology 55 (2020). https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue55/2/
Mol, Angus A. A., Csilla E. Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, Krijn H. J. Boom, and Aris Politopoulos, eds. The Interactive Past: Archaeology, Heritage, and Video Games. Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2017. Open access. https://www.sidestone.com/books/the-interactive-past
Reinhard, Andrew. Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018.
Reinhard, Andrew. No Man's Sky Archaeological Survey (data archive). York: Archaeology Data Service, 2019. https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/blog/no-mans-sky
Reinhard, Andrew. "Archeology of Abandoned Human Settlements in No Man's Sky: A New Approach to Recording and Preserving User-Generated Content in Digital Games." Games and Culture 16, no. 7 (2021): 855-884. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211005236
Smith Nicholls, Florence, and Michael Cook. "The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring." arXiv:2204.10949, 2022. https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10949
Smith Nicholls, Florence, and Michael Cook. "'That Darned Sandstorm': A Study of Procedural Generation through Archaeological Storytelling." Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2023). ACM, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1145/3582437.3587207

Game and digital preservation

Monnens, Devin, Zach Vowell, Judd Ethan Ruggill, Ken S. McAllister, and Andrew Armstrong. "Before It's Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper." Edited by Henry Lowood. American Journal of Play 2, no. 2 (2009): 139-166.
Newman, James. Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence. London: Routledge, 2012.
Rothenberg, Jeff. Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 1999.
UNESCO. Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage. Paris: UNESCO, 2003.

Memory, forgetting and the law

European Data Protection Board. Guidelines 1/2024 on Processing of Personal Data Based on Article 6(1)(f) GDPR. 2024.
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation), articles 6.1.f, 17.3.d and 89, recitals 26 and 158.
Székely, Iván. "The Right to Be Forgotten and the New Archival Paradigm." In The Ethics of Memory in a Digital Age, edited by Alessia Ghezzi, Ângela Guimarães Pereira and Lucia Vesnić-Alujević, 28-49. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Last updated: 9 October 2026