Playing the long game

My daughter was born a couple of weeks ago. There's a lame joke to be made about a frigate-sized baby requiring many years of real-world skill training to pilot. But, the more apt observation is that this noob is handily piloting a pair of Titan-sized tenders.

February 15, 2014, was my first day with Eve. Since then, my family has moved, we've had a baby, and my dog has doubled in size. In the game, I've churned through five characters, whittled down to three. (Yesterday, I briefly regretted getting rid of my stripminer, Rosy: picking at asteroids seems an easy, casual way to do something in the game while doing a 3:00 a.m. bottle feeding. But, then I remembered: I'd much rather sit in our nice corner rocking chair than this creaky desk chair. So, no sweat.) In that span, I've flown over a dozen types of ships, racing up to cruisers and battlecruisers, plateauing for a spell with a battleship, clawing my way into a marauder ... only to look around and wish for the speed and energy of a frigate. It's all been very exciting.

I wrote before about trying to squeeze in as much Eve as possible before baby's arrival, but alas that didn't happen. Spent more time playing X-Wing Alliance, plus a bit of Grim Fandango. All other things being equal -- or, unchanged -- I'd be jumping headlong back into Eve. While X-Wing games have been fun, their nostalgia and neo-novelty value is waning, but Eve is always fresh, and I have plenty of goals I've barely crawled toward. But: baby!

Soon after leaving graduate school, I made one of my first Adult Decisions: I took $100 and put it in a Certificate of Deposit. A year later, I'd made $6 interest! Well, Eve is about to become my next CD, with a minimum one-year term: no-touch (much), but with higher value when it comes out of the oven. And that's due to a big change in the game in November: CCP removed the requirement that all queued skills begin training within 24 hours, and players now can queue up to 50 skills regardless of when training starts.

Well, Eemiv has 50 skills lined up, training time to complete in about a year. (Technically, a bit sooner: in April, I'll realign Eemiv's core attributes to accelerate training.) Eemiv's core ship-fitting skills are pretty well maxed out; a year hence, he'll be maxed out in additional gunnery, maneuver, and ship types. Dengar's parallel queue isn't as long, only about 60 days: I've tightly trained her up for frigates and cruisers (around which she's well maxed out) and, more recently, logistics. In about a month, her parallel training (which costs extra money) will end; when Eemiv's queue is done, Dengar's remaining 30 days will wrap up. I'll continue to update Eemiv's skill planning spreadsheet as things tick off -- thank you, Eve Droid, for keeping me posted on these developments without me needing to log in or fire up Evemon in bootcamp. My final character, Talon, has a few market orders ending in about a week: I'll need to renew them, and that's kind of a blessing because it also means I can consolidate a few of them.

As I've thought about the changes that come with having a baby, I've realized that as much as I love games, I enjoy reading and writing more. Those two things are more compatible with being interrupted by an unpredictable child. (And, when there is time for games, titles kike Grim Fandango are a better fit than Eve in my current circumstances.) Still, I plan to continue to write about Eve -- I have a few draft entries begun -- but this may be coupled with a few other topics. I've given some thought to consolidating this blog with my blog on model-building, and perhaps just broaden it to be "a place to write about stuff" (such as the books I'm reading: I just finished Leviathan Wakes, which was pretty amazing). We will see.

o7, everyone.

Ctrl Alt

I've created another alternate character to train up and get involved with player-vs-player combat. As I train her up, I'm remembering another refrain I encountered when I started playing and reading about Eve: some folks rush to pilot larger ships, but there's a lot of fun and even wisdom to be had with smaller vessels.

I'm certainly seeing this now. My main character for a while has been running level 4 missions in a powerful Navy-issue Megathron. It's fun to blow up so many pirates and other NPCs, and the loot is good: my station-trading character has made good money on his own, and selling off the loot has been a nice bonus. I've been good, too, about training up support skills to make sure I'm not flying a glass cannon.

But, the Megathron is slow. And in larger missions, I get tired of alternating between grinding down on enemy battleships and then micro-warping away so my big, slow guns can track more nimble frigates (even with drone support). Some missions have taken two hours to complete, and my completionist personality doesn't allow for blitzing missions.

My first forays into PvP with the new alt have been mixed: I enjoy the swiftness of flying Atron and Incursus frigates. Now knowing what I'm doing, the tutorial missions (which I did for some money and faction standing) flew by. It's nice to have a skill-training plan with a notion of what I'm aiming for. And training for small-scale ships and modules will be speedy compared to working away for large ships and modules.

I jumped into Factional Warfare and promptly got blown up twice. First, I went to a friendly industrial complex where my dinky Atron was promptly blown up by an enemy tier 2 (i.e. more kick-butt) frigate. Got a new one, refitted, jumped back in and really screwed up: I flew down a friendly complex, thinking I should just fly around defending it. Alas, I guess anyone flying into a complex triggers the defenses: a "friendly" vessel started shooting me. Oh, well. I shot back for a while. And then an actual enemy arrived and blew up my ship. I warped out in my pod, which his corp-mate promptly exploded. Dang.

Both of these stemmed from some errors on my part: I should have just warped out as soon as I saw trouble in both areas. But, I didn't. I'll do better next time. In the meantime, I've also joined the Blue Fleet [Corporation], in constant (fun) warfare with the Red Fleet. Red vs. Blue has hundreds of members with lots of stuff going on; I could see this as my lever into really figuring out PvB and getting the most out of Eve, especially on the community/group-play front.

