In EVE Online, your entire experience of New Eden comes through prostheses that are both enabling and disabling. You almost never see your actual character itself, outside of the portrait in the corner of your screen, and the default male or female corpse floating in space after you are killed. In the game’s lore, you float in a goo-filled escape pod at the center of your spaceship, controlling everything with your mind. That’s how a drug you take can enhance technical aspects like missile velocity or the power of your shields. Your ship is not a prosthesis like a cane or eyepatch, that only augments the body—this is a prosthesis that does that, but is also augmented by the body, as an extension of the mind. This might seem pretty far out there, but it’s happening in real life all around you. Canes and eyepatches are not the only kind of prosthesis.
Socrates feared in Plato’s Phaedrus that writing would make us forgetful. Anyone who pre-dates cellphones will tell you they used to remember hundreds of phone numbers, and now only know a few. So, Socrates was clearly on to something—we invented writing, which then changed how our minds work, which then changed how writing works, and so on, from the tablets of Gilgamesh to Twitter. This is looking at writing as a prosthesis—a tool that becomes so integral to the being that uses it that the being becomes a ‘cyborg’[i] and the two are inseparable. Because they are inseparable, changing one changes the other, such that our increasing modernization has led us toward shorter and shorter pieces of writing (a reality in the face of which this blog commits ritual suicide) but then a form like Twitter has also fundamentally changed how we interact with each other as community members.
Out of EVE’s lore, we interact with this world through the necessary skeuomorphisms of the buttons you press to turn on modules, the visual panels that display things like cargo, and scan results, and of course, the omnipotent Overview. These are design features that admit—yes, an actual human is still piloting the ship, and yes, they still need to press buttons. (Also, who doesn’t love pressing buttons.) Yet this is another prosthesis, now for us as players: the UI of the actual videogame becomes inseparable from our ability to exist and interact with the game world. In this way, the ship is a prosthesis for the capsuleer in-world, and the UI is a prosthesis for us. Each prosthesis allows profound power, but also limits that power, like how the only bridge to an island both allows and controls access to it. CCP balances their game less often by manipulating its rules, as most real-life sports are balanced, but rather by the prosthetics we use to interact with it. Thus, our vessels, and our game UIs, are both enabling and disabling.
So what happens when the player, in real life, is also disabled?
You know, like me.
I grew up in a dense and winding suburb of central New Jersey, half a mile from my elementary school and about three miles from the grocery. The neighborhood was built in the 1950s, with originally three models of house—the ambitiously-named A, B and C units—repeated several thousand times across what once was farmland. It was designed not as one of those dehumanizing grids, but with winding and inter-looping streets that hugged the sides of gentle hills, making it famously labyrinthine to anyone who didn’t live there. By the time I was born in 1997, many of the houses had received some sort of addition or augmentation, and many remained the same. My dad personally installed three skylights in our little unit, as well as a bow window across the dining room, and built a large greenhouse out back, in which he grew, let’s say, both legal and illegal vegetables, in the patented aeroponic system he had invented and then failed to make into a business. Like most neighborhoods in central NJ, mine was extremely diverse, with the highest density of Indian families anywhere in the country. Walking to and from school, or the grocery, or a friend’s house, on streets concealed beneath the interlocking canopies of 50-year old oaks and ashes, over sidewalks cracked by their roots and dappled by the shadows of their leaves, one might pass just as many women in vibrant saris as they would White yoga-moms on a power walk.
But my mom didn’t walk for exercise. She walked because she couldn’t drive.
In her early thirties, she developed a rare genetic form of macular degeneration called Stargardt’s Disease. Essentially, the cells of her macula—the part right at the center of the retina that handles detail vision, like reading and recognizing faces—stopped discarding their waste, and clouded up. Her condition progressed very rapidly, and while the disease being limited to one part of the eye means, at its worst, it still can’t make you totally blind, hers got about as bad as it can get within a year or so. She had to quit her job, stop driving, and reorganize her life. A few years later, assured that she wouldn’t pass it on to her kids, they had me.
So I grew up with a role model who handled her condition with all the grace and aplomb in the world. Or at least, in suburbia. (I still don’t totally know the difference.) She walked me ten minutes to and from school, when friends on my street got rides in the car. She and I walked to the doctor’s office on the other side of the neighborhood, or to one of several parks, or all the way out to the grocery store, when needed. She was in terrific shape, and when my brother was born, would strap him into his walker, march an hour over to Stop-n-Shop, load forty pounds of groceries in around the cheerful baby, and troop on back. Sometimes she would be accompanied by our two extraordinarily well-trained Labradors, who went off-leash the whole way, and sometimes she’d be accompanied by me. I knew my friends’ moms drove everywhere, as my dad did, and to be honest—I felt sorry for them. I liked walking. I got to know the Minoan tangles of our neighborhood better than any of them, and came to disregard snow, ice, rain, heat, and all the other hazards they would never experience from the candy-coated interiors of their minivans. Of course, when we had to go somewhere outside of the neighborhood, and both my dad and grandparents were busy, one of those minivans would get us there.
