Nataliia Dmytriievska was 15 years old and enveloped by flames when she first heard the call of outer space. A year earlier her boyfriend had taught her the basics of poi, a Maori dance in which performers swing flaming, tethered weights to describe bright geometric shapes in the dark. Despite the burns and bruises she earned, Dmytriievska was a determined pupil. She would practice for hours each day, drawing flowers and other outlines around her body using dummy weights, before attempting the same perilous tricks using fire.

Although money was never the primary motivation – “I simply love the fire; there is something magical when you feel like it’s in your control,” she said – after a few years Dmytriievska turned semi-professional. She joined a circus troupe in her home city of Kiev, Ukraine to help support her university studies. She excelled, often performing to audiences of hundreds. In June 2007, the troupe began rehearsals for an interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Raven. As the backing music sounded out for the first time – a pipe organ, played rhythmically, as if calling people to worship, soon joined by galloping guitars and a furious drumbeat – Dmytriievska took to the stage. She began to dance. But her mind was not on the performance. As soon as she finished the routine she left the stage, walked up to her friend on the mixing desk and asked: “Where is that music from?”

The track, he said, came from Eve Online, a science-fiction video game. It is, he explained, a game set in a vast galaxy comprised of tens of thousands of stars and planets, and inhabited by half a million or so people from around the world, who explore and do battle together daily via the internet. Dmytriievska returned home to see for herself.

Space, it turned out, was a demanding place. Even before she entered the virtual galaxy, Dmytriievska had to make numerous choices. What would her character look like? What race would they be? Would they have shoulder‑length hair or a tight bob? What about piercings, tattoos or scars? Today, after years of updates and improvements, people who are new to Eve, as the game is known to its inhabitants, meet their digital avatar in the captain’s quarters of a spaceship, a gloomy room with a full-length mirror in which you can admire your newborn character. But when Dmytriievska joined, Eve was a simpler proposition. “Back then it was more of a, ‘Here is your ship, now fuck off’ kind of approach,” she told me.

Dmytriievska’s new character was summarily cast out into space, in a Rookie ship – the lowliest and least powerful craft in the game, offered gratis to every newcomer. On screen, at the centre of the sweeping galaxy, Dmytriievska saw her craft, a nub of lights and metal, blinking expectantly in a perpetual night sky. Moments later, its hull erupted in flames, as an enemy ship taught her Eve’s most elemental rule: in space, everyone longs to hear you scream.

Dmytriievska, who only spoke a little English at the time, tried in vain to find other Ukrainian or Russian players within the game who might be able to guide her through the basics. Eve is a cold, hostile environment. You can pause to admire the curious play of light in the atmosphere, or the heft of the distant planets as they pass through stardust clouds, but sooner or later you will have to start thinking about how you are going to go about earning a living, out there in the galactic wilderness. That new spaceship will not pay for itself.

Dmytriievska’s initial expedition floundered in the face of Eve’s arcana – should she install the Social Adaptation Chip in her character’s digital brain to increase her charisma or the Ocular Filter, to increase her perception? Glumly, she closed the game window. But Dmytriievska did so not to quit, but to learn. Just as she had spent a few hours each day learning to juggle fire, she now took a few hours each day to study Eve.

Along with fish, aluminium and Björk, Eve Online is one of Iceland’s biggest exports. Launched in 2003, it is a science-fiction project of unprecedented scale and ambition. It presents a cosmos of 7,500 interconnected star systems, known as New Eden, which can be travelled in spaceships built and flown by any individual. In-game professions vary. There are miners, traders, pirates, journalists and educators. You are free to work alone or in loose-knit corporations and alliances, the largest of which are comprised of tens of thousands of members.

As a microcosm of human activity, the game has been studied by academics interested in creating political models, and by economists interested in testing financial ones. In a universe where every bullet, trade, offer of friendship and betrayal can be tracked and its impact logged and measured, Eve offers a new way to understand our species and the social systems of our world. “Within Eve we can see a political community that models hierarchy, authority, rule of law, power, violence and distribution of labour,” says Felix Ciuta, senior lecturer in international politics at UCL. “Players project onto this blank space their political and ideological principles. The way in which people act in the game might not reflect the way in which they act in the real world. But their virtual behaviour almost certainly is an expression of their ideas about how the world really works.”

