Hands up: Who thought it was cool that Captain James T. Kirk (aka Canadian actor William Shatner) got to go into space for real at the age of 90—and, at the same time, thought the flight itself was a ghastly PR exercise for Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space business?

Hands up: Who feels awed watching Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets land on floating drone ships at sea—and simultaneously horrified at the plans of the world’s richest person to use such technology to commercialize space and allegedly to build private colonies on Mars?

I know I’m not alone in struggling with such cognitive dissonance after moments like the Shatner flight. “I hated it on one level and thought it was cool on the other,” says planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Mark McCaughrean, senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency, admits that sometimes he refuses to watch feats of virtuoso spacefaring from the new space barons, lest he get sucked in by their superficial glamour. It is not just sour grapes about the cool things they get to do with their wealth. It’s about the scientific, social, and philosophical implications of what they are doing and how they are doing it.

Many of us grew up on the excitement and allure of space, inspired by Captain Kirk’s mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before” and by NASA’s heroic Apollo moon landings. We were taught to anticipate lunar bases, gigantic rotating space stations, and settlements on Mars. Later, even when we came to recognize that the Apollo program was a product of Cold War belligerence, we didn’t want to lose those childhood dreams of breaking free from Earth’s gravity and voyaging to the stars. Nor should we: The person who is indifferent to the sublime wonders of the cosmos is blind to a crucial part of the mystery of the human condition.

The new space race pursued by the likes of Bezos, Musk, and Virgin’s Richard Branson taps into that same thirst for inspiration and transcendence. Their companies are pushing the limits of technology in remarkable ways. At the same time, there is something deeply unsettling about the space barons’ capitalist swagger. They measure the grandeur of space in terms of dollars and Bitcoin. They look out into the cosmic expanse and see another frontier for business expansion, ripe for profit-making colonies, mining operations, and satellite swarms.

This is where the dissonance kicks in. A deep tension exists between the notions of space as a place of wonder and as a resource. Our yearnings for what space represents are being exploited to justify vanity projects that risk undermining a genuine fascination and respect for the universe beyond our planet.

Perhaps, you might say, we shouldn’t be put off by the braggadocio, mistreatment of staff, tax dodging, and all-around smugness of the space tycoons. We aren’t meant to like them; it’s all part of their performative “hubristic genius” shtick. “You might not like them, but we need them!” the argument goes. Well, let’s consider the reality behind some of the popular ways people defend the space barons.

“These companies are developing useful technology for serious space science.”

A popular idea is that companies like Musk’s SpaceX and Blue Origin will advance space technology by being more ambitious and flexible than purely state-driven efforts. NASA or other public agencies provide funding and set the overall goals; then the private companies can figure out the best way to achieve them. Such public–private collaborations have had some notable successes—most recently in the development of Covid vaccines. The payoff of this approach for space science is by no means obvious, however.

The low-cost, reusable rockets that SpaceX has developed with the support of government contracts make a big difference in your budget if your payload is cheap, McCaughrean notes. Not coincidentally, cheap payloads are the kinds of things Musk is interested in, like the assembly-line internet satellites of his Starlink project. Or like human beings, “so cheap that they’ll pay for themselves to go,” McCaughrean says. But big scientific payloads like the James Webb Space Telescope are not cheap at all. The priority for them is the most reliable rocket, and even a major cut in launch costs won’t have much effect, proportionally speaking, on the bottom line.

Neither is it obvious that the money NASA has given to Musk and company could not have been equally well used by a public agency that was similarly set loose to innovate. “The U.S. is giving massive government grants to Musk and Bezos,” says Mary-Jane Rubenstein of Wesleyan University, author of the forthcoming book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. “Why not not? It’s that Reagan-ish thinking that if you let the wealthiest pursue whatever they want to, eventually it will benefit everyone else.”

“OK, but it doesn’t do any harm to serious space science.”

