XVI – Where You Been???
Well, gentle reader, the more interesting question might be where have you been. There’s far more of you than there are of me, so the answers would probably be pretty varied (though if I know EVE players the answer is probably either “at my coding job” or “at my PC playing other games”) and, if the few thousand…
XV – EVE is Dead
EVE is dead. And if you’re part of the EVE community, you probably already know what I mean. You’ve probably heard this quite a few times yourself, and for probably the entire time you’ve played the game—yes, even if you’ve played since 2003. Simply put, people have been declaring this game dead for as long…
XIV – New Dawn: Horizontal Balance and the Nature of Pay-to-Win
Well, if you’re at all immersed in the EVE community, you know there’s been a bit of a hurricane since I last posted (no, not the battlecruiser). After the recently announced ‘New Dawn’ industry changes, many EVE players have been in revolt.[i] No doubt some of this has been driven from the top levels of…
XIII – Pindar-Posting: What Really Are Battlereports?
I wrote in Post I on this blog about how I think EVE in general is a work of art; and given the huge social movements towards esports, it seems entirely fair to say that EVE is also, if not a form of athletics, a form of competition. Generally, in our culture, we see art…
Intro – What are EVE Biographies?
Virginia Woolf wrote that “Few poets and novelists are capable of that high degree of tension which gives us reality. But almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests…
XII – Tanizaki vs the Triglavians: the Role of Mystery in Worldbuilding
Imagine that a novel begins: Sam got out of the car and went into the gas station to buy cigarettes and a flashlight. There’s nothing to suggest that this shouldn’t be true—that at some point this didn’t or couldn’t happen—and so we, as readers, accept it. We suspend our disbelief for a few more lines. …
XI – Speaking EVE: Specialized Language as a Way to Define Fleet Size
The first time I met up a friend from EVE was at a restaurant in Manhattan, near his hotel. He and his soon-to-be fiancée had flown up from Texas, and my partner and I had taken the train two hours down the banks of the Hudson from where we went to school. As most EVE…
X – I Don’t See the Point: Playing EVE While Blind
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…
IX – “It Doesn’t Matter Until it Matters”: Strategic vs Recreational Gameplay, Part Three
I swing open the side panel of my ancient Area 51 and set a small fan pointing at it. On Discord, there are half a dozen pictures of my corpmates’ computers set up about the same. This is our version of shoring up the trenches before the guns start to toll. I pause a moment…
VIII – “Why You Running?”: Strategic vs Recreational Gameplay, Part Two
“Oh come on, we’re just trying to give a good fight,” they write in local as we’re defensive-bubbling and running for our lives. It began with a Gnosis, who wandered into us seemingly on his search for deeper truths. Shockingly (not shockingly) it was bait. We were 1 jump out of GE-, back when it…
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