Corporations, however, do not operate autonomously from one another, and instead form complex alliances that employ officers and fleet commanders in order to oversee economic, political, and warfare campaigns. How various alliances occupy, expand, and organize various territories of New Eden is the basis of the EVE’s society. Where much of this dynamic plays out in massive wars like B-R5B, other aspects happen through diplomacy that happens away from the battlefield. What the white paper attempts to grapple with is finding a way to harness these dynamics into a consolidated legislative body.

When I spoke with some current CSM members, however, the need for the CSM was not based on the grand philosophical assessments of EVE’s social evolution as proposed by the initial white paper. Instead, some council-members noted that the CSM came out of a necessity to harness activities of the game that fell outside of the boundaries of the computer simulation. Sion described to me the need for effective participants in the CSM to have active roles in what he (and others) called the “metagame” qualities of EVE. He discussed how his experience in space diplomacy between different corporations within his alliance started five years ago, and how this metagame activity has now become a dominant part of how he “plays” EVE. In other words, for many members of the CSM the political participation has become the main way to play the game.

“I used [to] actually play the game: I’d log-in, shoot spaceships, or what have you, but the metagame is an entire creation that exists in parallel to the game world,” he told me. “We have an immense command and control structure [within alliances], it is beyond even what most people can understand.”

What the white paper doesn’t articulate, according to other council-members, is the extent that metagame-play contributes to EVE’s society. As a result, the tasks, duties, and jobs of running a corporation of alliance within the game started to bleed beyond the screen. Those real-world commitments became problematic for CCP to oversee, since many players were conducting back-channel conversations out-of-game with developers in order to gain advantage for their corporations. Some council-members said that in some ways the CSM was more formally established in order to create an oversight committee to prevent metagame activities to infiltrate and influencing developers favoring a particular player group.

The “real-life” activities of EVE community members are a striking example of when a game begins to evolve into another type of simulation. In this instance, the metagame becomes a kind of political simulation that starts to manifest itself more off the screen than it does within the virtual society. For instance, many council-members discussed how they often engage in physical player meetings in order to discuss in-game policy. As a more independent representative, Sug discussed this in some detail: “I spend hours having group and personal discussions. I do monthly open chats on a public communications server run by one of the educational corporations. I do interviews, I have gone to player meetings locally as well as the yearly CCP sponsored gathering in Las Vegas.”

It was surprising to me, however, that few CSM members I talked with viewed themselves as outright political representatives of this virtual society. Some members attributed the lack of personal political identification with the fact that the voting process for the CSM is based on a block-vote system that can result in somewhat lame-duck representatives. This process is similar to party-line voting in that regardless of who is running, as long as they are representing a certain sector of space or have specific alliance affiliation. In a block-vote system, a candidate only requires a certain number of votes to be elected a member of the CSM. All subsequent votes that would’ve gone to the top candidate automatically trickle down to someone next in line. For instance, if a large alliance in New Eden has already committed to one candidate all votes that go over the necessary amount go to a second or third representative.