EVE General Discussion

This year's fanfest gave me the answer to last year's debacle.

CCP brought in real space guys who are amazed and interested in a community of 500,000 who love space and would love to be there already.

The space elevator guy said it all: "I met the Mittani. He is confident and charming and probably what was said about the first snake in the first Eden." And then he gave his game name to a goon questioner and said, "I don't know if I trust you, but I'll work with you."

CCP gave him 6,000 60-day accounts for real space freaks actually working on getting out there. "500,000 people who want to be in space? Hell yea! I want to talk to CCP."

As I decided some time ago -- and I sent the tag line in --

Eve is our dress rehearsal for the future, should humanity survive.

Fixed. And EVE is a game. Deal with it.

you lack some serious imagination what this is all about, it's like you would say the internet is just wires, funny

EVE is real as long as people believe that EVE is real. Deal with it.

Seriously...string theory? Oh dear how I hate string theory...

Truth.

This is pure nonsense and I don't know why I see it repeated so often. Codes of conduct emerge because people see the need for them to. Do you think a criminal is just sitting around thinking "man, I'd really like to murder that guy, but it's illegal"? Without laws there are still consequences. Kill somebody and his family/friends kill you right back. Eventually that ends up getting codified: kill someone, society puts you on trial to prove that you did it, and does something really nasty to you (up to and including killing you right back). It's exactly the same thing with a lot more bureaucracy thrown in.

In Eve, people kill each other's ships because there aren't any real consequences. At the end of the day, your "dead ship" (now a number changed in a database wherever it is that CCP hosts Eve) is still meaningless to everything going on in the real world. People aren't trained from birth to not game hard and try to win. We're trained from birth not to hurt other people by our parents. We know the difference. I am a villain in Eve and I relish blowing up your crap, but I'm a kind person in life who literally won't kill insects. My most serious crime to society is jaywalking.

I can kill your pixels because they belong in a game designed for both of us to try and kill each other's pixels. Actually killing you involves real violence and real blood. I couldn't do that unless you left me no other option, and you'll find that most people are like that (and a big chunk of them wouldn't be capable of doing violence to someone else even in self defense). Laws aren't needed to keep people from doing those things. Hell, consequences aren't even enough to stop people from murdering one another (they just try harder to keep from being caught).

Eve proves the exact opposite of what you claim. Every one of us knows that we build fake empires of Internet spaceships. Even despite the fact that we're all well aware that this is just a game, we still do what we do in real life. We make friends. Groups of friends make corporations, corporations make alliances, and alliances make coalitions. We establish order without anyone making us do it. We punish villains with violence. If you don't believe that, then attack some of your blues and find out what happens. If there were a game mechanic that enabled people to imprison your character and prevent you from playing, you can bet your ass that people would use it. We build massive networks of trust and, for the most part, those networks actually work. There are scuffles and friendly fire incidents and awoxers, but those events happen far less often in Eve than fleets that form up to cooperate peacefully amongst themselves (but not towards outsiders). That is exactly the kind of emergent order that anarchists claim will occur naturally. We do this to protect our amassed meaningless piles of zeroes and ones in a computer database most of us will never see.

Amusingly, CONCORD and the faction navies are far more effective in high sec punishment than police and military forces are in real life (they show up way more quickly and always know who is in the wrong), and yet they provide exactly the same service: punishment. They do not provide protection from villainy any more than the police can, unless you happen to have the police following you around everywhere to keep you safe (which happens for almost nobody). People skirt that system and routinely commit crimes, just like they do in real life. Other people will shoot those criminals whenever they appear in high sec systems, and they're way more dangerous than CONCORD and the navies are.

Eve mirrors life in a lot of respects, and the fact that so much emergent order has occurred that null sec systems are typically very safe despite the lack of any game police to protect them should lead a reasonable person to conclude that the "anarchy" of Eve Online actually works out pretty damned well for a lot of players.

Even Candyland has a winner and a loser. This idea of "games" where players don't actively compete against one another for victory is the abomination. Eve just does what games have done for tens of thousands of years before anyone ever thought of WoW.

And yet, with its formation of blue blobs, and informal agreements between industrial groups, it largely mirrors the old world....Where we would hop over to france for a bit of a fight, not really achieve anything, then go over for a big party in the off season...

Industrial informal allegiances and deals are made and broken all the time. And, as in real life, those with the biggest megaphones have least to say, and yet appear way more influential than they are *shrugs*

EVE can be a strange place. I've seen hated enemies in-game buy each other PLEX when family emergencies spring up. I've also seen RL fistfights over somthing silly as a T1 frig loss (I've worked with EVE players).

I often mention the EVE/RL divide. For those who have a solid definition between the two, EVE can be a great place to explore your inner psyche, and let the "bad guy" come out (we all have one). People who don't have that divide seem, quite frankly, very unstable to me.