I love reading and I love exploring new areas of thought. My summer reading list is fat and my fall reading list is coming together behind it. Exploration of new ideas and concepts are a very important part of my life aside from fitness and health (which I do a bit of as well). Learning and seeing new things is also a corner stone of my love and interest for space and astronomy. When I was young I loved dinosaurs and stars like any other person going to grade school, but gradually dinosaurs faded away and the stars remained. It didn’t help that I was completely entranced by Star Wars (not the Jedi, but the spaceships) and when I took those 3.5 floppy disks for X-wing and later TIE fighter and installed them on my old computer in the early 90s it wasn’t to fight, it was to fly in space (though I did a lot of fighting). In the mid-90s X-wing vs TIE fighter became my first internet online gaming obsession. The microsoft gaming zone and the various squadrons and the utilization of Case’s Ladder as a system of measuring who was good and not became a regular activity for me in High School. (I put on about 10kilos during this time because of it) X-wing Alliance didn’t offer what I wanted, its controls were more laggy and the general performance of the game was really a better story driven plot than a pvp experience.

After that my online gaming pretty much stopped. I went to university and did the university life and avoided MMOs and other games as they were breaking into the market. However, my obsession with space remained, but being terrible at math I found a better home study-wise in History. My degree in History gave me the skills I needed to be a powerful reader though and as a result reading is my primary hobby outside of Eve and the gym.

Eve as a satisfaction of a natural passion for exploration:

CCP loves to remind us of the sandbox, the single shard universe, and the darkness of eve. Eve is indeed a cruel galaxy where you should keep your trust as a valuable commodity to use and spend on people who you have come to know and respect; Every other faceless denizen is to be mistrusted, avoided, or engaged in combat. This is not the reason I play eve. This will never be the marketing strategy that would keep me in eve either. In my opinion all humans are inherently narcissistic, but at the same time we are a social species evolved to survive in a social world. The smiles of other people reward our brains more than the suffering of others. We want to be grandiose, we want to be admired more than feared. Our selfish nature fuels our social behavior in a way to seek out good feelings, and the best reward is the projection of happiness (despite what some may say).

Now this isn’t to say that I am ready to pass out flowers and rainbows to everyone that logs onto eve. No, I am a PVP type of guy and a Pirate. I love to make other ships explode, I like to engage in combat be it a good or bad fight (heavily preferring good fights). I just believe the best selling point for eve in my case is the fact it satisfies my inner explorer (child). I always wanted to explore and go into space, I wanted technology to rise up for space colonies, and I wanted Arthur C. Clark’s vision (Minus the Cold War shit) in 2001 and 2010 to be where we would be at those given years.

To me, Eve is a wondrous and beautiful place first, and it is full of hidden terrors and dangers second. Like an expedition that travels into remote areas of the world to discover hidden and wondrous things for our mutual enrichment perhaps failing or meeting their doom, but also with the chance and opportunity to emerge with stories, items, and proof of amazing things. The risk in exploration brings eve a depth that goes beyond any other gaming experience.

There is no value in Guild Wars in the cartographer achievement because there is no true risk, but in Eve every star system you enter provides risk and challenges beyond anything experienced in other games. Not because eve is dark, but rather because eve represents a frontier of sorts for the brave, because it is a sandbox the terror and threats for the brave are, in fact and perhaps ironically so, other brave pilots.

Player versus Player is the key to any mature gaming experience:

There is a reason why eve boasts a mature audience of players. Most everyone who plays eve is of drinking age and most have seen or are in University. The complexity of eve attracts sophisticated people to the game. People who play eve, interact with it to push their boundaries and by in large push the game’s boundaries to their limit to try to maximize their experience. Sophistication and complexity turn some people of or provide a horribly steep curve of entry for newer players, but for those willing to take it slow and patiently learn the culture and methods of eve, they can quickly rise up and join in the emergent game play and participate and influence the game in small or large ways.

PvP is the primary driver of economic forces in eve, outside of fuel blocks and the manufacturing of foil (and some PVE) the only means of consumption on a large scale is the continued “recycling” of ships lost in combat. Every ship that is destroyed will eventually need to be replaced to continue the good fights. PvP in eve with doctrines, fittings, roles, and the skill point system itself (not to mention: implants, boosters, links etc) creates an entire universe of thinking and strategy that produces in many alliances and entire war-doctrines council or think tanks to produce concepts and ideas to win the day.

PvP isn’t just about the pushing of influence and power it is also about reputations and notoriety; famous players and corporations are typically know for their combat prowess.

The sophistication of PvP keeps the wall of entry high or in theory keeps it high for success, but good practice and experience and a bit of understanding of ships and modules and any player can break into it quickly and easily from rifter and up.

The Stars are calling us:

There is nothing dark or cruel about pvp when you examine it, and the same is for high-sec ganks or ganking of mining barges or freights: these activities are the “risk-factor” for the exploration of a graphically beautiful game that allows us to meet some of our mutual dreams and desires to reach out and touch the stars. Seeing and experiencing eve allows some of us to gratify our love for space and the idea of space. I hoe that CCP follows astronomical news and discoveries and might feel compelled to add more dynamic aspects of the universe around us as they are discovered and as technology and processing power allows them to. Even if the black holes in wormholes are of no real threat or danger to the systems they are in, and the planets and starts of the eve cluster are motionless, it is a snapshot of all our hopes and dreams. The inherent darkness in the game is simply a byproduct of human nature, it is the same nature we struggle with on earth, and it is the same nature genuine and good people overcome everyday when working in a social setting. There has to be evil so that there is a need for good and vice versa… eve as a sandbox I hope it never changes, but just because it is cruel doesn’t make it dark or evil: it makes it real.