Iceland looks like an alien planet, a foreign world of bubbling chemical pools and volcanic smells bathed in strange colours by an unenthusiastic sun. Its capital Reykjavik is a city on the edge of the world, occupying a small area of a vast, completely flat expanse of black rock. Sheer cliffs rear suddenly out of the ocean in the middle distance, visible behind a seemingly permanent sheet of thin fog. It’s easy to see how something like Eve , a massively-multiplayer online game about spaceships floating in a foreign galaxy, might have been created here. Eve is nine years old, launched by developer CCP in 2003. Now there are more people playing Eve than actually live in Iceland (400,000 Eve players compared to 300,000 Icelanders), which rather puts this small developer’s achievement in perspective.

I’m standing just outside HARPA in Rekjavik, one of the weirdest-looking buildings in one of the weirdest-looking cities I’ve ever been in – an angular, ship-like structure with sheer glass walls that shimmer with waves of undulating, colour-changing light after dark. I’m having a cigarette with a group of three skinny young men who have come all the way here from the US for Eve Fanfest, the annual gathering of hardcore Eve players.

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How Eve works, in a nutshell.

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These three men all belong to the same virtual corporation. They fly and fight together in-game, they trade and go to war with other corporations, and they participate in the most interesting and deeply intricate online gaming community in existence. The Eve universe has its own elected council of politicians, its own organically-evolving economy and its own complex and fascinating history of years-long conflicts, uprisings and hostile coups. These guys are active enough participants in this alternate universe to have flown to Iceland in real life to see what CCP has in store for it next year. One of them has just shown me a picture of himself as his Eve avatar, with facial tattoos and medal-adorned costume digitally superimposed upon his smiling form.We’ve been chatting – mostly about Eve, inevitably, a subject that I knew next to nothing about before I came here. They’re friendly, personable, and extremely happy to explain things to an initiate (or attempt to, anyway). I may have known nothing when I arrived, but I’ve learned a lot, and I sort of understand why Eve inspires such passion and devotion in the thousands of people who play it – usually to the exclusion of every other video game. But there’s a question that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind: don’t they feel, even a little bit, that they’re missing out on real life by spending so much of their time in Eve?They all think for a while, leaving me to wonder whether I’d made an unforgivable faux pas and was about to be sacrificed to the space-gods, before one of them stubs out his cigarette and answers.“I don’t have a spaceship in real life,” he says, grinning.Fair enough, I think. None of us do.

Inferno is Eve's latest expansion - and was met rather more warmly than Incarna.

“ Eve is quietly but confidently changing the entire conception of what a video game can be.

“ This is real-world politics, just not in the real world.

From the outside, Eve Fanfest is impenetrable. Every year more than a thousand people who fly internet spaceships in their spare time converge in one of the strangest cities in the Northern hemisphere to discuss the intricacies of corporation warfare, policing and criminality, economics and manufacture and, of course, spaceships. Once a day, the CEO of CCP Hilmar Petursson stands up and gives keynote speeches in front of this massive audience, addressing players about the forthcoming changes and improvements to the game and the future vision of the company, and (almost) everything he says is met with eruptions of delighted cheering. At one point, during one of these presentations, people were literally cheering an image of a floating rock.I had no idea what was going on. But then, Eve is not like any other videogame in the world, not even remotely. What CCP has done over the past nine years, and what it’s continuing to do now with things like Dust 514, the PlayStation 3’s first massively multiplayer online FPS, is quietly but confidently changing the entire conception of what a videogame can be, and how far it can extend into real life. CCP has created a game where the social structures and economic system that its players have constructed are vastly more important than the game itself.The players rioted. En masse, thousands converged upon a monument near one of CCP’s in-game spacestations and blew it up – then cancelled their subscriptions. CCP responded by calling in an emergency meeting of its player-elected Council, flying its members out to Reykjavik to broker a peace deal.As a direct result of all of this trouble, 120 people at CCP lost their jobs.This might sound like a bunch of nerds getting uppity at a developer trying to make money, but for anyone involved with Eve, it was a major historical event, a political uprising against something that threatened to shift the balance of authority from the populace to those in power (CCP, in this case). This is real-world politics, just not in the real world.Being an outsider in the Eve community for a weekend has given me an insight into what it must have been like for my parents watching me grow up with video games and wondering why anyone would have such a deep interest in virtual things. When I came here I found these people’s passion and dedication fascinating, but slightly worrying. But it starts to make sense as soon as you realise that Eve isn’t so much a game as a lifestyle.Eve was built around people rather than developer-created content out of necessity as much as anything else. When CCP was founded, they couldn’t have got the manpower together to make a content-heavy MMO stuffed with missions and quests even if they’d hired every single talented game-designer in Iceland. Instead of creating stories for players, they constructed a game infrastructure where the players could become the stories.It worked. This is probably a good time to emphasise that Eve isn’t some welcoming online utopia: it’s cut-throat, cruel, atavistic despite the futuristic setting. Give people a sandbox, and they’ll throw the sand in a rival’s eyes before kicking them in the shins and destroying their sandcastle. Such is the level of crime and skulduggery in Eve that CCP now has an internal affairs division to monitor the actions of its own staff in-game. Within a few weeks of Eve’s launch, there were several wars going on between players separated by language, forming loose alliances and supplying each other with munitions on the sly.

