“This stuff matters.”

Jon Lander, the executive producer of CCP Games’ EVE Online, tells me this during an interview on the first proper day of the company’s Fanfest 2013 event in Reykjavik, Iceland last month. He doesn’t seem to mean much by it and at the time I took it as a throwaway comment. We were in the midst of a larger conversation about monetization and his company’s business practices.

However, after three days surrounded by developers and EVE devotees, I came to understand this as the foundational idea and central thesis of the game. All human interaction—be it face-to-face, in an online forum, or expressed through a series of intricate systems and delicate game mechanics—has value.

By the end of the event the mantra that the world of EVE Online is every bit as real as the physical world has been repeated during every panel, every roundtable discussion, and every keynote. The speakers’ tropes become a running joke for media and PR reps alike: “single-shard universe,” “emergent gameplay,” “player-driven narrative,” “sandbox." But the impact behind these ideas is self-evident in the faces of 1,500 people from around the world who flew to Iceland for a week to congregate, talk shop, and party.

CCP Games' decision to house the American media corps in the Centerhotel Plaza at the base of Austurstraeti seems like a tactical choice to make this year’s Fanfest Pub Crawl as accessible as possible. Austurstraeti is the main street in Reykjavik’s shopping and night life district, which makes for easy traveling. The Harpa, Reykjavik’s newly-constructed concert hall and convention center, is nearby as well.

Behind the hotel lie the parts of Reykjavik that more closely resemble where its 200,000 citizens live and work every day. Small shops and houses with exposed beams sit along narrow, one-way, cobblestone roads connected by an intricate network of alleys, cut-throughs, short cuts, gardens, parks, and courtyards. Wandering around I see people in their offices working, someone hanging art in a gallery, and a woman baking bread. In this neighborhood I feel less like a tourist and more like a voyeur.

That feeling stays with me for the rest of Fanfest, especially when I watch two EVE players get married at the end of the first day or when the artist running CCP’s ad hoc tattoo parlor tells me that at least 50 people have gotten the Guristas logo permanently etched into their skin. I have to conduct an online search to find out that the Guristas are a prominent group of NPC pirates in EVE Online, prowling the game’s lawless hinterlands for easy marks.

Later, during the EVE Online keynote, the 1,500 people packed into the Eldborg auditorium lost their collective minds over the news that the game’s upcoming expansion, Odyssey, would move ice mining from belts to anomalies. A few seconds later changes to ore and moon mining were announced. Senior producer Andie Nordgren (also known as CCP Seagull) told the audience that they would soon be able to launch seven probes at once instead of the paltry three they’d suffered with until now. I was a bit perplexed by the thunderous, riotous applause that greeted these seemingly minor in-game tweaks, but I suppose that as an outsider that’s kind of the point.

“We’ve created this virtual world, this digital universe where people can go and really do whatever they want,” Lander tells me. “It’s supposed to be a world. It has good people, it has bad people. Violence. It has altruism, it has politics. EVE has all of these things.”

If EVE is a virtual world, Fanfest lets me know I’m a tourist there too.

Equal parts celebration, pilgrimage, and bacchanal, Fanfest is an annual event devoted originally to all things EVE Online, but the festival has increasingly expanded to cover CCP’s other offerings. Attendees this year hear about the upcoming free-to-play first-person shooter Dust 514 and the Vampire: The Masquerade-based MMO World of Darkness. It’s a place for fans to gather and attend panel and roundtable discussions, but the celebration is also a chance to rub shoulders with CCP’s various development teams during private dinners, charity poker tournaments, and the aforementioned pub crawl.

Fanfest 2013 was reportedly the largest one to date, which reflects not only EVE Online’s steady growth but also the heightened excitement surrounding the game’s 10th anniversary this year. “I thought it would be fun,” a Canadian EVE player named John tells me. “It’s EVE’s 10-year. Everybody’s talking about it.”

John is a member of Surely You’re Joking, an Alliance that specializes in exploiting EVE’s wormhole mechanics. “Another SYJ member was coming as well, so we thought we’d meet up, have fun. And drink.”

“I’ve never been to Iceland before,” says Scott, another EVE player, but from the opposite end of North America: Mississippi. “You play this game for long enough, all you hear about is Iceland. It’s made in Iceland, all the developers are here. A lot of people talk about it.”

“A lot of people” is many of EVE Online’s 500,000 monthly subscribers. That number looks modest when pitted against World of Warcraft’s multiple millions, but EVE—and CCP along with it—has grown steadily since its launch in 2003. CCP generated $65 million in 2012. According to chief marketing officer David Reid, that's enough to bankroll EVE’s ongoing expansions as well as development on Dust 514 and World of Darkness.

“EVE is a very successful game,” Thor Gunnarsson, the vice-president of business development at CCP, tells me. “At least from a business perspective, it is certainly an outlier or an exception to the rule in the MMO space. [With most MMOs], you create a game, launch it, have your big opening weekend, hit your big plateau, and then manage the fall-off.”

