“Obviously you will get the archetypal geek in the basement, which I suppose is the popular image in America, but really there is a much more diverse collection of people in terms of age and professional background who play this game, and really most games, than the cultural stereotypes would suggest,” Ms. Wheeler said. “And you really see that represented on this council.”

Image MEETING OF ALTER EGOS Some player representatives and their Eve Online characters, from the top: Alex Kravitz, 22, of Minneapolis, and his Bane Glorious; Charlie Eriksen, 17, of Odense, Denmark, and his character, LaVista Vista; Alison Wheeler, 52, of London, and her avatar, Inanna Zuni; and Shayne Smart, 36, of Amsterdam, and his game identity, Serenity Steele. Credit... Photographs by Bara Kristinsdottir for The New York Times; Eve Online images by CCP

As could perhaps be expected, European and American players arrived on the council with different concepts of how a democratically elected group should operate. CCP mostly allowed the players to establish their own methods of procedure and publicity. While the Europeans were largely in favor of allowing the committee to deliberate in private before announcing recommendations, the Americans favored full and total disclosure  a reflection of the different political cultures on either side of the Atlantic.

“I don’t think there is any question that my idea of democracy is very different from a European person’s idea of democracy,” said Sean Conover, a 30-year-old computer forensics analyst from Cranford, N.J., who as the character Darius Johnson is the leader of a powerful military alliance of more than 5,000 players called Goonswarm. “I think Europeans are more used to the idea that their political elites operate by different rules than everyone else, and that government officers need to be able to huddle somewhere in a private room so they can say things to each other that are different from what they say in public. What we’ve had to explain is that Americans have a very strong sense of fair play. We don’t abide things like that, and we want everything to be open. So, yes, there has been some conflict on that level.”

To help bridge the gap, CCP took the council on a field trip to Thingvellir, the birthplace of Icelandic democracy, where ancient tribal leaders convened to settle differences. Making an analogy that amused the players to no end, Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, CCP’s lead economist, declared that the players on the council had become “the chieftains of the Internet.”

Yet the council members came not only from different real-world cultural backgrounds but also from different political factions within the game. Eve is much deeper than some other “massively-multiplayer” online games, in that players compete with one another not only in virtual combat, but also as industrialists, traders, propagandists, mercenaries and political leaders.

Niall Dologhan, for instance, a 34-year-old public relations executive from London, plays a character named Hardin who helps lead an alliance that supports the interests of a theocratic, slave-holding race called the Amarr. In the game world he would usually have little to do with Ankhesentapemkah, the character played by Eva Jobse, a 24-year-old student from Zeist, the Netherlands, or with Serenity Steele, an alter ego of Shayne Smart, a 36-year-old Internet strategy consultant from Amsterdam.