> jim rossignol

I wrote this piece two years ago but it was never printed, thanks to lamentable publishing failures that were well out my control. I was reminded of it by this post over on GameSetWatch, which charts ‘Oh my God’ moments in gaming. As I wrote the article there was, ongoing, one of the largest actions I’d seen in Eve at the time. Thousands of players were involved in taking territory from a player alliance called ‘The Five’. It was a surprise attack co-ordinating huge fleets over a 48-hour period, an action which resulted in months of conflict for my home alliance. It was incredibly exciting, and even though I’d seen some huge fleet battles by that time, it was that weekend that cemented my ‘Oh my God’ feeling about events in that game. It was a truly epic experience, and one of the multitude of events that finally brewed the vast “red versus blue” war that Eve now finds itself embroiled in.

Those of you familiar with these kinds of games will have read much of this material before, but I wanted to post it up here as a kind of record of why the game kept me hooked for the following two years. I would probably write quite a different piece today.

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In space, no one can hear you scheme.

Good thing too, because intrigue permeates the space-war obscurity Eve Online to the core. By this I mean genuine gunpowder plots, players versus player, where betrayal and revenge are habitual. Just recently a group of assassins (real players, playing characters in the game) executed a plot some ten months in the making. They ‘killed’ another successful player, claimed a bounty, and looted the equivalent of around US$16,000 of game resources. Equivalent, that is, to what you might get if you auctioned off such virtual resources on Ebay.

Eve is a massively multiplayer game, utilising similar technology to Ultima Online or Everquest to put thousands of people in a game together. It’s a shared experience in which millions of man hours are ploughed into developing the careers of imaginary starship pilots. Compared to the rich worlds of your out-of-the-box fantasy role-play, Eve is sparse, although tactically complex. Instead of handing out quests and stories, it simply gives you a spaceship and kicks you out into the universe. “Get on with it!” says the game. And so we did. We went after the most interesting thing in the game: other people.

Most games want you to get together, with maybe a couple of other people, and kill a goblin, a yeti or a mystic python, but Eve has little use for such distractions. People band together into groups of dozens, perhaps hundreds of players, each providing the others with far more interesting targets than that non-player goblin. Banding together into squads and corporations seems to fulfil some primal urge, as if even in this relatively abstract game world we are compelled to form pacts, to swarm around points of interest, forming tribes that will keep the strangers at bay. These players protect themselves from each other, from the animosities that will necessarily appear; because without conflict, this game is nothing.

Conflicts are unfolding right now. Only a small circle of players knew of the plans for this weekend’s events within Eve’s sprawling online universe, which was a stroke of luck, because if the enemy had known were we coming, they might have been able to do something about it. As it was, our scheming lit up the heavens.

Wave after wave of spacecraft, each one piloted by an internet-ready human being, was to make a surprise attack on the enemy (who are a bunch of other, oddly less likeable human beings). The attack would be a resounding success. Of course a storm of electric death was probably inevitable – our scheming simply lit the fuse. It’s gratifying to see such plans unfold like a slick sci-fi screenplay. Conducting mining operations, running trading routes, training manufacturing skills, well, they’re all options within Eve, but they fade into the background when war is laid on the table.

Even now, as I write these words, hundreds of my allies are invading a region of a galaxy that does not exist. Their goal is financial as well as thrill seeking, economic as well as for entertainment. Eve Online’s online world is one of hyper-capitalism, Machiavellian machinations and juicy, hungry politics. It’s a game about wealth, organisation and /power/. But most of all it’s about star-ship combat, the complexities of which have kept us busy for over three years.

But like all armies, we have to pay for our fun, and we all want a piece of that imaginary oil. We’re the hungriest consumers a gaming world has ever seen. Deploying the roughest of space marines is only a fraction of the fight we’re willing to make to get what we want. That’s what makes it so addictive: in Eve, prolonged warfare within imaginary empires is driven /purely/ by the ambitions and activities of the players. They consumer. That must be fed. There’s nothing fake about these conflicts: it’s a wargame that the participants take very seriously. We /invest/ in this game, with both time and money. Our characters /grow/.

On the night of the attack I sat typing, the back of my mind subconsciously turning over what was happening just a few clicks away… Then the silent scheme arrived by instant message, ominous above my winking cursor: “Come on in. There’s an invasion.”

I desperately wanted to join them, that horde in space (visualising the dart-like interceptors coiling in tight orbits around immense battleships as they prepare for war), but I had words to deliver. Besides, I was acutely aware that, as the battle expanded and intensified, I’d simply have to fall asleep amongst the stars, face down on the keyboard, leaving my friends to thunder forward, tackling our enemies amid the deep nebula. 2:19 AM GMT on a Friday night, and the fight was only just beginning. The Europeans would be getting tired.