As a microcosm of human activity, the game has been studied by economists interested in testing financial models

As she began her research, Dmytriievska read about the game’s three primary districts. High Security is a heavily policed area of space where drones and sentry guns pursue characters who have been flagged for criminal activity. Here new recruits can find sanctuary from the pirates that roam Low Security, a more dangerous patch of cosmos where unscrupulous bandits hijack vessels to sell them on for profit. The third, final and most notorious territory is Null Space, the galactic wild west where even the most well-tooled characters live in a state of constant peril. There the risks of being blown up are offset by the potential rewards: money, fame and power.

Dmytriievska researched the famous and infamous factions and corporations that vie for control of territory. She read about their renowned leaders, who battle and scheme for supremacy. She learned of Eve University, a player-run virtual institution staffed by volunteers who lead newcomers through the fundamentals, and of the legendary Titans, vessels so large that they are capable of disrupting the tides of entire planets.

Finally, in 2008 after months of study, reading online guides and lurking in the game’s forums, Dmytriievska felt ready to return to New Eden. With some sense of ceremony she clicked on the icon Eve Online for the first time in nearly a year. She has lived there most days ever since.

In 1997, three friends – Reynir Harðarson, Thorolfur Beck and Ívar Kristjánsson – founded the game studio Crowd Control Productions (CCP) in Reykjavik. Their ambition was simple but ludicrous: to “create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life”. They dreamed of a game that would appeal to people from all over the world: a multiplayer space opera. This kind of luxurious project (the “Crowd Control” in the company name bespoke the hope that its games would be well-populated) was not going to be cheap. For one thing, at the time, there was no broadband internet connection in Iceland. So, first, the trio launched a board game, Hættuspil (Danger Game). They had so little startup money that they had to mortgage a house owned by a close friend’s grandmother to pay for its printing. The gamble worked: Hættuspil was a hit (since its debut, roughly one in eight Icelandic households bought a copy). With the money from the board game, the team were able to work towards Eve’s big bang moment. After three years of continuous work, the game finally launched in 2003.

In the two decades after video games first appeared, outside of a few university campuses, people could only play cooperatively while gathered around the same screen or plugged in to the same local computer network. The advent of the internet brought new possibilities: virtual spaces that could be inhabited by more than one person at a time, who could connect from anywhere in the world. But these virtual worlds soon faced a problem: they were forever on the edge of obsolescence. Players were often lured from one game to the next, each brave new world more technically proficient than the last. When too many players leave a virtual world, the cost of maintaining it becomes prohibitive and the game’s servers are switched off. This is a catastrophic event: the world and everything in it dies.

Spaceships do battle in Eve, a virtual world that has achieved the rare feat of lasting more than a decade. Photograph: Eve Online

Since the first graphical virtual worlds launched in the mid-1990s, more than 50 have closed as a result of dwindling populations. Some, such as Lego Universe (2010-2012) closed quietly and without ceremony. Others make the Armageddon a formal part of the fiction. When Rubies of Eventide (2003-2009) closed down, developers burned down the capital city and every player’s character died in the fire. Some developers provide remaining players an opportunity to celebrate their memories and even to grieve. In the hours before Star Wars Galaxies (2003-2011) closed, the skies lit up with a prolonged and expansive firework display, providing a mournful ceremony for the remainder of the million players who bought a copy of the game during its eight-year existence.

Eve is one of the few virtual worlds to have survived longer than a decade. Still, apocalypse-by-exodus remains a constant worry for CCP’s 330 staff, most of whom work exclusively on Eve, from one of the company’s four offices in Reykjavik, Atlanta, Shanghai and Newcastle. Andie Nordgren, the game’s executive producer, believes that it has not only survived but thrived because it is “the world’s largest living work of science-fiction”.

Eve’s narrative appeal has little to do with formal authorship. It is constantly evolving, but not in the same way as other so-called massively multiplayer online games, such as World of Warcraft, where new stories are added by a collective of scriptwriters. Eve’s story is written and steered by the actions of its players, whose individual and collective dramas play out and intersect week by week. People do not play Eve to “win”. There is no way of “completing” the game and no set, overarching goal. Once you’re a virtual millionaire and own the most powerful ship in the game, Eve becomes a game about social interaction and self-made goals. This gives the game its distinctive power.

