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loading a pistol and getting back on the rocket-ship
Image credit:ReverendRoo/Bethesda
Image credit:ReverendRoo/Bethesda
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If we were looking for a strictly psychological explanation for creeper spacerocks in Starfield, we might invokefrequency bias, aka the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which describes the tendency to notice something more after seeing it for the first time, leading to the belief that said something is everywhere. Why do we become so fixated? Possibly because we’re afraid of the object or entity in question. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon was named in the mid-1990s for a German terrorist group, which people began to see everywhere after reading about it in newspapers.
There is ample reason for people to be afraid of asteroids, of course: they are rogue hunks of debris with the potential to smash into planets and wipe them clean of life. They’re also a videogame nemesis of some antiquity. In 1979’s Asteroids, you blow up screenfuls of space rocks to the sound of a mercilessly escalating Jaws-style chipset theme. There are older literary precedents - on the one hand,space impact storiessuch as HG Wells’The Star, and on the other, representations of wandering planets inastrology, which were said to have a malign influence on human beings. Who knows, perhaps all these stories and traditions have combined to breed some kind of collective hallucination among Starfield players. Or perhaps it’s just a bug.
Image credit:Niall H/Bethesda
