The cultural prestige of being first is one of the oldest forces in science, and one of the most corrosive.
The sociologist Robert Merton, in a lecture to the American Sociological Society in 1957 called “Priorities in Scientific Discovery”, observed that the history of science was strewn with bitter disputes about who had found something first — Newton and Leibniz over the calculus, Cavendish, Watt and Lavoisier over the composition of water, and dozens of others — and that these disputes were not, as historians had often treated them, unfortunate lapses of character in otherwise disinterested men. They were structural. Science, Merton argued, rewards originality, and the chief form the reward takes is recognition: having one’s name attached to a discovery, a law, a constant, a disease, a comet. Because the reward is recognition and recognition goes to whoever was first, scientists care intensely about priority, and the intensity produces disputes. Eponymy — the naming of things after their discoverers — is the institution in which the reward is paid.
The naming system of No Man’s Sky is a pure eponymy machine. The first player to scan a creature and upload it gets to name it, and their name is displayed beside the creature’s for every subsequent visitor. There is little other reward: small payments in the game’s currencies, but nothing that confers much advantage. The game pays discoverers as science does, in recognition. And it produces the behaviour Merton described: players racing to be first, prizing the rare planets where nobody has been, competing to have their names on the most remarkable finds.
The system’s prestige is distributed with some irony. In science, priority matters because discoveries are scarce and hard to make: there are only so many fundamental laws, so many elements, so many comets visible from Earth. In No Man’s Sky, discoveries are effectively infinite. There are eighteen quintillion possible planets, and any player can be the first to almost any of them, by travelling to a system nobody has visited. Priority, which in science is a rare and fiercely contested prize, is in the game available to anyone in practically unlimited quantity. And yet it is still prized. The prestige of being first does not seem to depend on scarcity. It depends on the sense that one has done something nobody else did, and that the record will show it.
from Brave New Worlds: A Cultural History of No Man's Sky (2026)