One story, above all, illustrates this power. At 5am on 18 April 2005, a character known as Mirial, the CEO of Ubiqua Seraph, one of the largest corporations in the game, warped into the Haras solar system, flanked by her most trusted lieutenant. It was a moment for which the members of the Guiding Hand Social Club, a corporation of spies founded by Istvaan Shogaatsu, had long been waiting. A code word went out across the Shogaatsu’s chat channels: “Nicole”. Within an hour Mirial was dead.

Ten months earlier, Shogaatsu had agreed to take on this contract killing for an anonymous client. The fee was one billion ISK – Eve’s virtual currency, named after the Icelandic króna. It was, at the time, equivalent to about £320. (While it is illegal to sell ISK for cash, CCP sells an in-game currency for real money, so it is possible to calculate an exchange rate.) Throughout the intervening period, Shogaatsu and his agents performed a thorough infiltration operation, orchestrated in private chat channels and on secretive forums. They took on jobs within Ubiqua Seraph and, week by week, ingratiated themselves with other corporation members. Soon the mercenaries had operatives in every level of the organisation.

When the code word went out, the spy network was poised to strike. Mirial’s prize ship was destroyed, along with her escape pod and, finally, her vacuum-frozen body was delivered to the Guiding Hand Social Club’s client. Shogaatsu’s spies looted the company’s hangars and vaults. The combined cost of the ambush and theft totalled more than 30bn ISK, an estimated £10,600 of assets lost through robbery or destruction. It was, at the time, the largest theft of virtual assets in any video game.

While the ensuing news reports brought Eve to the attention of players around the world, some feared it might destroy the universe too. “It was a pivotal moment,” said Hilmar Pétursson, who worked at CCP from the beginning, and who took over as the company’s CEO in 2004, shortly before the incident. “People wanted CCP to interfere. They felt betrayed and outraged. But we looked at what had happened and could see no rules that had been broken. Only trust had been broken. It’s not our job to guarantee trust.”

When CCP released a statement to this effect there was an outcry from both players and staff calling for the decision to be reversed. For many, a line between play and reality had been crossed. Overnight, 500 people cancelled their subscriptions to the game. For a few days, New Eden teetered on the brink of destruction.

Eve skirted apocalypse. Many players exited the game in disgust but, soon afterwards, a British video game magazine published a story about the incident. Five thousand intrigued readers joined. If Eve’s world had been on the verge of collapse, it was now saved and, moreover, its custodians had established critical laws with which to govern the virtual world. It was a close call, but a crucial one. As long as no real-world laws were broken, players now knew that they were free to play the game however they chose; an act of extraordinary cunning or betrayal might even make them famous.

The 2015 Eve Fanfest held in Reykjavik. Photograph: Steingrimur Arnason

Perhaps this is why Eve inspires in some an undying allegiance. Almost every year since 2004 Eve players from across the world have gathered in Iceland’s capital. Together they drink, celebrate and share knowledge or get-rich-quick schemes (sample session title from 2015’s event: “Confessions of an Eve Trillionaire”). In the Harpa building – a mass of black glass that sits heavily on the Reykjavik shoreline, like a grounded spaceship – attendees whoop and cheer as CCP announces its forthcoming plans for the virtual galaxy. In 2015, the crowd were brought close to mass hysteria by the news that the paintwork on ships will soon be shown to gather dirt and rust.

One hundred and twenty players showed up for the first “fanfest”. This year there were 1,200, many of whom had spent thousands of dollars to be there. The makers of other popular video games hold annual festivals in their honour, but this event is different, not least because Eve’s players are different. This is not a game that accommodates undergraduate stoner idling or StarCraft’s caffeine-fuelled competitiveness. Its victories come slowly. They require long-view investment, even leadership skills. CCP claims that more than 50% of the player base is employed in engineering. “You will never find a player who has done something important in Eve Online who has not also done something important or significant in the real world,” one attendee at the fanfest told me.

