Day 9: Avatar and story

I don't remember where I read this, but it stood out: in Eve, your ship is your avatar. Totally makes sense: although you design a character and even pose him/her for a portrait picture, the first and sometimes only look other players get of "you"is your ship.

From Azyl Alfa

Here's me. Or, one of my twins. A Gallente Catalyst. I suppose my destroyer has different guns and other accoutrements. Bought it for 5 million ISK (the in-game currency). I have no idea how fast it can do the Kessel Run.

This is all a bit different than other Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (I think -- I've never played another MMORPG, other than a few days of The Old Republic), where the individual avatar is something human-ish, anthropomorphized, with a face, and it's you. Or game-you. Starfleet Online gives you a starship to flit about in, but you have a person-ish character steering it, you recruit individuals to crew your ship, and you even leave it from time to time to putter about worlds. Vehicles are a critical component of Battlefield and Halo, but you play as a discernible human(oid) who enters, emerges from, and/or splatters against those war machines.

So, it's different. Neat. I, for one, am glad I don't have anything distinctly me-looking as my online presence. Going all the way back to Knights of the Old Republic, I've always used character creators to try to make something vaguely me-ish, and the outcome is always way too flattering.

Does the de-emphasis on an arms-and-legs persona contribute to Eve being a distinctly "out of character" RPG? (I don't have a point of comparison for how much other MMORPG denizens chat in- or out-of-character.) Everything I read about character creation said the race, ethnic, and gender choices are purely cosmetic. And, from what I can tell, there are no barriers to changing your character's appearance -- unlike, say, recent The Elder Scrolls or Fallout games, which present a big warning about not being able to change your character's appearance after the tutorial.

I suppose it makes sense, too, that you wouldn't populate a big galaxy with up to 1.5 million (500,000 players times three characters per player) characters without providing any kind of ongoing narrative. There is lore, and it looks like expansions sometimes add depth, but there is no change. Hilmar Petursson, CEO of Eve developer CCP, told Polygon that CCP is not "telling the story of the game." Seemingly in the same breath, he said, "The game is the players" (Polygon's/Petursson's emphsis). Players. Not characters. Where there is conflict, it's based on players' decisions, not in response to a third-party story arc. Eve has some built-in missions, with names and places and a conflict, but they are bite-size, with no mass and evaporate upon completion. In fact, I've been offered a couple of identical tutorial-esque missions more than once, with only the locations changing.

And having written all that, I'm scratching my head a bit: I've always enjoyed games for their stories as much as or more so than their gameplay. I love Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for its innovative story-telling twists; Call of Duty: Ghosts, meanwhile, plays pretty much the same way, but it has a lame story and I commensurately dislike the product. Mass Effect 3's gameplay is more refined, but I prefer the first and second games' narratives (Like Garrus, at right, I miss the elevator-as-load-screen chitchat from the first Mass Effect). The best part of Mass Effect 3? The final DLC, which has no gunplay, no leveling up, and is all about a final farewell to some great characters. Knights of the Old Republic II has some wonderful tweaks to gameplay over the first game, but the first one ... well, the first one doesn't have entire storylines eviscerated and left bleeding. You can guess which one I prefer.

So, at first glance, one of the biggest draws for me in a video game isn't part of Eve. I have an inkling what's compensating for that, so far at least: a sense of growing my (non-)character. My capsuleer serves one important purpose I've figured out so far: serving as a bucket for skill points. Filling this bucket is what allows me to access new avatars, i.e. ships, and allows me to do better things with them. I'll write more about this sense of making progress later.

Day 9: Welcome!?

Shortly after the first post went up, I found this interesting essay about Eve posted at Polygon.

Lots of things stand out. I mentioned one already: some kind of overlap between playing Eve and building a model ship. But the presence of just one woman quoted in the article sparked a memory of something my wife said nine days ago: she suggested I create a female character ("capsuleer") to see whether I'd be harassed because of the character's (and other players' supposition about my) gender.

Unfortunately, there are lots of examples that dovetail with that kind of behavior toward women: reporter Josh Mattingly's harassment of game designer Laralyn McWilliams, threats of violence toward Anna Sarkeesian, the #1ReasonWhy hashtag before the 2013 Game Developers Conference, a professional gamer's wretched treatment at the hands of her coach, and the inane disbelief of Aisha Tyler's love of video games, to name a few.

All of which are awful. And while I think the vast majority of game players are as appalled by this behavior as I am, I think there's also a much broader exclusionary mindset among game-players than many folks realize or want to admit. In addition to the attention toward the poor treatment of women who play games (and even as characters), there's lots of vitriol toward other populations: beyond the more obvious awful language about e.g. gays and blacks during in-game trash talk, there's much nasty language about new, unskilled, and casual game-players. I even demure from using the word "gamer" because it's often part of the "You're not a [real] gamer because [arbitrary X]." And even though I'm squarely in the middle when it comes to game-buying and -playing demographics, might innate sense of gamer-ness

Many of PBS Game/Show's videos focus on community, and most recently (as of this post, and embedded at right) tried to define "gamer"ness. Beyond this one, host Jamin Warren asks questions about racism, the portrayal and stereotypes of men in games, trolls, sexual orientation, violence, and even (relevant to my wife's initial suggestion) playing a character whose gender is opposite your own.

When it comes to language and welcome-ness online, I often think of a Penny Arcade comic from 2004 that, tongue only mildly lodged against cheek, remains relevant. That caricature, though, is a small but disproportionately loud and impactful population. A more contemporary and thoughtful look into that discomfort-minded population comes from the University of Manitoba, who found strong correlation between trolling (granted, just one type of exclusionary act) and the "dark triad" of narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Yowser.

The aforementioned Polygon essay makes clear that trolling and griefing are a big part of Eve. And that's not my cup of tea. But, that essay also spotlights some of the polar opposite -- facilitators, helpers, and generally nice folk -- and that sounds pretty swell. I hope to stumble into more of the latter than the former. Eve lets players create three characters per account. If I decide to create a second character, I'll probably make her female, and we'll see what happens.

Day 8: Going to write about this

This fall, I started building a model ship, the Albatros. When the difficulty curve for this project has kicked up, I've sometimes redirected my mind toward video games: Splinter-Cell (meh), Call of Duty (blah), and Lego Marvel Super Heroes (yeah!) all distracted me from nailing planks and gluing strakes.

Most recently, though, it's Eve Online. Why? I'd heard about Eve off and on for a long time: the web occasionally lights up with videos of enormous space battles, and Eve is mentioned in the after-aftermath coverage of Sean Smith (one of the oft-unnamed in the refrain about "Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans"). Furthermore: I'm a sci-fi nerd. And as much as games divert from building Albatros, there is a shared notion of ship-ness between Eve and my model that appeals to something deep in my DNA. Plus, hey, 14-day free trial! So, last weekend: downloaded, installed, puttered.

It was about day 6 when I asked my wife whether she was okay with us paying the monthly subscriber fee.

There are a lot of things about Eve that fascinate me. There are a few things I'm absolutely wary of (that were even barriers to me giving it a try earlier). From what I've seen and read, there are some aspects of the Eve community that are hugely appealing, but also some of the same things that make me wary of the online gaming "community" in general.

As much as I like ships, I like writing. That's why I've been writing about building Albatros, and that's why I'm going to write about Eve. Whether I'm flexing my hand-eye coordination with tweezers or a mouse, it's nice to process my thinking and ideas through the written word. So, here's the first one. More to come.