Jump On Contact

This post is a little different from normal. It’s part of this EVE blog community thing called “Blog Banter,” and the topic this month is “Why do you love EVE?” This is something I’ve thought a lot about and tried to explain a bunch of times, so I thought I’d do a post as part of that series.

Fleet waiting next to an Erebus to bridge back home.

“Wait, can you go back and explain exactly which part of this is fun?”

Pretty much every conversation about EVE ends up here at some point. Maybe I was talking about how players mine, station trade, or run missions. Is waiting for strip mining lasers to cycle really that much fun? I mean, this is something I pay CCP to let me do, but to anyone watching me “play” it looks about as tedious as mining in the real world.

The problem is, I still don’t have a good answer. A big part of why I write this blog is to try to answer the question for myself. Where, in all this tedium, loss, and betrayal is the element that I love?

There are, I think, easier and harder ways answer the question. The moment when your overview starts flashing red tickles your brain in the same way hundreds of other multiplayer action games do. Outwitting and outplaying an opponent feels good in a way we all understand from sports.

It’s harder to explain why I love sitting at a friendly tower waiting for a Titan to bridge me somewhere. Or why I sat in a Battleship configured for electronic warfare for 3 hours yesterday during a tower bash. It turned out they didn’t even need me; my ship was essentially useless against the tower, and we didn’t run into any serious opposition where I could have done something helpful. Hanging out in Stealth Bomber fleets is often similarly boring – I’ve spent probably 6 hours doing that recently and not run into a single good target. I don’t think it’s enough to say that we do these boring things because they’re prerequisites for doing other, more fun things. I don’t think love is about balancing the good with the bad. Even when I’m camping at a gate, getting seasick from staring at interdictor bubbles, I still love EVE.

For me, the key is that what happens in EVE means something. It means a lot of different things to different people, but in the end, everything I do has some significance in a larger context. Even compared to other multiplayer games, this is a big difference. It doesn’t matter if the blue team wins on a Team Fortress server. If I’m the star player in a Halo game, it doesn’t have much of an impact on anyone once the game ends. Just being in a fleet, even when I don’t do anything particularly helpful, means something. I know I’m part of this larger whole trying to achieve something, and if I do my job right, fewer of my fleet-mates will die. Or maybe we won’t even have to fight, because our fleet looks too strong to an enemy scout. That’s really satisfying for me.

So when I’m nuzzling up to a Titan, waiting for a fleet to form, I’m thinking about what’s going on that I’m not seeing, and what it means. I know there are scouts around the system watching for reds. I know there’s a cyno pilot somewhere getting into position. I know there’s chatter on the command channel negotiating where to drop the fleet. I know there’s a flurry of activity in the station, where people are fitting fresh battleships for combat. I know the ship I’m sitting in was manufactured in a station somewhere, and shipped into Pure Blind in a Jump Freighter. All around me, there are people doing something that makes it possible for me to be where I am, doing what I’m doing.

EVE is a detail-oriented world. Precisely how you do something matters. Align in the wrong direction for a fleet warp and you might get left behind and get caught by an enemy Interceptor. Accidentally shooting a neutral might trigger a diplomatic incident. Approaching a Titan for a bridge from the wrong direction might make you miss the bridge and be left out of the operation. This gives EVE a texture that I love. Nothing happens the same way twice. This gives EVE a rich and detailed beauty that no other game has. I love watching a fleet de-cloak around a gate. I love seeing the tight bubble of fleet-mates in warp with me. I love seeing a friendly fleet drop out of warp across the grid from me. I know similar things have happened a thousand times before, but they’ve never happened precisely this way before, and there might be something about the way it’s happening this time that changes the future.

Because what I love is about the context and meaning of the world, it’s a really hard thing to explain to people. To explain why I appreciate waiting for an op to start, I have to explain all the other pieces of the world that are moving into place at the same time, and why all that work matters. While it’s a much larger project to explain all the facets of EVE that I love, I put together a small montage of the kinds of in-between moments that I’ve been talking about. Nothing momentous is happening in any of them. They’re just the moments where something might happen soon. Or it might not. But I still love them for what made them possible and what they might become. I hope you like it.

(As always, 720p version available if you click through to YouTube, which I highly recommend.)