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If We Could Only Just Start Over…
By The Apostle | August 30, 2007
Found this story during my random browsing for something completely different.
For those of you who don’t know about EVE Online (as I did an hour ago) it’s a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game based around exploration, colonization, and conflict in a new galaxy. Kind of like starting over (allusions to Eve and Eden are found in the story background).
So, with real human players having a fresh start in a new galaxy, what happened? According to the Hilmar Petursson, CEO of Crowd Control Productions, the company that developed EVE:
It turned out, in the first few months of EVE that players of different nationalities were banding together in specific areas of space. The Scandinavians in one area, next to the Russians (who had hacked the game so they could chat in Cyrillic script, and no-one else could understand them). The Americans were across the other side of the galaxy and the French were in between The Scandinavians and Americans. All arranged around the pocket of neutral territory known as Empire Space.
Now here’s how it went: The Russians were highly organised and powerful in battle and were attacking the Scandinavians. By rights they should have wiped them out fairly quickly but things descended into a war of attrition lasting for a couple of months. This was because the Americans, whilst protesting their neutrality, were ploughing their considerable production capabilities into supplying the Scandinavians with ships and material. Through some audacious espionage, the Russians figured this out and hired the French to cut off the supply lines from the Americans to the Scandinavians. The Scandinavians quickly folded and the Russians were victorious.
Involved in all this was a combination of political manoeuvring, subterfuge and economics which wasn’t built into the software, having evolved out of the way people played the game. This was even before alot of the mechanics for alliances and other political shenanigans was built into the game.
What a lot we are! I seriously doubt with a fresh start we would b able to avoid the atrocities of our collective past.
Tags: EVE Online, Massively Multiplayer Online, MMO, human, players, political, subterfuge, political shenanigans
Topics: In the News, Uncategorized |
August 31st, 2007 at 11:15 am
Thanks for the trackback, glad you found the article interesting.
You kind of miss the point of the game though, EVE is built around the need to compete for resources such as space and minerals, if there was no competition there would be no game. EVE was not designed as somewhere we could start over and do a better job, it was designed to reflect the world we currently live in. Sociologists and economists are already studying EVE and other virtual societies to gain insights into how people interact and what can be done to change the way we do things in the real world.
Something I didn’t mention in the article was the fact that CCP have actually looked into provideing the organisational governmental tools available within EVE as stand alone products, to improve the efficiency of real world oraganisations. To think that real world societies could benefit from software developed for a game…
I reccomend you watch the trailer for the current version of the game, it may give you a better idea of where it’s headed. Which by the way the players have a large influence on, if we’d played the game differently who knows where we would have ended up? But you could say that for real life couldn’t you.
September 6th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I loved the story and as a Privateer fan, EVE is the first MMO that got me tempted to play it… still tempted, actually.
I was saving this for a future article, but humanity thrives on conflict. In particular, competition. If the game’s focus was to all get along, no one would play… until someone tried to undermine the game, or challenged the majority on an issue, and conflict broke out. I don’t think the creators of EVE were so naive, in fact I think the seized on this idea of reproducing real-world conflict and have done it remarkably well.
Thanks for the update on the sociologists studying the game (I’ve heard of similar projects going on in WoW.) These social games do provide a fishbowl scenario to observe communities lacking in (or with alternate) parameters for a social contract, allowing the community to re-create one as they see fit.
On a side note, perhaps the Church of Man should establish a presence at EVE… now, should we take the form of our namesake from Privateer and wage war on technology with technology? LOL…