"EVE Online is a massive multiplayer online game—a single environment shared by thousands of players, like World of Warcraft or Second Life—that has been in continual operation since 2003. It contains all the set pieces of space opera—moons, distant outposts, mighty dreadnoughts—but it is no ordinary video game. In fact, it is like little else on the Internet in its ability to mirror the functioning complexity of the real world...
resources within EVE are finite. And the ability to collect those resources, and to build those resources into fleets, and armadas, and local economies—that ability is finite. So when one alliance defeats another alliance or takes over their territory, that has consequences for the power balance of the rest of the game...
The history that we’re talking about now is the history of the entire world playing in one shared game space. That makes EVE really, really special. It means you have these entire areas of the game where you will go into them and you can’t speak the language. You can’t negotiate with certain player groups within EVE because they only speak Russian or they only speak Swedish. You wind up with these fantastically complex governments that actually have translators and diplomats to go between these different cultures. That’s the level that a lot of these in-game groups have reached once they get up to 10,000—I think the largest one is close to 25,000 people...
to run those, you need very impressive leaders, who are going to give speeches to rally the workers to continue building ships or go out on the front lines of a fight that is relatively futile. And that was fascinating...
Part of the reason why EVE can be so shrouded in propaganda is that those players do go away, and then they no longer maintain their stature in the community or the credibility to tell the history of what happened to them and their organizations. In EVE, you very much have a winners-write-history sort of problem."
I heard about this on the podcast Imaginary Worlds, which is excellent. Definitely listen to that episode, there is so much detail that wasn't in this interview.
FB: This is Fascinating. By all rights, the click-bait title should have been "Humanity has already fought its first great space war".
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