Then, in the summer before 8th grade—one year exactly after I first downloaded EVE: Apocrypha—I was diagnosed with the same condition. It wasn’t as bad as my mom’s—and still isn’t—but it obscured my ability to read and recognize faces enough for me to become legally disabled.
I won’t go into my reaction to this, in part because I’m not trying to tell my life story in this blog post, and in part because I really don’t know what it was. Unlike my mom, who had no role model, I took it in stride. I already walked or biked everywhere. It was good conversation fodder in school. I joked about it, used my accommodations, and didn’t give it much thought at all. To this day, I don’t really identify with being blind, to such an extent that it’s kind of uncomfortable for me to write about it at all. As my mom always said, being blind is as much a handicap as being really short or really tall, we just apply a lot of legal and social definitions to it. Everybody has different abilities and limitations, and sometimes your great abilities—like fitness gained from walking everywhere, or an archival suburban cartography—grow out of those limitations. Or, as my dad put it, with characteristic diplomacy, “I’d rather be blind than stupid.”
The way your eye works is sort of like the rings of a bullseye, such that the outer rings are really good at detecting motion, the middle rings really good at recognizing patterns, and the center at making out details. This center part of my eyes is mostly ineffective, and my mom’s is totally destroyed. That means I have a blind spot smack in the center of my vision, about the relative size of a dinner plate at the center of a round four-seat table. That is, it’s not a significant part of my total field of view: I don’t bump into things or have any trouble navigating the world, besides reading signs. But it is almost all of the part of my eye that recognizes people’s faces and reads characters. If you want to see how I read, fix your eyes on the line above the one you’re reading, and without moving them, try to read the line above or below it. Your eyes will naturally want to move. Hold them in place, and try to make out the words you’re not looking directly at. It’s really strange to experience—though you can see the other words perfectly well, you can’t make them out as well. You know they’re there, but it takes an extra moment to actually read it.
Anyone who has been trained in game tracking is already good at this. The center part of the eye is a distraction in tracking, because you’re looking for patterns. Good trackers can unfocus their eyes, relax their gaze, and let the middle section detect minute disturbances in the leaves, or the dust. When an old hunter friend taught me this technique, he said I learned it faster than anyone he had ever seen—because that’s the only way my eyes can work. This proved my mom right, yet again—another case of what made math class impossible giving me a superpower somewhere else.
Despite these limitations, I still do lots of visual things. I’m a musician, a writer, and a writing teacher. I still drive, perfectly safely—because you only need your ‘reading vision’ for reading street names, which thankfully our phones do now. And yet, I need large print, or to read digitally; I play music mostly by ear, because I can’t sight-read; though I’m usually the first to spot deer on the side of the road, I also often park at the wrong building when ‘the destination is on your right’ could mean any one of several, and then spend a few minutes either reading mailboxes with my binoculars, or doing the “honeybee,” flitting awkwardly from door to door until I find the right one. Just like if I was short, or had severe allergies, or bad motor skills, I am better at some things and worse at others.
This topic hadn’t actually crossed my mind at all when compiling a grand list of blog ideas earlier in the summer—yet, whenever I mention my eyesight to other EVE players, I usually get a lot of questions, like how in the cinnamon toast fuck do you play such a visual game? Indeed, the running joke “wait, EVE has sound?” does remind us that New Eden is a world we never touch, taste, or smell, and very seldom hear. So to play this game, and to attempt to play it at a very high level, with vision legally recognized as 20:800, is probably kind of shocking, if not pathetically Quixotic. But I have known quadriplegic people who played EVE very well with a mouthpiece controller, and they are no doubt far more disabled, in most circumstances, than I am. Maybe one day I’ll interview one of them, or write something more broadly about the disabling and enabling spaces of the internet, and how EVE fits in that. But for now, and as a respite from a month of intricately wrought and theoretically dense essays, I’m going to take this moment just to write an elegy of my experience as a blind man playing EVE.