At this year’s event, two artists had set up shop in one of the Harpa building’s broad corridors, offering a range of Eve-themed tattoos. Next to their stall, attendees in fancy dress browsed a shop selling miniature models of in-game spacecraft. There were also burned-out circuit boards, taken from the game’s servers to be replaced with quicker versions. Before the morning’s masterclasses ended, I approached an older man dressed in heavy priestly robes, edged with gold trim and ornate clasps. Charles White is a Californian with a closely trimmed beard, thin-rimmed glasses and a soft accent. He also works for Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory; he helped put the Rover on Mars. “In the game the players call me the Pope of New Eden, harbinger of faiths,” he told me. “I ran with that and made a costume based on the player’s feedback. I showed up here wearing the costume because I’m 55 years old and I don’t give a crap any more.”

An Eve player gets a tattoo at the annual fanfest. Photograph: Ben Hunter

White has been playing Eve since 2008 and is anxious about Eve’s future development. “I don’t really have an endgame,” he said. “But I’m concerned for some of the elder players. Once you own a Titan you’ve pretty much won the game. Where’s the challenge? There have to be things to do.” Players running out of things to do is just one of the threats facing the Eve universe. It must continue to expand in order to hold its inhabitants’ attention, but this expansion must also be in the right direction. One wrong move can jeopardise the game’s existence.

In 2011 CCP introduced a new feature that had been 18 months in the making: a digital store where in-game items (clothing, accessories and so on) could be purchased for real money. It was a disaster that brought New Eden close to its second catastrophic event. At the fanfest, Francesco Munda, an Italian player, recalled what happened: “At that time the game had a huge number of technical problems. Then in this grand reveal, CCP gave us a digital shop. All other problems were pushed aside. The game was in dire need of fixing. Nothing was fixed.” For many players, one object on sale in the digital shop epitomised CCP’s greed: a virtual monocle that could be worn by a player’s online character, which cost £45.

The leak of an internal memo from the company’s CEO, Hilmar Pétursson, that denounced the complaints as “noise” further enraged the player base. Thousands gathered within the game and began to stage symbolic riots, firing their ships’ weapons on a giant monument stationed outside a major trading hub. The protest, which marked the beginning of what soon became known as the “Summer of Rage”, was staged continuously for a week. It was effective. In an unprecedented move, Pétursson wrote an open letter to the game’s players admitting that he had made a mistake. “We made a mess and someone had to own it,” he explained to me. “It was mine to own.” After the letter of apology, CCP acknowledged the protest by switching the 3D model of the in-game monument to one that was broken and damaged, a lasting memorial to the time when the players made their collective voice heard and the game’s makers responded.

Few video games accommodate their player base in this way. Eve’s creators have learned that the future of their world depends not only on the happiness of the game’s players, but also their feeling that the players, ultimately, own the world which they inhabit. Pétursson describes his company as mere caretakers. A better analogy is that he and his employees are gods. While many CCP staff members play the game avidly, they also exist in Eve on a celestial stratum, defining the rules and boundaries of its reality, listening to the desires of the players and deciding whether or not to act upon their pleas.

And among this group of heavenly bodies, fire-juggler Nataliia Dmytriievska is something of an archangel.

After she rejoined Eve, Dmytriievska began to help other new players into the game, remembering the difficulties that she had experienced. She joined a large alliance, which had around 10,000 members, and began to recruit newcomers. Twice a week she would host teaching sessions – either general theory or practical flying lessons through the less dangerous areas of space. In playing the game, Dmytriievska made friends with some CCP staff. “I talked to them about what it was like to work there,” she told me. “They told me it’s like a family. I wanted that.”

Dmytriievska sent numerous job application forms to CCP, each of which was rejected. But she had learned the value of persistence and, finally, after four years of pursuing her career inside the game, was invited for an interview to become a game master, an official expert employed to answer players’ questions. Dmytriievska’s family urged her not to go to Iceland. One family member told her that Ukrainian women who emigrate often end up as sex slaves. But Dmytriievska, who had just gained her bachelor’s degree in criminal psychology, was determined to find a way to turn her hobby into a vocation.