The Eve folk are a backwater among gamers, quietly living out their sci-fi archetypes, loving the laser-death and the complex market-driven economics. Their game is one that most people loath, and few people understand. It seems so far from the iconic bustle of Halo and Tekken, or even the populist online games such as Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies. But that’s how we like it: offbeat, unadulterated, intimidating.

Seventy thousand people sounds like a lot – it’s the population a small town – but in reality it’s barely a murmur amongst the great thronging conversation of gaming communities. We’re the space hermits, the nebulous obscurists busy with our grand escapism. There’s no other game like Eve, and it’s hard to say if that’s a good thing.

Anyway, Blue Adept was the fleet commander.

Blue is pretty good. He’s smarter than most commanders. He’ll lead a powerful force; a fleet of perhaps a hundred ships. He’s focused, calm. And that’s what’s needed in these situations. Being on the Euro shift I usually miss the American fleets that Blue commands, but we have a couple of Dutch guys who are similarly gifted. Their skills and apparent lack of social life is genuine a boon to my alliance. When you’re taking thirty, sixty or a hundred ships into battle you’re risking hundreds, perhaps thousands, of man-hours of work. These people slaved to get their ships, and if you’re the commander then they worked for /you/. You had better be good. They spent hours, days, /weeks/, to be your weapon amid the black heavens. Your toy.

It might be a plaything, but Eve doesn’t forgive. A fleet battle between scores of players will leave someone defeated. And it will hurt. Other games coddle with a safety net and an immutable bank balance, where death is merely a brief delay in your pleasure before you’re back in the action, beaming. Eve makes you work off the debt. It makes you /lose/. That’s what keeps the good neuro-chemicals flowing – what delivers another surf of adrenaline. This game is about /risk/.

To actually gamble something in a videogame is a rare feeling. Sure, games can be colourful and playful and fun, but what of when they make you scream and moan? What of when they dozen hours you put into that grim-looking starship are obliterated. Isn’t that real risk? Hours of your life. Days. Vanished into the void. Why even go through that?

The same reason you bet money on a hand of poker.

But there’s more. There’s the thrill of enormity, the novel anonymity amongst the vast murmuring crowd. You don’t have to listen, but there are 70,000 voices in there. Unlike all the other arcade scintillations that make up my gaming life, this is nothing personal. There are thousands of other people in the Eve galaxy, and what takes place is a social story, like the deep history of a town or city. There are thousands of personal vignettes taking place, hundreds every hour: the perfect kill, the minor betrayal. Theft, crusades, trade wars and bounty hunts; even the mining operations, with industrious gamers ploughing the virtual fields of the asteroid belts, all these moments weave into the fabric of what is unfolding for a tribe of people. The pirate fleet that arrived just too late, or the heroic last man out, sat there making cash until the final second… They’re the stories of a war that no one can see, but all the Eve-goers share. Just the same as anywhere else in our world, something always happening, and it’s always happening /to someone/.

To think about a game in this way seems to require wide-screen contemplation. Few people understand what it means on their first encounter. To play a single game, that takes place /without/ a timeframe or visible conclusion, feels odd, perhaps even meaningless. No one wins, and there is no end sequence. But, as in the rest of life, you find meaning – you make it for yourself.

This requires tens of thousands of players work in collaboration or competition in a network of star systems that is rivalled only by the galaxies of the real universe. It’s impressive that they’re there at all, and that they make so much of it is a revelation. Wilder still that people have played steadily, night after night for over thirty six months. They are wracking up years of play without a thought. /Years/.

Because I’m one of those people, sucked into a gravity well I can’t escape, Eve Online has hung around my neck like an invisible albatross. Getting across just what has happened in those lost months is going to take more than a poetic mariner. As well as a seemingly endless stream of discussion in blogs and forums, I’ve been writing digestible chronicles for popular magazines, reams of chatter that attempted to define Eve’s density and diversity. I detailed the story of the great server crash of M-M, and the first time we entrapped an lone pirate, even the interceptor duels and glorious fleet battles. Somewhere along the line I even recalled the time that Rob got really wealthy by trading cows – these events make up a small book, and have bored my non-gaming friends rigid in conversations in bars all over the world.

And I’m still going. It’s been punch in the intellect, a smackdown of the imagination. I’m reeling. I even tried to quit, and failed. Nothing has consumed me quite like this. It’s not love, but it’s some kind of relationship.

The people who dared to go into Eve got bored, or they got /changed/. Most didn’t have a clue. Eve folk occasionally refer to me as a ‘solid diplomat’ or a ‘clumsy combat pilot’, as if I’ve taken on new careers and earned badges of (dis)honour that have almost no currency or relevance to the real me.

