Introduction
EVE Online is what’s known as a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (which I’ll call an MMO) published by CCP Games. Among virtual worlds, EVE stands apart in a number of ways. It’s among the largest unified game worlds. It’s one of relatively few virtual worlds that have survived for more than six years. It has far more player agency than most other online worlds. Most importantly for me, EVE has a radically different design than almost every other massively multiplayer game on the market. I’m confident that someone looking back on the design of massively multiplayer worlds in 20 years will see EVE as a significant milestone that will show us in a very concrete way the true variety of stories and experiences virtual worlds can create.
Unfortunately, EVE is a really hard game to get into. There is a huge variety of different kinds of roles you can play in the world. In particular, the geopolitical world of EVE, with big alliances fighting epic wars to claim, hold, and develop space is quite remote to the starting player. Most major alliances require your character to be more than 6 months old before they’ll accept you. Even outside that so-called “end game” world of big fleets and territory wars, EVE has a ton of variety to offer that takes quite a long time to reveal itself.
This blog is all about unwrapping the mechanics of this world for people that aren’t necessarily in it themselves. I’m not going to write in-character and I’m not going to shoot pretty photos of the world with the UI removed. I’m going to do my best to avoid lingo and explain the taken-for-granted assumptions of life in EVE and explain the details of what makes the game tick, from both a social and game mechanic perspective. As much as possible, I’ll share what I see, hear, and feel. I’m going to take a particularly detailed approach; there’s lots of writing about the epic events and battles of EVE (and I’ll write about that as much as I can), but there’s a lot of other angles to the world of EVE that are almost as interesting and deserve more attention.
As I start out on this project, I’m no expert in any of these facets of EVE. I’ve dabbled in lots of things, but there are still big parts of the world that I don’t have any insight into. This is what keeps me playing, and hopefully it will keep you interested enough to follow along.
Most EVE blogs out there—and there are lots of great ones—are aimed at other EVE players. As a result, they’re pretty jargon heavy. For anyone outside their particular expertise, it can be really tough to understand what’s really happening. Hopefully, following along with my journey into the world of 0.0 alliances will scaffold you up to being able to read other EVE blogs or understand news stories about what’s happening in the EVE universe. This blog will probably make more sense if you know something about MMOs already, but I’ll try not to skip over too many fundamental concepts if you’re new to this kind of thing.
My larger hope is that in following my travels and the lens they offer into the larger world of EVE you can gain an appreciation for what’s so special about EVE, even if it’s a game you never want to play yourself.
