That war, and the extraordinary video game that contains it, now have their first history, Empires of EVE. Andrew Groen, a journalist who’s written for Wired and Penny Arcade Report, spent the last 18 months piecing together a detailed chronology of the conflict and its three great participants. It was released this week—just in time for a new major conflict in EVE, possibly the largest to occur since the events Groen documented.

“EVE is the most real place that we’ve ever created on the Internet,” Groen told me. I’m not sure he’s wrong. Last month, we spoke about what makes EVE so emotionally important to its players and what it can tell us about the world beyond the game.This interview has been edited and condensed for the sake of clarity.

Robinson Meyer: Are you an EVE Online player? Is that how you learned of the events in the book, or did you hear about it by other means?

Andrew Groen: No, I’ve never actually been an EVE Online player, even when I was writing the book. I got to know EVE because when you’re just in the games community, when you follow games as a niche medium, you tend to hear these tip-of-the-iceberg tales about what goes on in EVE. Whispers get around of this battle that had 4,000 players in it, or this incredible Ponzi scheme someone ran that duped 10,000 people throughout the game’s history.

So a couple of years ago, I was thinking, what are the areas of video games that aren’t being serviced by journalists? And the number one thing that came out was EVE Online. And I set out to see whether anyone had ever written a definitive history of what had gone down in EVE Online, and it turned out no one had ever done it before.

When I started out, I didn’t know for sure that EVE was a game that had things like causation in it, where one event necessarily precipitates the next event. That’s not true in any other video game ever made. If you’re in World of Warcraft, and your guild is the first to kill a raid boss, that doesn’t have consequences on the rest of the world. It doesn’t change anything. The raid boss still re-spawns 24 hours later. If you die during a raid, all of your stuff comes back as soon as you resurrect.

But resources within EVE are finite. And the ability to collect those resources, and to build those resources into fleets, and armadas, and local economies—that ability is finite. So when one alliance defeats another alliance or takes over their territory, that has consequences for the power balance of the rest of the game.

EVE Online / CCP Games

Meyer: Can you give me a sense of what the world of the game is like? Like, is there finite territory in EVE, as well—when you look at the end of the star maps, are you looking at the end of space?

Groen: Basically, yeah. The way that EVE works is it’s sort of a globular cluster of stars, and all of the stars in that cluster are connected by stargates. You travel between stars only through those stargates. You wouldn’t be able to travel beyond the bounds of this particular star cluster, which is 7,800 stars total. There’s about 3,500 that can be conquered by the players.