In the early days of EVE Online, CCP Games CTO Hilmar Veigar Petursson found himself with a dilemma. He had borrowed a higher-end ship from a friend, promising to use it to mine for their mutual benefit. During a bathroom break, though, he came back to find his auto-mining ship had been destroyed, a result of his carelessly forgetting to modify the in-game safety settings correctly.

At first, he was distraught over betraying his friend’s trust. Then he realized that, as CTO of the company making the game, he could give his friend a replacement ship with just a few lines of server code. Still, he hesitated. The idea of simply forming a new ship out of nothing, of creating just one more virtual Cruiser in a virtual universe full of them, seemed wrong somehow.

“Oh, why does that feel so wrong, cheating in my own game?” Petursson asked rhetorically during a presentation at the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas today. The answer, he said, is key to the emotional connection that EVE’s economic systems manage to lend to what are, when it comes down to it, just bits of code on a server somewhere.

In the EVE universe, all of those bits of code represent the time and effort that the game’s players spent organizing into corporations and alliances, mining virtual resources and protecting their investments, Petursson said. These resources are tied to real-world monthly subscriptions to the game through an exchange system, but they are only meaningful because they are limited by the game’s mining system.

To simply spawn a new spaceship into that world would throw off that whole economic system, Petursson said, even if the effect was so small as to be undetectable. That’s why he ended up spending months of his paternity leave saving up in-game currency to pay his friend back rather than simply “cheating.”

“This is a fundamental test from the universe” he recalls telling his wife. “If I make a spaceship out of nothing, then that spaceship isn’t real. If I bring something unreal into the game, the whole thing is gonna crumble. I might not get caught, but… I will always know the game isn’t real.”

That statement is a little ironic, given that every spaceship in EVE isn’t “real” in a tangible sense. But the story reflects CCP’s overarching goal “to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life.” To do that, things in the world of EVE have to be just as real as things in the real world from an economic standpoint. That real value comes from player time and effort, but also from the higher-level emotions and experiences that the players put onto those virtual objects.

In Maslowe’s famous hierarchy of needs, the value of an object in EVE is about as far from the base “survival” level as possible. Yet hundreds of thousands of players devote huge chunks of time to acquiring these objects, crafting memorable stories and a portion of their self-image around those investments. Those stories can be as epic as a galaxy-wide battle that destroys $300,000 in real-world value or as simple as the personal tales that get crowdsourced into a documentary. They’re the kind of stories that inspire players to travel to an annual gathering in Iceland. They have formed the basis of a Dark Horse comics series and a planned TV series based on real EVE narratives.

This layering of higher-level emotions and needs onto base objects isn’t unique to the virtual world, Petursson noted. There’s very little functional reason to buy an older, expensive Porsche over a more reliable, cheaper Toyota. The extra value comes from the emotional response and fulfillment that you derive from the luxury car. An expensive pair of shoes or a trip to a high-end coffee chain provide similar intangible value over a simple pair of boots or basic instant coffee grounds. In other words, the real value of most objects (and of most objects in games, by extension) is all in your head.

Deriving value from emergent gameplay

Economic structure only explains some of the appeal of games like EVE, though. Some of the most interesting and valuable parts of the game have arisen from the emergence of teamwork. Petursson recalls how EVE was originally designed so that the small cargo hold in a starting frigate would require players to make long journeys to and from the mining areas quite frequently in order to limit their rate of progress. Instead, players exploited the vestigial ability to eject a large cargo container into space, loading it up locally, then towing it to its destination. The net effect was a 100-fold increase in the overall mining rate attainable by players.

Petursson first thought he should plug this exploit for fear that it would destroy the game’s economy. But, he said, he quickly realized that this cargo container mining was much more interesting than the system he had helped design. It required players to work together and put their trust in each other to make use of it. “What if we embrace the chaos and hope for the best?” was the thinking.

EVE Online is full of these kinds of stories of players using the game in ways that were never intended. Petursson recalled how the game initially shipped without unicode chat support, meaning the game’s significant Russian population couldn’t communicate with each other in cyrillic. These players eventually hacked the client to support their alphabet, with the unintended consequence of them no longer being able to communicate with players that just had the base client. Even if the Russians were able to speak the same language, their text would be seen as unicode gibberish.

The result was, in effect, a secret code language for the Russian corporations and alliances in the game, one that further isolated them from players elsewhere in the world. “Their one way to communicate was violence” Petursson said. This helped lead to one of the game’s first major battles, where the Russians finally managed to infiltrate an area of the universe controlled by mainly Scandinavian players (with the help of some French factions attacking American supply lines, of course).

The $50,000 or so lost in that early battle pales in comparison to the $300,000 lost in last week's major confrontation. Still, it shows how even early in EVE’s existence, CCP found great success by simply treating its in-game economy as sacrosanct and letting players tinker with it in unexpected ways.