But perhaps that’s true of all games. Most veterans of the LucasAst’s space-sim TIE Fighter will recant how they proudly learned just what it was to be an Imperial Combat pilot, so perfect was the incremental curriculum of skills installed by that masterpiece of game design. So it is with Eve: we gather an Encyclopaedic armoury of game knowledge, a fact that cannot help but alter your permanent neural record. Whatever else I might achieve in life, in work, love or war, I will always be a capable citizen of the Eve universe, just like I’m a capable citizen of Tetris…

Of course I’m not really that involved in the diplomacy these days, preferring the immediacy of a quick skirmish or a lightning strike against enemy pilots to the emails and meetings that dominate our politics. Previously I’ve talked myself and half a dozen associates into profitable (an unprofitable) situations. I’ve negotiated a truce when we really needed it and talked us into some large covenants, but I’m really middle management – a petty bureaucrat. I’m not really playing the big game. Nothing vital. Nothing lethal.

That invasion, the one that’s taking place as I type, is one link a chain of infinite manoeuvres that plays the game on its grandest scale. As the capacity to capture and hold the resources of deep space have evolved over the years, so the player-led politics of supply and demand have intensified. The pyramid has gone up. There are hierarchies, commanders, politicians, spokesmen and organisers. The big picture of the game looks something like an endless power-struggle, set in motion by scheming alliance commanders. But there have been some very real victories; alliances have been smashed, individuals broken.

One of these alliances, consisting of around a thousand human players, recently took a step too far. Their aggressive policies made them a few too many enemies. And tonight hundreds of players have formed up to deal a critical blow. The enemy’s ships will be attacked, their fleets smashed, the space stations ransacked.

These attacks will likely be real blows. If the immensity of the dreadnoughts (capitol ships of ludicrous ordnance) can be brought to bare then the expensive player-owned structures can be destroyed and the sovereignty of a region can be contested. Like some giant real-time strategy, we are part of the tank rush, striking into the enemy bases, disrupting their resource management and slaying their heroes.

Of course the flow of destruction might not turn in our favour. The opposing alliance is powerful, resourceful and smart. They will no doubt hit back with brutal vengeance. They’re highly experienced, and regularly field some of the most effective fleet operations in the Eve universe. If they weren’t as good as they are then there would have been no need to move against them.

As the weekend closes, an alliance of peoples, lead (bizarrely) by Eve’s huge Russian-speaking contingent, will write themselves a famous victory. The balance of power will shift, new enemies will be made and new wars will be declared. We look, right now, as if we will plunge into the largest war the galaxy has ever seen. Thousands of participants, North vs South: electric death of blitzkrieg parameters.

And business in the core of Empire goes on as it ever did. People mine, trade, do missions. The battles, however huge, always seem to subside. The economy rolls on. Wars are expensive. Someone will get fat.

Crucially, these struggles might also push the game in directions that it was never meant to go in. As the huge numbers of people push their complex mechanisms of Eve for every inch the will give, so the weak-spots become obvious, and the stress points begin to break, the game theories begins to collapse. What if the declarations of sovereignty over space are genuinely meaningless? What if the developers can’t fix it, or find a method that definitely works for all?

If the current ideals of capturing space through construction are proven unmanageable (as some commentators on the great invasion are already suggesting) then the game might simply become one of roaming tribes, making war in a conceptual desert, waiting for their developer Gods to gift them a new oasis… Like the world we live in, Eve will never be a finished article. It can only ever be a work-in-progress.

What I wanted, as the documents that made this book happen [or not happen, as it turned out] were formulated, typed and printed, was to write something contemporary to what I was actually doing in games. I wanted to extrude the raw process of space war in 2005. But by the time this is in your hands it’ll be long gone. Ancient history. To capture the drama is almost impossible, because it never /my/ drama, and it never stops. Growth is its only goal here. Even when the developers aren’t adding new features or fixing the things we’ve discovered problems with, the players are driving their world onwards, with politics, socialising, war and silliness.

That’s what the people in here pay for: drama and evolution. For the most part that’s what they get, because even when things go wrong, in fact /especially/ when they go wrong, they’re risking something of the thing they’ve invested time in. It’s scary, this symbiotic enterprise. With developers and gamers relying with each other to make something, they sometimes they break it. Sometimes they disagree, squabble and hurt each other too. I love them for that, because it’s so human.

Whatever the ramifications of our scheming, and the resultant conflicts, whether or not the game as it stands will malfunction because of the way that players want to play it, Eve has been a beautiful, engrossing event, unimaginable in any other context, or at any other time. The fact that it was possible at all, that this was what the potential of videogames actually led to, is verging on the miraculous. We are, through simply wanting to play, running out of the toyshop, out of our familiar streets and off into the horizon of a strange and uncharted territory.