EVE Online is a deceptive game. It claims to be about ships and explosions in space. In reality, though, EVE Online is a game about people. It’s a game about relationships. It’s a game about how we learn to deal with one another, and how we choose to deal with one another, when there are no rules to threaten consequences. But what do those choices say about us? Are we really able to compartmentalize ourselves so well? Or do the lessons we learn in the harsh glare of the New Eden cluster follow us beyond EVE, and shape who we are more than we might realize?
Consider this story, submitted to us by Sarinblackfist, of Karmafleet:
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In early 2003, a friend of mine in High School asked me a question that would radically alter my life. He had a beta invite code for World Of Warcraft, and he was not going to use it, so, he innocently asked me if I wanted to try it out. I gratefully accepted, and ever since, I’ve been an avid MMO game player, single player games have not been able to hold my interest, unless they are truly top shelf titles. Unfortunately for me, I have only relatively recently in my gaming career, found EVE, a little under a year ago in fact. However, EVE has changed me irrevocably as a player, and as a person in an MMO community.
Live and Let Live
During the majority of my tenure of World of Warcraft, I played on a PvP enabled server, so at any time, nonconsensual combat could, and often did happen. Unlike in EVE, this was a conscious choice I made, when first creating my character. There are servers where PvP is disabled by default, but I enjoyed the feeling of danger and the thrill of the fight more often than not. I hardly ever initiated a fight with another player though. I prefered to do my own thing, and let others do theirs, and only defend myself. Eventually, I found myself in control of a relatively successful guild, and for the most part, everyone followed the same philosophy. This, plus some interesting forum personalities, led to us being massively popular with the opposing faction, and led to some unique gameplay experiences.
I always viewed ganking as a valueless effort, something with no reward, so why bother with it. I never once re-thought this position, because it led me to genuinely useful interactions with the opposing faction, I could share monster spawns with them, they would drive off other members of my own faction, making for less crowded spawns, while leaving me be. This attitude saw me through over ten years of gameplay, with very little problem. I engaged in PvP in authorized battlegrounds when I wanted, and for the most part, didn’t engage in it when I did not want it. Sure, sometimes justice-murders needed handing out, but those were exceptions, not the rule.
PVP for the sake of PVP always felt like it just interfered with the rest of my gaming time. It caused people to retaliate, sometimes there would be escalations where more and more people would get involved. All I wanted to do, was whatever task I had set for myself, and not be bothered with other players. This is the attitude that I assumed, I had carried with me into New Eden, and into all other multiplayer spaces that weren’t solely about fighting other players.
Rocket Racoon
“What if I see something that I wanna take and it belongs to someone else?”
Over the past weekend, I downloaded a new Massively Multiplayer game still in beta. This game, Tom Clancy’s The Division, is a third person shooter, based in a post-apocalyptic New York City. You play as a member of an elite task-force branch of the department of Homeland Security. The game follows a lot of basic MMO and Survival game tropes, finding your own food and supplies, leveling up your avatar with experience granted by NPC kills and mission rewards, and a complex gear system that combines item drops and NPC vendors. Overall, it seems like a solid entry into the market and a fun multiplayer experience.
What makes the game more interesting than it being a more realistic take on Borderlands, or a multiplayer version of the Fallout series, is “The Dark Zones.” The Dark Zones are lawless areas in the games, where no NPC enforcement entities exist to police player action. More difficult PvE missions and targets spawn inside these zones, and they drop more powerful items and upgrades for players to gather. Until I entered one of these zones, I was playing a relatively peaceful and friendly, if a bit lonely game. Once I entered the Dark Zone, and realized that I had basically made the transition into this game’s equivalent to Lowsec, the gloves came off.
The first time I saw another player, I immediately dropped behind cover, and pointed the business end of my assault rifle at them. The game’s HUD flashed “Non-Hostile Agent” over his avatar, and I lowered my weapon. As he walked by, I found myself wondering just how Non-Hostile he was. “What if he wanted me to let my guard down, so he could shoot me in the back?” A chance meeting outside of a station in Hisec had taught me not to let my guard down around anyone, anywhere. “What if he was the scout for a larger group around the corner.” A single frigate jumping through a gate hoping to trigger an aggression timer. “What if the rest of his group was cloaked up and holding position nearby. “ A brick tanked Procurer, waiting in a calm, “empty” asteroid belt.