EVE Online’s sustained success and popularity can be attributed to a mix of intricate, open systems that allow equally intricate social structures. Players band together to form corporations, multiple corporations form alliances, and multiple alliances form coalitions.

Lander calls it “the infernal machine… You have to harvest things to build things to blow them up. But you need reasons to do those things. It’s about creating those great, big, grand things which groups of people can achieve.”

The trick, “the most manipulative, sort of Machiavellian thing we ever did,” Lander says, was to host the entire game on just one server. Named “Tranquility,” CCP’s massive server is located in London and operates all of EVE Online and Dust 514. “If you have a single universe … there’s no duplicate of it anywhere else. Somebody has to be there to be a part of it,” he explains. “What I’ve done can then be persistent, and now we have a history in our world.”

“There was a corporation called M0o around 10 years ago, 2003,” Lander begins. M0o was one of the game’s earliest and most ruthless groups, notorious for squatting on interstellar bottlenecks and pirating anyone and everyone who came through. The group didn’t last long, however—they disbanded about eight years ago.

“But everybody knows about them,” Lander says. “People still talk about systems where M0o had set up camp… for those people who knew them, that were destroyed by them, it had great meaning. They wear it like a badge of honor.”

Lander continues, regaling me with the story of Chribba, a player that “has never done a bad thing in EVE, since day one.” Chribba’s claim to fame is his elaborate Veldspar mining operation. Veldspar is very common and relatively inexpensive. Chribba made, and continues to make, his fortune by acting as a third-party arbiter and escrow holder. “He’s got a reputation for doing good things in the community,” Lander explains. “He’s got a reputation that is absolutely crystal.”

These types of player-driven stories have a way of propagating through the EVE community in local, in-client chat rooms, private corporation- and alliance-governed forums, and fan sites. Collectively they form EVE’s shared history, from the halcyon days of the Great War to present-day tensions between the game’s massive coalitions.

Steve Shultz is an EVE player from the Twin Cities, a rookie fleet commander in an alliance called Gentleman’s Agreement. He hated EVE Online for the first six months he played it and was prepared to quit until he read an account of an alliance called Gents. This group systematically dismantled a rival alliance in a region called Vale of the Silent.

“I started reading about what they did,” he tells me. “They scouted it out, they ransomed capital ships, they had them bubbled and locked down.” Gents set up three evacuation routes and charged a toll, and slaughtered anyone stubborn enough to resist. “They fail-cascaded that alliance,” Shultz enthuses. “I decided that’s something I wanted to be a part of.”

That desire to take part in and shape EVE’s collective history creates meaning for people, according to Lander. “If things are meaningful, people are prepared to put their own price on it. This stuff matters, and it’s why people will continue to come back.”

Scott, the player from Mississippi, has spent most of his career as a member of the United States Coast Guard. He’s a staff officer supporting the Coast Guard’s criminal investigators. “We move around all the time,” he tells me. “In the last 13 years, I’ve lived in 12 different places. So you have temporary friendships, temporary connections.

“But every time I move, the same people that I talk to in-game … wherever I go, they’re still the same people,” he finishes. “I can honestly say that I have friends in the Netherlands. I have friends in the UK. I’ve got friends in Canada. I’ve never met them before, but I talk to them four or five times a week.” Scott has been playing EVE Online since 2006.

EVE Online’s impact on the real world manifests in other ways. Perhaps the most exciting news from the event for fans was CCP’s announcement that the True Stories initiative—a compendium of player-submitted schemes, plots, and wars—would be the foundation for a set of transmedia projects. This initiative includes a Dark Horse-published comic series and a TV show helmed by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur.

“We’ve taken some expensive lunches in Hollywood over the years, but we never found the right approach,” Gunnarsson tells me when asked about the TV series. “Then we had this breakthrough moment. Why don’t we tell the true stories of the players? Why make some shit up when you’ve got some of the most awe-inspiring stories of friendship and betrayal that have happened in the industry?”

One such story might belong to Steve Shultz, the EVE player from Minnesota. High-level politics and diplomacy aren’t interesting to him—“I’m not that kind of player,” he says. “I’m not a schemer”—but he has fond memories of his first few excursions with the Gents alliance.

“We lived in Cloud Ring. It’s four big pipes, like a square,” he explains. “You have an out on each corner. People come into these pipes and you trap them. And you kill them.” He’s grinning by now. “And what’s hilarious is that you’ll kill three or four, and they’ll take off, but you’ve got scouts everywhere and you’re watching them the whole time.”

“Then you kill them again. And we can do this for an hour or two until there’s none left.” Shultz’s story ends on a sympathetic note: “I can only imagine what that would be like, to be one of them. It’s one of those things where you just have to keep moving forward. What else are you going to do?”

Alliances like Gents are full of brutal players, in a sense. It's fitting for a brutal game developed in a harsh, primeval country of glaciers, volcanoes, sulfuric geysers, and impromptu snowstorms. But the Iceland I saw is also breathtakingly beautiful, and even at its rowdiest, Reykjavik—and Fanfest—feels cozy, intimate, and comfortable.