EVE Online (wiki link) is a game that manages to utterly fascinate me, despite my having no desire to play it whatsoever.
The short version, for those who don't know: it's a space opera massively multiplayer game. It's like Everquest or World of Warcraft, but if everyone was Han Solo (or Mal Reynolds, if you prefer), all with a thick layer of cyberpunk sauce.
(Side note: "Cyberpunk Sauce" would be an excellent band name.)
The thing I find so fascinating is the amount of insane social stuff that happens around the game. The game assumes - or at least *allows* - for the players to play criminals, and as a result, the sort of behavior that would get you kicked out of any other MMO gets you more or less a high-five in EVE.
For example, one of the major game-play components is that players can start and run corporations. Like banks.
So, Ponzi Schemes are all over the place. Also, banks that turn out to be Ponzi schemes, whereupon the investors find this out, form a space-posse, and murder the heads of the organizations and steal all their stuff, also commonplace. Meanwhile, the game developers are all grins, because that's the game they wanted to run.
(There's a story from a few years back, which I assume is true, where one of the larger banks in the game, with jillions of player's in game money in it, was revealed to be a Ponzi scheme. But, the story goes that this was revealed by the guy who was running the con, who proceeded to fold the operation, take all the money he's acquired, buy the best ship in the game, and then take out a huge bounty on himself. I mean, that's awesome.)
Anyway, some crazy stuff happened last week - crazy even by EVE standards. I'm not going to try to recap, but this Ragdoll Metaphyics column over on Offworld does a great job summing it up.
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