I once lost a Curse because, when a hunter uncloaked and appeared on my Overview, I thought it said “8,000km” but instead it said “8,000m”[ii] so I just sat there through the precious five seconds I had to get away. If you’ve tried reading the way I do, as I described above, you’ll notice immediately that you can only read by the general shape of the word. ‘Mountain’ and ‘Momentum’ are difficult for me to distinguish, for example. So while the Curse was the most extreme example, I have no doubt lost plenty of ships due to the importance of single characters, be it the ‘k’ for kilometers, or anything else. This is probably the most common failure of my real body to use the prostheses EVE gives us.
Of course, I play with UI scaling at 150%, on a large 5k monitor. I color-code everything I possibly can. I use control-scroll as a magnifier to do everything on my computer, and will often rapidly zoom in to read a target’s angular velocity, then zoom back out before I miss something in the fight. In other words, I use the prosthesis of my computer to interact with the prosthesis of EVE’s UI, to interact with the in-lore prosthesis of my spaceship. There’s a lot of filters there.
While I often multibox,[iii] and have for years, I can’t use two monitors, because even with these aids I still need to lean very close to the screen. Leaning from one screen to another rapidly is a quick way to get spasms in your neck and back; likewise, 27” is big enough for me to use a large UI, but not so big I’m craning my neck to see something at the topmost corner of the screen. So, to multibox, I simply tab very rapidly between clients, and assemble my game UI to make that easier: I assiduously set up identical overviews, watch-lists, and hotkeys, and set a different UI color on each character so that I know, for example, red tint means one and green means another.[iv] But these are things most experienced pilots do anyway, whether they use multiple monitors or not. That middle prosthesis of EVE’s UI does not come very well optimized, and needs a lot of tweaking to be effective, while the default is more like a game UI from Ikea.
Last week, I wrote about how I played in bloc warfare while in very busy parts of my life. That certainly had something to do with it. But though I’ve always enjoyed smallgang PVP the most I enjoy anything in any videogame, I also shied away from it for years because I thought my eyes were just not good enough to be really great at it. While in a bloc, I was able to have a lot of the visual awareness handled by my fleet commanders, so that I was able to be helpful by scaling the few skills of executing commands across many different accounts. It finally struck me that this was like how I handed over my job as quarterback in 8th grade to someone with a much worse arm just because—what, I thought I should? Then, newly diagnosed and trying to interpret my place in the world, I thought the right leadership decision was to ask our coach to switch to tight end, before the season even started. He didn’t want me to, and I even argued with him, I know now because I was trying on an interpretation of a disabled identity, the way 8th graders try and discard all sorts of identities. Yet here I was, at 22, still holding myself back from the gameplay I really enjoyed for the same reason.
At the start of the pandemic, I joined the amazing smallgang community of Odin’s Call, and finally began playing the game the way I wanted to. I promptly lost a Zealot the same way I lost that Curse years before, but in the utterly warm and loving atmosphere of my new corp, it didn’t matter, and I probably didn’t even mention my eyes for the better part of a year.
Throughout this period, I optimized my protheses, both in and out of game. Just like how you don’t know the limitations of a cane, or of writing, until you meet them, I realized that my time holding myself back from harder gameplay had also been holding myself back from the solutions that would let me do it. This is a humbling lesson I learned, and something I can’t stress enough to anyone with any sort of disability—you only develop solutions from meeting problems. Don’t shy away from problems until you’ve tried. For me, while I no doubt would have had an easier time at EVE with perfect eyes, my gameplay then became a quest to see how far I could go with my body.
Emotionally, this is a tricky thing to juggle, and I have lightyears of a head start because of my mom. On the one hand, fuck my eyes, I now want to see how good I can get at EVE. On the other hand, I’m at peace with the fact that my ceiling is probably lower as a result of my vision. If I ever come to a point where my quest of essentially self-discovery disturbs that peace, I need to quit. But for now, and since March, 2020, my goal is to get a little better at EVE every day.
At first this was in my piloting, my communication, my fitting. This last part was familiar—I had always tried to win on the drawing board, aware of my limitations in actual execution. For a long time, it had worked well enough. Though I couldn’t react as fast, I was able to win fights by knowing the meta, guessing their fitting, and countering it perfectly.
But communication was new. You don’t talk ever on big bloc fleets, and in smallgang you talk all the time, collaborating and sharing information with others. (In this way, smallgangers maybe do play EVE with their ears.) I was still slow at reading details like target velocities and angles, but I was able to get this information from my fleet. I was one of the more experienced and knowledgeable players in my group, so I also started to play to my strengths: instead of trying to relay the information I couldn’t read quickly, I tried to share helpful thoughts about how an opponent would likely be fit, or how many people they usually flew with, or where we could engage.