Anyone who thinks that Musk’s priorities align neatly with the needs of space science should ask astronomers what they think of his 1,500 or so active Starlink satellites that are now obstructing the view of telescopes with bright streaks and raising concerns about radio-signal interference. Starlink has filed plans to launch up to 42,000 satellites in total—about five times the total number currently orbiting Earth—and competing services like Amazon’s Project Kuiper plan to add thousands more. There are already 1,600 close encounters in space (within 1 kilometer) a week from Musk’s satellites, risking collisions that could strew debris in low Earth orbit.

“There was a time when I was enthusiastic about commercial space because I saw it as a possible way we could conduct more science,” Porco says. She now concludes that this is not the way it will work. “When you put science, and the way science needs to be conducted, up against commercial interests, the two make very bad bedfellows.”

The ostentatiousness of private spaceflight could also tar the public perception of space exploration as a whole. It would be foolish of space researchers and advocates to suppose that the rest of humankind—beset with disease, poverty, climate change, and political oppression—shares their positive feelings for the value of the enterprise. “The danger with all of this is that we look so detached, so removed from reality, that people say, ‘You’re all just lunatic fantasists. Why should we give you any money?’ ” says McCaughrean.

“Commercial space ventures provide inspiration.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of the private space race is how readily its capitalistic impulse can exploit the romantic fantasies of voyage and discovery that have always impelled human spaceflight. Even as Bezos has created an earthly empire worth more than the GDP of Spain—an empire that has exempted itself from the normal rules of commerce—he beguiles us with false promises of democratic travel to other worlds.

In reality, the story that the entrepreneurs are selling intensifies a disturbing antidemocratic aspect to spaceflight that has been there all along. From the start, human spaceflight has tapped into old religious and nationalistic narratives of expansion, entitlement, and conquest, as Rubenstein’s forthcoming book explains. For example, a 1986 “vision statement” by the U.S. National Commission on Space, whose members included Neil Armstrong, declared that “the promise of virgin lands and the opportunity to live in freedom brought our ancestors to the shores of North America,” making it very clear which subsection of the U.S. population it was addressing. “The settlement of North America and other continents,” it went on, “was a prelude to humanity’s greater challenge: the space frontier.”

If you buy into the notion that human settlement of space is part of our (a very selective “our”) manifest destiny, then perhaps the commercialization of spaceflight and proposals to mine asteroids for profit create no discomfort. But for many scientists and space enthusiasts, efforts to privatize the solar system hijack our well-founded sense of awe about space. “The commercial space people have hacked for profiteering reasons those feelings of exaltation we all feel at the thought of space travel,” Porco says. “What better hack could there be but to send Captain Kirk into space?”

“We need to get into space to survive, and these guys are taking the first steps.”

Shatner returned shaken from his Blue Origin flight. The voyages of the starship Enterprise were meant to be mythic, not realistic: Its cosmos was full of adventure as well as hazard and positively teeming with life. That’s not what Shatner found in space. Instead, he spoke of how the beautiful blue of Earth’s atmosphere vanished in an instant as he ascended. “You’re looking into blackness . . . there’s the blue down there, and the black up there.” At that moment, he realized a basic truth about space: “This is life, and that’s death.”

“The moment he got out there, he woke up,” Rubenstein says. Shatner’s comments weren’t exactly on message for the planetary-settlement crowd, she notes: “The tension between the optics and the text of the revelation grew so intense that Bezos interrupted Shatner to pop the cork off a bottle of champagne.”

As Shatner recognized, space is not filled with bountiful islands that we can reach if only we have the resolve and the technology to cross the forbidding ocean. It is a place of unrelenting emptiness, terror, and peril. It’s hard to swallow Musk’s pitch of Mars as a safeguard for human survival when we don’t yet know if we can get anyone there at all, much less keep them alive self-sufficiently. The even more extravagant promise that Mars could be made a habitable oasis by terraforming—transforming its atmosphere to warm it and to support breathable air and liquid water—is “almost certainly impossible,” says Porco.

