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The way that EVE works is it’s sort of a globular cluster of stars, and all of the stars in that cluster are connected by stargates. Meyer: Can you give me a sense of what the world of the game is like? Like, is there finite territory in EVE, as well-when you look at the end of the star maps, are you looking at the end of space? So when one alliance defeats another alliance or takes over their territory, that has consequences for the power balance of the rest of the game.
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And the ability to collect those resources, and to build those resources into fleets, and armadas, and local economies-that ability is finite. If you die during a raid, all of your stuff comes back as soon as you resurrect.īut resources within EVE are finite. The raid boss still re-spawns 24 hours later. If you’re in World of Warcraft, and your guild is the first to kill a raid boss, that doesn’t have consequences on the rest of the world. That’s not true in any other video game ever made. When I started out, I didn’t know for sure that EVE was a game that had things like causation in it, where one event necessarily precipitates the next event. And I set out to see whether anyone had ever written a definitive history of what had gone down in EVE Online, and it turned out no one had ever done it before. So a couple of years ago, I was thinking, what are the areas of video games that aren’t being serviced by journalists? And the number one thing that came out was EVE Online.
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Whispers get around of this battle that had 4,000 players in it, or this incredible Ponzi scheme someone ran that duped 10,000 people throughout the game’s history. I got to know EVE because when you’re just in the games community, when you follow games as a niche medium, you tend to hear these tip-of-the-iceberg tales about what goes on in EVE. Robinson Meyer: Are you an EVE Online player? Is that how you learned of the events in the book, or did you hear about it by other means?Īndrew Groen: No, I’ve never actually been an EVE Online player, even when I was writing the book. Last month, we spoke about what makes EVE so emotionally important to its players and what it can tell us about the world beyond the game.This interview has been edited and condensed for the sake of clarity. “EVE is the most real place that we’ve ever created on the Internet,” Groen told me. It was released this week-just in time for a new major conflict in EVE, possibly the largest to occur since the events Groen documented. Andrew Groen, a journalist who’s written for Wired and Penny Arcade Report, spent the last 18 months piecing together a detailed chronology of the conflict and its three great participants. That war, and the extraordinary video game that contains it, now have their first history, Empires of EVE. “It’s one of the first times we can point to something and see an ideologically fueled conflict taking place on the Internet between tens of thousands of networked individuals.” And in the latter half of the 2000s, those people engaged in an enormous conflict: The Great EVE War. These thousands of players vie to support their organization and the philosophy it promulgates.
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The world of EVE, called New Eden, has devoted salesmen, ruthless technocrats, tactful diplomats, and fanatical propagandists-and, unlike most other games, almost every character, no matter how high or lowly ranked, is a real person. In fact, it is like little else on the Internet in its ability to mirror the functioning complexity of the real world. It contains all the set pieces of space opera-moons, distant outposts, mighty dreadnoughts-but it is no ordinary video game. EVE Online is a massive multiplayer online game-a single environment shared by thousands of players, like World of Warcraft or Second Life -that has been in continual operation since 2003. Sometimes you even pledge allegiance to a warlord.įor the more than 500,000 people who play EVE Online, this isn’t a fantasy. For all that time, you have been scraping by in the final frontier-evading pirates, settling scores, and enduring the Machiavellian rise and fall of space empires. You’re the captain of a nimble fighter, working for money or sheer thrill or you operate a modest mining ship, plying your trade in the nearest asteroid belt. You have lived in it, every day, for the past 13 years. Imagine the Star Wars universe is real, and you live in it.