Almost without conscious thought, I thumbed my mouse wheel down, changing from my assault rifle to my double-barreled, break-open shotgun. The unsuspecting agent walked right past my cover, no doubt seeing “Non-Hostile Agent” flash on his HUD when he glanced at me. The game lied to him. I emptied both barrels of my shotgun into his avatar. He went to the ground, looking around for a friendly face to resurrect him, and found nothing but me. As I was going through his things, with The Division’s version of a suspect timer flaring above my avatar’s head, I started wondering why I had just done that. This isn’t how I play games, I’m friendly, I’m helpful, at least, I was before I started playing EVE.
EVE Online, has taught me, if you have someone in your crosshairs, you better pull that trigger before they do. Seemingly, no one that you meet in randomly in New Eden is your friend. It is a harsh place, full of pirates, opportunists, scammers and liars, and because of this, it builds harsh people. This is probably the most vital lesson that I’ve learned in my first year of playing EVE, if you find yourself sharing a grid with a pilot that you don’t know for a fact isn’t trying to kill you, then you need to have either a plan to murder that pilot, or to escape when they inevitably try and murder you. It was not an easy mindset to adopt for me, and for a long time, I thought I was resisting it and not fully adjusting to EVE the way I knew I needed to. As I looked down at the agent’s freshly looted corpse, I knew that EVE had indeed changed me, as a gamer, for better or for worse.
EVE is real.
I always tell my friends, that ask me about EVE, why I play such a strange game, with such an intense learning curve. “Isn’t that just spreadsheets in space?” They joke. No, EVE is much more than that, EVE is a place where you can find new and interesting things out about yourself. You can make new friends, you can make new enemies, and you can really just change your whole perception of yourself as a gamer.
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The players of EVE Online are a remarkable social experiment. We nurse insults and hatreds for years. We hold up singular acts of violence or betrayal as cultural touchstones. But we also come together to care for our own, regardless of in-game conflict or bitter feuds. We devote time, energy, and resources to aiding humanitarian causes through our vicious sandbox. But on some level, do we become truly desensitized to the cutthroat, unforgiving nature of our interactions? Are moments like Sarin describes indicative of a harder edge to the violence we commit on one another? Do we run the risk of those interactions influencing how we deal with people outside of games, as well?
It’s undeniable that EVE Online influences us as much as we influence it. As human beings, we are pattern-matching machines. We fall into consistent habits easily. The more positive reinforcement a particular pattern of behavior gets, the more we engage in it. But does that mean that we’re all training ourselves to be sociopaths?
In some cases, the answer is definitely ‘no’. I find myself thinking of someone I’ve known through EVE. We’ll call them ‘M’. M plays primarily in lowsec, eschewing both the empire-building of null and the safety of highsec in favor of the action to be found in faction warfare. M engages in ruthless violence daily, laying in ambush, and hunting other players. M’s been doing this for the better part of ten years, with an unforgiving view on what faction warfare means. People who fly for other factions are enemies. Those whose past affiliations are unsavory are forever suspect. But M maintains an unshakeable faith in the basic goodness of humanity, and it shows in the way he chooses to live. When his country needed him, M stepped up to serve. When he got out of the military, he became an EMT, driving an ambulance. At the same time, M insists he’s nothing special. M isn’t turning into a vicious monster under the influence of EVE Online.
For years, we’ve heard from alarmists and shysters that violent video games are unhealthy. The research shows a different story; that video games tend to be a healthy outlet for most people. They can help keep our minds flexible and responsive. EVE isn’t much of a video game, though. It’s more of an immersive social environment. That may mean that our experiences in EVE spark different responses in our brains than sitting down for a few matches of Modern Warfare or Planetside 2. Rather than a quick jolt of endorphins, EVE experiences tend to be a long slow simmer.
So what’s the takeaway here? Are some of us doing irreparable harm to ourselves by indulging in a violent and predatory mindset? Are others just driven enough to remain good people in a corrosive, corrupting environment? Maybe it’s all a crap shoot. Maybe it all comes down to keeping our eyes on who it is we want to be. Maybe in the end, there is no simple answer.
In the long run, life is a long process of constantly becoming who we are. Each of us can benefit from stopping every now and then, to re-examine just who that is, today.
(This article owes its existence to a submission from Sarinblackfist, of Goonswarm’s Karmafleet, with additional material from TMC Editor Arrendis.)
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com.