“People get so wrapped up in wish-fulfilment fantasies about living on Mars that they lose context completely, as if you can just fly away and leave all our troubles behind. It doesn’t solve any problems by going to Mars,” McCaughrean adds. For the goal of survival, we would be much smarter using our knowledge and resources to keep Earth habitable in the face of the inadvertent geoengineering we are already conducting here.

What is frustrating about the efforts of the space barons is that they contrast clever feats of engineering with impoverished acts of imagination. Hidden behind their lofty language and populist promises, Rubenstein says, lies a banal rationale: “If we want to keep living as we do, the only thing we can do is find some other place to exploit.”

Space agencies in the United States, Europe, China, Canada, Japan, India, and elsewhere are showing different ways to establish an uplifting, shared presence in space—without business, and without people. The James Webb Space Telescope, now orbiting the sun a million miles from Earth, is opening the most powerful artificial eye on the cosmos we’ve ever had. Robotic missions will soon fly over the hydrocarbon dunes of Titan and investigate the ice-covered oceans of Europa.

We might plausibly extend that approach to an international, crewed research base on the moon. But we don’t need space tourism and private industry to get it. This doesn’t mean that big commercial ventures should be banned. But we should be more clear-eyed about their motives and priorities and consider how much we want their already ubiquitous presence in our lives to expand into the heavens too, with barely any regulation to constrain them.

Even if you feel in your marrow that our human destiny lies in the stars, you might want to look closely at what the space billionaires have done down here. Then ask yourself whether they are the best people to take us up there.

In June 2020, Sony Interactive Entertainment released The Last of Us 2. The game, a postapocalyptic adventure created by the California-based video game developer Naughty Dog, swiftly became one of the highest-grossing in Sony PlayStation history, selling four million units in its opening weekend and receiving more than 300 awards. Yet it also sparked a sharp backlash from a significant group of players who felt betrayed by the game’s brutal, manipulative story line. Fans and critics clashed online, some of the game’s producers received death threats, and many players still feel wounded by the experience.

The Last of Us 2 incident highlights a large, understudied issue in the gaming world. For years, social scientists and media critics have warned that violent acts within video games might promote real-world aggression, even though the evidence for such a link is equivocal at best. Yet the same experts and pundits have largely ignored what I consider a far more serious problem: intense emotional experiences within the game that can lead to genuine trauma. Game designers do not pay nearly enough attention to psychological safety, particularly regarding the bonds that develop between players and the characters they identify with. As a gamer, I have both seen and experienced it firsthand.

In social media forums and in real life, players often react intensely to upsetting in-game events, especially when they involve harm to a favorite character. “It’s just a game” is the common response, but in the moments when a player feels vulnerable and hurt, is it really just a game? The anguished responses to The Last of Us 2 show that deep emotional attachments within immersive games, when mishandled, have the power to trigger depression and anger that stick with the players, bleeding into outside social dynamics.

“What you experience in life will influence how you experience the game,” says Julia Ayumi Bopp, a gaming user-experience researcher in Finland. “But also, what you experience in the game may influence what you’re going through in real life.”

Video games wield tremendous emotional influence because of the way players identify with controllable characters within the world of the game, experiencing a loss of self-awareness and, to an extent, melding their identities with those of the characters. Philosophers Jon Robson at the University of Nottingham and Aaron Meskin at the University of Leeds write that games “stand in sharp contrast to most other kinds of fiction (even other kinds of interactive fiction)” because they invite players to “generate fictional truths about themselves.” As players become immersed, they subconsciously adopt the game’s world as an extension of their own. Even non-controllable characters, whose behaviors are set by the game itself, can take on the role of trusted companion or protégé and begin to seem real.

