For further reading on the topic, I recommend
this and
this article. There are tons of psychological studies out there related to the topic of behaviourism (though unrelated to gaming) that you can read as well. There's a bunch of further reading mentioned in both articles above. It's certainly a fascinating topic.
Thanks for this, I find Klei's article about their findings on the subject especially interesting and useful, mainly because unknowing of this info I made the comparison between No Man's Sky and Don't Starve and that I'm currently analyzing Don't Starve's gameplay to see what makes it tick and how to improve on the formula. Very interesting reads, I especially like the simple example of the study with girls that were rewarded for drawing versus the girls that weren't rewarded and were just drawing for fun. This approach of obvious rewards and goals has become a problem in the last decade and it's probably one of the reasons why Dark Souls is so captivating with its obscurity and apparent difficulty.
By gum, this person gets it.
Your last paragraph in particular is right on the money. It's clear from multiple posts in this thread alone that people who are genuinely excited for this game don't want every planet to be interesting. We don't want super dense, over-populated systems. Some planets and areas will be rich in materials, wildlife and threats alike. Others will be completely barren. Some will fall in-between. That draw of the unknown - that's the appeal. That's life!
Edit:
Yeeees, yeeees, now we're talking. Thank you for bringing this discussion and those articles to our attention.
Yeah, you can't really have the surprising and overly exciting moments without the mundane. And let's not forget, people find even the most mundane tasks interesting enough to repeat over and over. However, some people's doubts about just how boring and repetitive the game will get are valid, but this can be said for any game with similar systems in place. Dark Souls downright forces you to repeat a very small list of actions over and over again, forcing you to walk through the same locations, killing the same enemies just so you could survive a bit longer and manage to overcome these obstacles. You don't really know what the goal is, there are no quests, all you know is that you can't really stand still and that there's a whole interesting world out there to kill. And it does that with the simplest of mechanics, engaging combat, experience, gathering loot and improving your gear. No Man's Sky might hit or miss these core elements, but we can't know that yet, it might go either way.
Just the size of the universe, I suppose.
It's like... even if you can identify via the star map where you are relative to each other and you decide to both start heading into the direction of the other and meet halfway... it could literally take years before you actually meet.
We won't really know this without more info or when the game comes out. The thing is, the size of the galaxy and the distance between planets is partially irrelevant, it all depends on how fast you travel in said space, how much time you need to get from one system to another, buy fuel, jump etc.
Elite: Dangerous has
400 billion systems in the galaxy, but a player has already gotten to the center of the galaxy
in just around 95 hours, while the game hasn't even been released yet. He was focused on getting there as fast as possible, refueled by flying close to stars and even with running into a lot of problems, server and stability issues, he managed to get to the center in
four days, and he mentions that it could most certainly be done in a shorter time.
It all depends on the obstacles they implement in No Man's Sky, how fast you can earn cash for fuel, space travel speed, hyperjump distance etc. It might very well take years in NMS to meet with other players (although I highly doubt it), it all depends on how they handle it. My hunch is that it will most certainly take less time than what they're anticipating because people are extremely capable when motivated. They should (if they haven't already) do optimized speed runs by the most capable players in the team (or playtesters) and get some hard data because depending on how reaching the center affects the game globally, it could potentially ruin or save the game.