Most video games can be likened to a theme park. The fun, like a roller coaster’s, has been entirely created by a team of professionals, and the players then progress through each loop, each dip, each turn in a way that has been meticulously designed to produce a specific effect. Books and films tell stories in a similar way.

Eve Online is more like a sandbox, where the players have been thrown in with a bunch of tools, like shovels and buckets, and are left to their own devices to create what they will. In Eve’s futuristic setting, miners extract ore from asteroids and refine it into minerals. Industrialists run huge factories to turn the minerals into spaceships, weapons and modules. Financiers provide investment capital, and traders take products to market. Finally, pilots buy the ships and fly them in combat, carving out player-controlled empires among the thousands of solar systems in the Eve galaxy.

Players can enjoy Eve in any of those roles, a diversity of experiences unmatched in any other game. But the most glamorous aspect of the game is participating in the epic wars for territory that can go on for months or years, involving tens of thousands of players. (Unlike those of most games, all of Eve’s more than 200,000 players are in one shared game universe, rather than split up among different copies of the virtual world; on weekends there can be 35,000 players or more online at once.)

For at least two years, the dominant conflict in the game has been between two alliances known as Band of Brothers and Goonswarm. Band of Brothers, known as BOB, is a wealthy, elite (some would say elitist) group that many players simultaneously admire, fear and despise. Goonswarm is a proudly profane group that conducts highly effective psychological warfare alongside its military campaigns. Like the members of BOB, Goons are also simultaneously admired, feared and despised by many Eve players.