When done right, the attachment between player and character can enrich the player’s experience beyond compare. One of my most memorable gaming experiences happened in The Walking Dead, a franchise game based on the comic book series and TV show of the same name. In it, a protagonist named Lee Everett must defend an orphaned girl, Clementine, in a world overwhelmed by zombies. Over time I developed a deep and genuine concern for the child—a type of bond that Bopp and her colleagues call “concern for one’s protégé.” My protective feelings toward Clementine were so acute that there were moments when I was driven to tears as I guided her through the horrors of a zombie outbreak. Understandably, many players consider Clementine one of their most beloved video game characters.

The psychological impact of the player–character bond becomes more complicated when the game doesn’t follow a clear good-versus-bad morality. I and many others experienced conflicting emotions when the original The Last of Us was released in 2013. Its story setting superficially resembles that of The Walking Dead. Joel Miller, the player character, must protect Ellie, a spunky 14-year-old who is immune to a spreading fungal disease that turns its victims into mindless, lethally aggressive beings. Throughout the game, Joel is a morally complex character who does not fit neatly into the “hero” archetype. Still, many of us were shocked at the end of the game, when he decides to kill a group of hospital workers who want to sacrifice Ellie and develop a vaccine from her brain tissue.

We understood and even empathized with Joel’s multifaceted motivations, however. He was traumatized from witnessing his daughter’s murder earlier in the game. He was fiercely devoted to Ellie, even if it meant valuing her life above many others. We shared in his pain and determination. This amalgamation of emotions solidified our relationship with Joel and Ellie through The Last of Us. As long as the designers respected that relationship, our emotions seemed validated and comprehensible.

Bopp and her collaborators surveyed hundreds of gamers and analyzed their accounts to understand the emotional qualities of their attachments. Players reported developing a broad range of emotional connections to game characters, from a sense of companionship to romantic feelings, and reacted strongly if any of those characters suffered or died. “Character loss was one of the most frequently mentioned causes of the emotional experience,” Bopp says. “These people often wrote that it had a lasting impression on them. They felt sad for several hours, several days, sometimes several weeks after experiencing it. At least one person wrote that they were actually mourning.”

As in many passionate relationships, with intense attachment comes the potential for psychological harm. Developers strive for an immersive experience through believable characters and strong player–character relationships; many of us gamers value and seek out such intensity without considering that it could leave us vulnerable to emotional manipulation and trauma. In The Last of Us, we grew to love Joel and Ellie, becoming emotionally invested in their relationship and their survival. Hence our shock when the rich moral pluralism defining these connections was abruptly rejected in its sequel, The Last of Us 2, in ways that felt manipulative and cruel.

Overturning the emotional landscape of The Last of Us, the developers at Naughty Dog retroactively framed Joel as a selfish, morally bankrupt person. In The Last of Us 2, he is brutally murdered at the hands of a new character, Abby, who is taking vengeance on Joel for killing her father, the doctor who would have operated on Ellie. Joel, who previously was depicted as a hardened survivor, now behaves in seemingly naive ways that make him easy prey. The murder is depicted in gruesome detail, as Abby beats Joel to death with a golf club; Ellie, feeling alone and friendless, develops PTSD.

From there, The Last of Us 2 offers players no opportunity for emotional recovery. Quite the contrary: The game then forces us to play as Abby’s character for several hours without any resolution to the murder, and without any emotional history for Abby that might explain the motivations and justifications behind her brutal act. The experience left many of us shattered.

Neil Druckmann, the creative director of The Last of Us 2, admitted that he had deliberately set out to provoke extreme emotional responses. He told the prominent gaming site Eurogamer, “The whole thing was constructed in such a way as to say . . . we’re going to make you feel such intense hate that you can’t wait to find these people and make them pay.” Some early testers were upset by the game’s harsh new direction, reacting to many of the same things that later triggered controversy among fans, but Naughty Dog moved forward anyway. Druckmann explained, “I’d rather have people passionately hate it than just be like, ‘Yeah, it was OK.’ ”

My own review of online comments suggests that many of the players’ responses to The Last of Us 2 were motivated by pain, not by hate. But some fans took out their frustrations by harassing and threatening Laura Bailey, the motion-capture actress who played Abby. Trauma begat trauma, as players who felt hurt by the game developers lashed out at a visible embodiment of their hurt.

