I have this idea for a video game called Are You Out There? where two players control two different alien civilizations and the goal of the game is to invent spaceflight and then manage to find one another in a ginormous universe. You can try to leave signs for each other to find, or send out probes and radio waves, or colonize many systems so you're a bigger target, but its hard because the universe is really big.
Idk just a thought.
An MMO where there are maybe half a billion galaxies and a somewhat realistic number of stars per galaxy, each one of them equally likely as a spawning point. Numbers are flexible for game tuning. Relativistic and FTL are achievable in the skill tree, but still, the math says it's extremely unlikely there will be any other players' civilizations in the same galaxy, and probably not even the neighboring galaxies unless the install base is huge.
Your civilization's constructs are also permanently in the game universe, so as time passes and players rotate in and out, if you do come across someone else's civilization, it's possible that it's already long gone, or too new in the game to be worth interacting with.
Isn't No Man's Sky something like this, just without the explicit goal of Making Contact?