Ignoring her family’s warnings, Dmytriievska arrived in Reykjavik on 12 March, 2013. She stepped off the plane into darkness. The sky was overcast, untouched by stars or the northern lights. It was, she recalled, extremely cold. “I couldn’t sleep all night,” she said. “I was so excited to see the country and to meet CCP.” The interview, contrary to Dmytriievska’s expectations, was not focused on her professional background or character, but on her knowledge of and accomplishments within Eve itself. Dmytriievska was being primed for a special role. Unknown to her, she was to become a cosmic go-between.

Four years earlier, CCP had commissioned a study into the political state of New Eden, hoping to understand how they could better manage this vast virtual society. The study’s authors argued that the game needed a player-run political body. Eve’s society had evolved past tribal structures, they said, into complex social hierarchies. In response, CCP established the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), an invention unique to Eve, the only example of a game-based democratic organisation designed to represent a virtual society. Each year scores of candidates stand for election in one of the 14 places on the council. In 2015 there were 75 candidates, drawn from across different areas of space. Just as in real life, candidates come with platforms, create propaganda and muster both in the game and out for votes.

Twice a year, CCP flies the successful candidates to their headquarters in Reykjavik for a few days of intensive debate – an audience with the gods, if you will. During that time, the council meets with CCP’s staff and hears about the new features planned for the galaxy’s future. The meetings can be heated and, on more contentious issues, there can be in-fighting between council members. But the council performs a crucial role in bridging the gap between the game’s makers and players. Indeed, after the 2011 riots, CCP called an emergency summit in Iceland for the council. Pétursson admits that the CSM’s advice directly influenced his mea culpa.

Dmytriievska’s final interview was, in the end, a mere formality. She was asked to start work later that week as CCP’s official coordinator for the council, a chaperone and champion for council members. Hers is a crucial role in the project to keep Eve’s universe alive. She must manage the tension between the game’s creators, who want to execute their vision, and the game’s inhabitants, who have different priorities. It is as if gods and their people are in a war over the universe – and Dmytriievska is caught in the middle.

As well as the risk of alienating players by tweaking the way the game works, CCP also faces the challenge of policing behaviour when aggravation and bullying spills out of the game and into the real world. In 2014, a statue was unveiled just outside CCP’s Reykjavik office. The monument lists the names of all active main characters in the game as of 1 March 2014 – more than half a million of them. It was a proud moment for the developers: the statue was unveiled by Jón Gnarr, the charismatic, cross-dressing comedian who served as the city’s mayor from 2010 to 2014. A few days later, four of the game’s players scratched off a rival character’s name from the memorial. The police were called and, when the culprits were found out, they were evicted from the game with a lifetime ban.

At other times, players have been known to hold others to ransom in the game for real money. One Russian player once claimed to be a hacker and threatened to cut the power to a rival’s home during play in order to steal his Titan ship, which takes weeks to build and is worth between £2,000-£2,500. At last year’s festival the Friday night pub-crawl ended in a street brawl (although there were some minor injuries, the participants later claimed it was just a bit of fun). “I’ve heard about couples breaking up over backstabbing in Eve,” says Nordgren, the game’s executive producer.

A Titan spaceship. Some are so large that they can affect the tides of Eve’s planets. Photograph: Eve Online

For many players who have been involved in Eve for years, the social game around the digital game is what provides the ongoing attraction. Merely improving one’s spaceship soon becomes tiresome. “People say it’s a game about spaceships … but not so much,” a senior member of one of the game’s larger, player-forged corporations said. “It’s about people.”

The most famous of Eve’s players is Alexander Gianturco, alias the Mittani. He is leader of the Goonswarm Federation, the largest alliance in Eve, and his name is known in every corner of the virtual galaxy. (Gianturco’s Twitter profile picture shows him kneeling, kissing the hand of Nasa’s Charles White.) He commands close to 40,000 players, directing the federation’s battles and actions from his home in Madison, Wisconsin. Gianturco, who used to work as a corporate lawyer in Washington DC, makes his living from the game by running an Eve-specific media empire, reporting the news of events from within the game on his website and YouTube channels. Gianturco regularly boasts that he has not logged into Eve for three years. Instead, he runs the Goons from chatrooms and online forums.