In response, Naughty Dog issued a statement saying, “We condemn any form of harassment or threats directed toward our team and cast.” Yet the company did nothing to address its role in cultivating intense relationships between The Last of Us 2 players and characters and then providing players no outlet for release when those relationships were brutally torn away.

That casual attitude is common in the gaming world, despite developers’ unique power to curate traumatic psychological experiences for millions of people. In a 2016 paper, Alistair Raymond Bryce Soutter and Michael Hitchens at Macquarie University in Australia note that video games differ from traditional media in that “individuals are not simply a passive audience, instead individuals are active participants.” Game developers are doing more than making entertainment; they are inviting players into potentially life-altering circumstances.

Nevertheless, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) uses letter-based rating categories (T for teen, M for mature, etc.) that treat games as if they were just like movies or TV shows. These categories do not meaningfully address the emotional aspects of gaming. More to the point, ESRB ratings do almost nothing to provide ethical guidance at the development stage of video games, when creators make the key decisions that could affect players’ psychological well-being. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) likewise fails to address adult players’ emotional and psychological safety in the “Principles” section of its Code of Ethics.

Game companies recognize the creative and commercial value of immersion, as Bopp documents in a set of interviews with developers. One, who worked on Gone Home, a first-person exploration game, expressed a typical desire for deep connections: “The intent was to allow the player to get to know these people like someone that they might know in their own life.” Bopp also finds that video games have been cultivating character attachments for much longer than most people realize. “I asked players to recall an emotionally moving game experience,” she says. “A lot of the emotional experiences that players wrote out referred to games that are quite old.” Immersion has existed across games of all generations, from classic 8-bit to photorealistic 4K.

Developers need to take the responsibility that comes with their power and be more careful in how they use it. In my view, the best way to prevent another Last of Us 2 incident (or worse) is to establish ethics committees within development studios to prevent psychological manipulation and abuse of players. A possible starting point would be to task these committees with asking specific ethical questions—perhaps developed in partnership with the IGDA and ESRB—about in-progress and finished games. The committees could then develop a scoring system for each game’s compliance with set guidelines that account for players’ emotional and psychological safety.

Games could be evaluated according to standard ethical questions like: What types of psychological traumas or social controversies could the game agitate? Is the development studio prepared to handle such consequences? Do gamers receive the proper in-game tools and opportunities to address the emotions being triggered? Gaming companies could also employ experts trained to predict player interpretations of a game’s content and to supplement the results of play-testing conducted during the game’s development. Neglecting to take player feedback seriously is where The Last of Us 2 failed most egregiously.

With such oversight, game developers would finally be guided by clear standards for the prevention of emotional harm. The developers would be forced to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with creating immersive experiences that powerfully affect us players. Maybe they would be inspired to create more creative, humane games. Until then, gamers’ best course of action is to engage in respectful, open discourse with development studios. We need to let them know that emotional trauma is a commercial issue as well as a moral one.

___________________________________________

Tips for gamers who experience emotional trauma

• Seek out supportive channels (on YouTube, Discord, or Twitch, for instance) where gamers honestly discuss specific games or create video essays that open up a safe space for others to share their feelings.
• Join the Video Games Awesome community, which encourages group engagement both online and at in-person gaming events. I’ve been a part of this community for years. I also follow individuals like The Completionist, who articulates how many of us feel about certain games and helps us understand why.
• If you belong to an underrepresented group in gaming, look for organizations that support your specific community—for instance, Can I Play That?, Black Girl Gamers, and Gay Gaming Professionals.
• Remember that everyone’s experience is different. If you don’t find the support you need in one channel or group, try another.