> jim rossignol

Excuse me while I have a nerd-grumble. Those not interested in the specifics of being hooked on gaming will want to skip this one…

There’s been lots of dissatisfaction among the group of gamers that I play Eve Online with. We keep grumbling, saying we’re tired of the game, or that we need a break. Given that most of us are habitual gamers, what we really need is a /change/. There’s a problem with that, and it’s that we can’t find anything else to move on to. Sure, we read, watch TV, plough time into writing, or reading about UFOs on Wikipedia, but we need games to come back to. Nothing has yet filled them same gap as Eve.

Other games do keep us entertained for the ten, twenty, or hundred hours it takes to beat them, and we loved sharing reports of Stalker, Supreme Commander, or Peggle… but there’s a gap. It’s as if we’re trapped. Nothing else can take the place of the MMO we’ve spent the last three years in. Warcraft, Battlefield, and Counter-Strike players report similar feelings about their own long-term exposure to these popular games, but I think they face a lesser problem. Other MMOs and other shooters are a lot like those three games. It’s easy to have a change of scene and find something similar to fulfil your gaming desires. Warcraft and Battlefield have become the model for future generations of games – and yes, I realise that nothing has done it better, yet - but at least there’s progress and extra material if you want to explore it. If you wanted to play something other than Warcraft you have Vanguard, Guild Wars, City Of Heroes, and so on and on.

Eve has nothing to follow it. No one is mimicking its ideas. There is nothing that has resource-driven conflict, or mass co-operation, or proper risk/reward. Nothing satisfies the cerebral challenge that Eve has set up. It’s as if someone created a flawed, half-finished version of chess, but then there were no other boardgames. Playing the game has created hundreds of frustrated chess players who have glimpsed the possibilities ahead, but are unable to realise them.

It’s easy to see why this has happened: no games developers have played Eve, or none of them have as much confidence in the model as CCP, or they want to be World Of Warcraft big instead of having 200,000 subscribers. All of which leaves me trapped. I want a post-apocalypse MMO where we’re all in gangs, fighting over scrap and fuel. I want a MechWarrior MMO where the worlds are instances and the mechs can be fitted according to the wealth you’ve derived from previous conquests. I want something that has the same fear of loss and potential for imagination and cruelty.

A friend of mine said of a mutual acquaintance: “He gets so angry about games because he loves them, but they’re not what he needs them to be.” I think that’s true of a lot of gamers now. Imaginative people who have glimpsed the possibilities and yet not lived to see them realised.

Ah well. There’s always a nice cup of tea and a sandwich to cheer me up. Time for lunch and sunshine.