According to Andrew Groen, an American freelance journalist who is writing a history that charts the first decade of Eve Online, Gianturco has helped to bring about a shift in the game’s tone. “Early in Eve’s story the game was a role-playing society; it was a blank canvas so the person who could make the largest splash became the most noticeable and therefore the most powerful.” Players tended to be very sincere and to treat this fictional world with utmost seriousness.

Today, Groen says, people are more aloof. This tonal change is, in part, thanks to the maturing world. “In the old days it was cool to care,” says Groen. “But Goonswarm came up with this fascinating cultural edict: if you take the game seriously and you bond under the idea that you’re the best of the best, a single loss can unravel the social fabric of the group. So Goonswarm’s rallying cry is: we are terrible at this game. This means that when they lose they are able to laugh about it. But when they win they laugh even harder, making fun of the defeated and bonding over the hubris and misery of their enemy.”

CCP claims that Eve is more popular than it has ever been – in 2013 the game’s population passed 500,000. The company’s experiment in democracy, following the Summer of Rage, has paid off. The search for new players also continues. Last month, the company simplified no fewer than 73 tutorials into seven more straightforward introductory topics, with a hope to entice newcomers who had previously been put off by Eve’s complexities.

But the game faces other challenges, not least from rival space-simulation games. This is, after all, a game built on ageing technology. In a medium where technological prowess is often key to dominance in the market, that is a risk. Is the game’s future truly secure? “Eve is certainly built upon compromises we had to make 15 years ago when first designing the tech,” Pétursson said. “Nevertheless this 12-year-old game is in many ways the most innovative one out there.” Arguably there are no other online worlds that exhibit such mature and nuanced social structures, or that allow players to play the game from outside its digital boundaries, as Gianturco does. “There are aspects of Eve that nobody has been able to replicate,” said Pétursson.

Many of Eve’s inhabitants agree. During one of the final panel sessions at this year’s fanfest, one councillor spoke earnestly of his belief in the game’s future, despite the toughening competition. “Eve offers an experience you can’t get anywhere else,” he said. “That’s the reason we’re up here. It’s not because you can fly around shooting other people. We’re here because you get to deal with people, both their in-game lives and their out-of-game lives.”

Nataliia Dmytriievska and Paul Elsy. Photograph: Daniel Hoffend

Groen is equally confident about the game’s prospects. “I’d be surprised if it’s not around for another decade,” he said. “It will probably be around for another 25 years. CCP honestly believes in the philosophical idea of a virtual construct that never dies.” There is something undeniably Icelandic – stoic, intrepid – in all this. As the snow swirls irritably around the Harpa building, it is easy to make a link between the game’s environment and the country in which it was conceived. For some, Eve’s philosophical darkness – its inhabitants are lost in space, engaged in never-ending conflict – reflects something of the dread of Iceland’s inescapable winter. There’s beauty in its vastness and ambition, but it can also feel bleak and oppressive. “That’s the key,” says Groen. “Eve offers us this utopian idea that you can never die. You can resurrect endlessly. But it also poses the question: do we really want to be strapped into the machines, waging war until the end of all time?”

For Dmytriievska, the answer is clear. In Eve, she has found the support and family she was looking for. “We all help one another,” she says. “You can rely on people. I never felt that in the Ukraine.” She is now engaged to marry Eve’s community manager, Paul Elsy, whom she met in the game. But her attachment to Eve is not merely romantic. “I never felt as though I was in the right place until I came to this volcanic glacier in the middle of the Atlantic,” she told me. “But here, I am an essential cogwheel at the centre of this incredible mechanism that is capable of creating universes. It feels interesting. It feels important. I can help to keep the fire of this world burning forever.”

Back in the Ukraine, Dmytriievska’s relations remain sceptical about her choices. “A few times I’ve been told to take a careful look at what I am doing with my life and maybe start thinking about a serious job,” she said, looking at the floor. After a moment, she looked up again, defiantly. “I simply reply: there can be nothing more serious than the spaceships business.”

Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread

• This article was amended to correct the following errors: the Council of Stellar Management meets twice a year, rather than every six months, and the meetings can last up to five days. Additionally, the monument just outside CCP’s Reykjavik office was unveiled in 2014, not 2011.

