EVE General Discussion

"EVE is Real." True? Not true? What does it mean to you?
-- question by John Carter (@john_carter)

Plato would have applauded this sort of examination. (Or maybe I'm confusing Plato with Morpheus.) To what extent is EVE Online the Cave. How much red pill, how much blue pill, what ratio of the two does New Eden represent to us?

What makes EVE Online real for its players is that there are consequences to the game play. In other games, loss translates only to time. You lose a boss fight in a game like World of Warcraft, all that you've lost is the time it takes to make your way back to the encounter. You lose to a fellow player in EVE Online, you lose not only time and items, but pride and ego.

What makes EVE Online real for its players is that this game is a shared experience between 50,000 players. That every player shares the same gamespace has an emotional weight. There's the real notion of the butterfly effect. That everybody contributes to the game as a whole. Other games, the shared experience is limited to groups of 5, 10, or 25 people. In other games, everything is rinse and repeat, there's nothing to lose, thus nothing of consequence that can ripple throughout the gamespace. In other games, the gamespace is like a generic sitcom, there's no continuity, the characters, the environment, everything is reset at the start of every episode. EVE Online is Lost, Fringe, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, it's a soap opera, a continuing drama. In other games, the drama is created by a game company and the players react to that drama, they are never the storytellers. In EVE Online, the drama is created by the players and the players react to each other. Shared experience. Players as authors of their gamespace.

What makes EVE Online real for its players is that consequence ripples throughout the gamespace for weeks, months, and years. From the simplest personal loss, to the largest alliance conquests, winning and losing has meaning. Take the recent annihilation of the Northern Coalition. Or even the destruction of Band of Brothers. These events still have impact, even though months and years have since passed. The metrics for success in this game are not transient. You plant your flag for all to see. You dare others to tear it down.

What makes EVE Online real for its players is that the arrow of time is all too evident. There are no do-overs. You cannot go back. There are no repeatsies.

What makes EVE Online real for its players is the meta-game. In other games, the accomplishments of the players are insular; what you accomplish has no bearing or effect on anyone else. In EVE, what you accomplish has effect on the entire game world. In other games, the game itself exists only while the client is running. In EVE, the game exists well outside of the client. Accomplishments in EVE require planning, politics, subterfuge, which, by necessity, are mostly achieved away from the pixels of spaceships. People think EVE well after they've turned their monitors off.

-- from EVE Blog-a-Day #010 - How Real is EVE? (Yes, a link to my blog. Deal with it.)

How real is EVE to Veskin Sentinel?

I could have easily drawn comparisons to LotRO or GW or Conan or SWTOR, but everyone is more familiar with WoW.

And when you log in you cease to exit in real world. Right there.

Depend. Reality as you described is not that real either. Its just bunch of "socially accepted man-made rules"

Reality is what you perceive as such, and is strongly influenced by "society" you grew up.
Yes we know something about external reality, but to describe it we use abbreviations/math/physics etc. so we don't understand it directly we understand those rules which has been created.

true. In essence day to day life is an game too.. For someone its an social game, for others its an wealth-fare game.

Suicide is simple act where you are too bored to play another day.

well if i wont count few dozens people who are important enough, then real life for 99,9 percent of world population is in essence meaningless and pointless with no real consequences.

Life value is over-rated.

If the life in whole universe cease to exist right now, then well nothing really happened, since nobody will be there to create an understanding of its being bad or good.

The rest just going from that point on.

No you don't. Try it for a week, I bet it won't pass a full day until you have to go pee because you still exist here.

As said, just like any other game. Just because it is played on one server does not make it any more real than any other game.

Indeed, MMORPG's are based on social interaction. The argument that one MMORPG is more real than another is nothing more than ignorance. Some prefer roleplaying space pilots, others as orcs and elves. It's all down to personal preference.