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The vision for Incarna.

“ People quit games, but they don’t quit their friends.

In 2005, one faction hired a guild of assassins to carry out a meticulous assassination of one of the most powerful figures in the Eve universe, Mirial, and steal her wealthy corporation’s assets – worth billions of in-game ISK and over $16,000 in real-life dollars. The hit involved several spies infiltrating the corporation at the highest level and took nearly a year. It was devastating, not just to the target but to everyone that was part of the Ubiqua Seraph corporation, all of whom lost incredibly valuable ships and assets (and even more valuable pride) that had taken them months of work to earn. Mirial’s body was stolen by the assassins, adding a level of personal vindictiveness to this astonishingly devious, huge-scale betrayal.There were calls for CCP to step in and reverse the damage, but in the end, nobody had broken the game’s terms of service or done anything technically illegal – so the developer stood firm. It’s these catastrophic acts of inter-player dickery, after all, that make Eve what it is.For the guys (and very few women) at Eve Fanfest, events like the Heist and the Jita Uprisings are part of their cultural vocabulary, universal touchstones that everybody in the Eve universe knows about. They talk about them like they might talk about the Arab Spring. Other games have strong communities, sure, but I’ve never seen another world that has one as involved and politically active as Eve’s. It seems next to impossible to be a casual Eve player – even small-scale miners or two-bit pirates know about the larger machinations at work in the universe.

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How Dust 514 could change the game.

This really is any developer’s dream. Eve is the only MMO that has managed to grow its population year-on-year since it was announced. This year, the Eve universe is expanding further: PS3 multiplayer shooter Dust 514 is going to add potentially a few hundred thousand more players to this fascinating economy. It’s not difficult to imagine that more than a few of those people may well end up more intrigued by the incredible society surrounding Dust 514 than by the game itself; shooting at people on alien planets is perfectly entertaining, but when you realise that the planet actually belongs to someone, and that you’re fighting to take it over for someone else, and that the air strikes you call in from the sky are actually delivered by Eve players floating in near orbit… well, suddenly it all starts to mean much more. It becomes more real.That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I’ve talked to people at Fanfest. If so many people care about it in such a complex way, doesn’t that make Eve real? If the players are the game, doesn’t that blur – or even erase – the line between where the game ends and real life begins? I mean, obviously the Internet spaceships themselves don’t exist, but the friendships, the history, the culture and the consequences of victory and defeat… those are as real as anything.Eve players aren’t missing out on real life. Eve is a part of their real life. Eve is so different from every other example of the form that I’m not even sure it’s accurate to call it a video game any more. CCP has created something completely new – and if Dust 514 succeeds, they’ll have rewritten the rulebook yet again.