Gaming for Love: Finding Love in MMOs

NY Times Covers EVE Online Summit, Runs it in "Television" Section

OK, many video games are indeed played on a TV, but correct me if I'm wrong, EVE is a PC game, so it's most likely played on a monitor, right?

Thus ends my attempts to Bazooka Joe every post I do today.

Ahem, anyway. We told you about the Council of Stellar Management a couple weeks back. They just had their big congressional session up in Iceland, home of CCP, the developer of EVE Online. A New York Times reporter went up to report on the proceedings and, surprise surprise. People are more civil in person than they are online!

Yet in person — around the conference table, in the CCP cafeteria, over cocktails amid the infamous Reykjavik nightlife — the vitriol and bickering that had often characterized their in-game interaction largely fell away, replaced by mostly cordial cooperation. Late at night, in the back room of a bar, you could even witness high-level political negotiations among the players.

Granted, it would take a deep and firsthand knowledge of EVE Online to report on any developments out of the Council of Stellar Management (I can't help but imagine Bill Lumbergh after typing those words). And the NYT reporter admits a general cluelessness — then again, aren't most of us. So, not sure what the confab accomplished other than taking the EVE players to a site where Icelandic tribes once met to resolve differences. And of course, since this was a summer conclave of EVE's student body government, you know that means at least one wholly unexpected hookup in a hot tub somewhere. But that wasn't reported.

A Council of Eve Online Gamers [The New York Times]

Interview: 'This Gaming Life' Travels Online Game Culture, Attitudes

Veteran UK game journalist Jim Rossignol, currently one of the Big Four at the Rock Paper Shotgun blog, has just published a book called 'This Gaming Life,' documenting his experiences in three different cities pursuing and documenting the culture of online games.

He covers the widespread competitive game scene in Korea, looks into Quake's evolving role in the London game scene, and visits Iceland to see the birthplace of EVE Online, to develop what he says is a story of "how games change the lives of gamers."

I thought the idea of a "travelogue" of game culture was interesting, so I asked Jim a few questions about the book, and his experiences.

The latest expansion to CCP Games' deep space MMO EVE Online has just gone live, bringing space-miners, space-moguls, and space-fighters alike into the Empyrean Age. The expansion focuses on two of the most important aspects of any MMO, storyline and PVP, introducing factional warfare, a system of militia ranks, system occupancy, combat zones, and factional warfare bases for players to capture and control. Each of the factions now has a corporation open to all pilots to help coordinate war efforts.

Along with all of the healthy player killing comes an entirely new region called Black Rise, which contains 49 new star systems and 40 new stations, many of which are already sworn to a specific faction.

It sounds to me like folks hungry for some ship-on-ship PVP might want to sign up for their umpteenth free trial of EVE Online.

Empyrean Age Features Page [EVE Online]

Iceland. It's where all the cool kids go to have a summit. Reagan and Gorbachev rapped about nukes there in 1985; 20 years later, the Supreme Metal Council condemned the overuse of the devil horns hand-signal. And now something billing itself as EVE Online's democratically elected government will meet there, probably because it's too far for Something Awful to show up and grief the shit out of it.

CCP's EVE Online fans have a "surprise gift" in store for current subscribers who log in after May 6th, to celebrate the game's five-year anniversary. Ooh, what is it?

The MMO biz is a capricious one, and most online games tend toward a naturally short lifecycle. Five years is a big deal for EVE, which distinguishes itself through both its aim to develop a realistic player "society" and its sophisticated in-game economy - they were the first MMO I'm aware of to hire a real-world professional economist in Dr. Eyjo Guðmundsson to manage it, and since then other virtual worlds and online games, such as Gaia Online, have followed suit. Many critics, like the PC gaming mavens of Rock Paper Shotgun, believe the industry can learn a lot from EVE.

Full release follows the jump, in which CCP has delineated what it considers EVE's "milestones" over its five-year run.

EVE Online Source Code Leaked, No Worries

The source code for CCP's EVE Online has been popping up on torrent trackers all over the place this week, leading to players worrying about the security of their accounts, as well as having the peace, sleep-inducing serenity of their mining efforts disturbed. CCP assures everyone that the leak will have no adverse effects on the EVE community.

"The server-side interface used by the client is carefully protected to ensure that no abusive or unwanted information is transmitted to, or from the internal EVE server systems. Nothing the EVE client can do can affect the game state, no advantage can be gained by manipulating the EVE client, no advantageous or disadvantageous information can be transmitted to other EVE users by altering the EVE client."

EVE Online and World of Darkness: Reynir Harðarson on MMOs

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a great (as always) interview up with Reynir Harðarson, one of the minds behind EVE Online, on EVE, new MMO-in-production World Of Darkness, MMOs in general, and why MMOs should be more like ... Facebook?

They are more like Facebook, or should be. They share the same technology, and they have to be considered as a social technology if the genuinely massively multiplayer gameplay is going to emerge. People interacting is all that matters here. We are going to stick to this vision with our games. It was what we believe in some form back in 1997 when we formed the company, and I think we demonstrated it with Eve. It really works. People like Eve and play it. They kept playing it. Twenty five percent of people who bought the game on day one are still playing it now and I think that is because of how the game is structured.

Great interview touching on a number of interesting points.

Eve Online Creator Reynir Harðarson [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Sorry if this one is a little late to the party. But it's the weekend, time for some longer think pieces. And besides, finding posts for Kotaku on the weekend is a bit like drafting a fantasy team. (Alright, World of Warcraft violence study, I'm going with you if ... DAMMIT. McWhertor took it ...)

Here's an article out of Wired I spotted shortly after coming aboard. It's a great look at Second Life and EVE Online griefers, whose behavior is truly sociopathic — in those communities. In the real world, they're average ordinary /b/tards and SA Goons — OK so they're probably sociopaths in the real world, too.

EVE Online Gets New Faces, Places