I would also teach our newer pilots before and after fights what details to look for, and when to relay them over comms. While this is something all smallgangers do, and all smallgangers benefit from when done well, this was my way of adding another prosthesis to my toolkit: my friends. I now was able to offset my visual limitations by relying on my fleetmates, most of whom didn’t even know I had a condition. Certainly this was only possible in such a great atmosphere as Odin’s.
Now, sharing meta knowledge, tactics suggestions, and teaching fleetmembers, are three of the big points of actually commanding a fleet. I had always wanted to be a fleet commander, as it is, in many ways, the pinnacle of gaming, but after some early experiences losing fights due to my vision, I had given up on it. Just like how I only optimized my UI in response to the new challenges of smallgang, I found that the amazing teamwork and respect in Odin’s had allowed me to start commanding fleets without even knowing it. At this point I was consciously on a quest to see how good I could get at the game, so with a sense of disbelief at myself, I embraced the fleet commander role.
For several months, I often played the role of ‘number two’ to my friend and fellow FC, Jon B Fletcher. Jon was very assertive and decisive, and did things like calling targets and anchoring[v] our fleet very well. But I had better knowledge of game mechanics, fittings, opponents, and geography. Most fleets in the medium-and-up scale run with multiple FCs for exactly this reason, so they can split roles, and each do a smaller job much better. For me, this was a perfect way to be helpful without challenging my eyes.
But, as with any skills, once I had this down, I continued to branch out. Soon I was running fleets solo, or doing the primary job while Jon or someone else backed me up. (I would sometimes mention right before a fight that I’m blind, just like I sometimes tell a new passenger in my car that I’m blind while already hurtling through the mountains. That’s always fun.) Where I spent my first few months in corp pushing myself to get better as a pilot, I now spent several more months pushing myself as an FC. Of course, I did lose ships because of vision—the extra delay looking back to my overview from my modules, or being slow calling a target’s name. But at some points in this timeframe, I was probably the alliance’s main FC. If you had told me 10 years ago about this, though even then I handled my limitations with aplomb, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.
Over time, Odin’s culture became diluted, likely due to the combination of burnout at the higher levels and continued recruitment at the bottom. Our comms became more cluttered, more full of ‘I told you so’ and ‘well actually’ than it ever had been before. While this was much discussed in leadership, actively worked against, and problematic for everyone’s combat effectiveness and sense of community, I think it made it especially hard on me. Even commanding a fleet, I had come to rely on the stream of information from helpful fleet members. I would dialogue often with the fleet about what was helpful for me, and what wasn’t—something most good FCs do. But now, running fleets was often a process of shouting people down, and I became not just frustrated that we were losing stupid fights, but really upset that the vital prosthesis of my teammates was dissolving before my eyes. After six months of trying in vain to fix the issue, I left, with nothing but love and goodwill for Odin’s and the good people there. I just wasn’t getting better anymore. I was dying because I didn’t see stuff again, and my team wasn’t helping me. As a result, I wasn’t helping my team either. It was time to move on, to try to develop that teamwork elsewhere, and to try to get better at new skills.
Like writing a blog!
But also old skills, like grid awareness, communication, fitting, meta knowledge, and all those others whose true limitlessness obscures the vast ether between master and virtuoso. Who knows where it’s going to go. And who knows, if I wasn’t blind, maybe I wouldn’t be so interested in the self-discovery of self-improvement. Though the very same issues that impeded our tactics also made it less fun to be on comms, maybe I would still be in Odin’s if stagnation didn’t deny such a personal quest. There are lots of people in New Eden who play specifically for community and mediocrity, and I admire them—really, there are few other games in which you can be really content at any level of gameplay. But I don’t feel like I’ve hit my ceiling yet, and so while I could just tread water and push the limits of my body elsewhere, at least right now—just like those few times I’ve gotten caught because of my blind spots—I don’t see the point.
[i] Donna Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto.
[ii] Killmail or it didn’t happen: https://zkillboard.com/kill/66931581/
[iii] A general MMO term for running multiple accounts at the same time.
[v] For non-EVE players and non-PVPers: when you right-click and ‘approach’ another ship in your UI-prosthesis, your vessel will automatically follow them at top speed. In major fleets, everyone does this on the FC, so that only one person actually has to click in space, and the whole fleet just follows. This is perhaps the epitome of fleet combat reducing the skills needed for members so that they can fly more accounts at the same time.
Isk Averse 
I was already impressed, and then you wrote about multiboxing.
Now, I am doubly so.
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