I'm reminded of playing Dragon Age: I finished the game with my initial character, a bulky soldier who carried a big sword. But, I got the most from the game -- accessing quests, garnering rewards, leveling up to cause the most damage for my play style -- with my second character, a nimble dwarven sneak-thief. There was virtue in not being a tank and also, in the second go-around, knowing what skills and talents to allocate level-up points to. Ditto my preference for speed over brawn in the X-Wing games: give me a nimble A-wing over the stronger X-wing or lunky B-wing any day.

Why Waterworld will never have hoverboards

You can't [verb] in space. Unless you've got power.

One of my favorite terms from high school chemistry, which I often use as a metaphor in my job, is limiting reagent. Mr. Bloomfield explained with peanut butter & jelly sandwiches: if you have one swimming pool full of jelly, another full of peanut butter, and two slices of bread, how many PB&Js can you make? Just two; bread is the limiting reagent.

Games have limiting reagents. Some are bottlenecks to shoulder through, others are walls that send you rebounding. Often they are resources that need balancing, decision points that draw the player into the game and reflect one's play style. Where the metaphor breaks from chemistry is that often the "limited" resource is merely the one that replenishes the slowest or has the lowest value; games aren't one chemical reaction, but rather several repeated hundreds of times.

Eve has a few of these limits: there are millions of ships to buy, but I can only snag as many as my pocketfull of in-game currency will cover. There are thousands of world, but the rate at which I visit them is bound by the ship's in-game speed and my real-world time.

And then there's power.

A capacitor readout, showing a full charge.
From NevilleSmit.com

Power management is nothing new. Wing Commander's energy weapons sit idle while recharging if you go guns blazin' and drain them faster than they replenish. Three years later, X-Wing played it differently: you need to balance power flow to engines, weapons, and shields. To recharge weapons, recover shields, or improve speed, the player-pilot must sacrifice one or both of the other resources. It was a great way to bolster my awareness of what was going on around me: could I, for example, afford to zero out my shields and weapons to race ahead to reach an injured vessel? When I got there, did I reduce my ship to a relative crawl to rebuild both my offense and defense? Or would I be better off leveraging my speed and powering my weapons, to hell with the shields because I would destroy all the TIE fighters before they got a shot at me? Although not portrayed in the game, Mass Effect's tremendously rich codex delves convincingly into balancing power use, heat dissipation, and stealth in deep space.

Eve's power readout is prominently centered at the bottom or top edge of the screen. It's a glowing circle that, unlike the icons to fire guns or launch a menu item, you can't readily intuit its meaning. I remember looking at Eve screenshots and puzzling about this persistent decorative gourd in the user interface.

Now that I know what it is, I sometimes lose sight of it. It's pretty innocuous, slowly trickling full or evaporating as I do stuff. A few times, though, I told my ship to do something right now but it didn't do it right now, and that's when all of a sudden I noticed the glowing circle had abandoned me: I'd taxed my ship too hard, and it needed to catch its breath. While getting blasted by pirates. Oops. It's insidious, too: unlike every other interface feature, the readout is strictly informative: clicking on it doesn't bring up a menu or execute an action; all I can do is hover over it and bear the gradual change in percentage, up or down. Not surprisingly, lots of skills and gear affect the rate at which this supply ebbs, fills, and even how deep its well runs.

I especially like the conceit behind Eve's power management. One of the oddball things about X-Wing is that it asks you to believe that a thousands-of-years-old pan-galactic military-industrial complex can create tiny starfighters capable of interstellar travel, but that the only way to recharge their weapons or shields is to sacrifice speed. If I deplete my lasers and fly in circles for an hour without diverting power from somewhere, the lasers won't recharge one iota. That just doesn't parse.

Eve does it a bit differently. The ships, whether gargantuan titans or tiny frigates, have tremendous engines that power their massive hulls. These engines also feed a capacitor, which stores surplus energy. Why? Each bit of equipment has an activation energy tax: it takes a few megajoules to fire that gun or to flip on that scanner. Too many simultaneous draws, the idea goes, would overwhelm the power plant, so the ship uses the capacitor for when it's needed en masse. The orb indicates how full the capacitor is, but there's a massive powerplant behind it. If I repeatedly fire full barrages, I could drain the capacitor, but it will gradually refill as the power plant sends it extra joules, tick-tick-ticking as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage. It's a nice texture in the game's lore, and I look forward to finding more of them.

Day 18: Daily countdown

Experience is a delivery device for skills, knowledge, and connections -- a trio that garner opportunity, advancement, and prosperity. Eve works much the same way.

Eve presents skills interestingly. Skills allow you and/or your ship to do stuff; while the label might change (feats, abilities, talents), they're a roleplaying game (RPG) trope, back to Dungeons & Dragons. In some games, your character's actions create "experience points," and you "level up" and improve a skill or two at various point thresholds. Usually, you choose to improve a skill relevant to your gameplay, but you're not required to. In the first Mass Effect, you could kill lots of bad guys with your pistol, then improve your pistol skills at level-ups -- or, instead, you could invest in persuasion or grenades, even if you rarely use those abilities.

I enjoy the Elder Scrolls games in part because skill progression works differently: to get better at something, you have to do it. Want to be a powerful swordsman? Swing one at bad guys. A lot. It's a lite version of the "10,000-Hours Rule" from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, or James Kirk telling a cadet that "we learn by doing."

Eve does its own thing, functionally and aesthetically. To start developing a skill, you acquire the relevant skill book -- digiliterally,* an item represented by an anachronistic tome.  (*My own portmanteaux: "literally," within the digital world's conceit. "My teammate literally stabbed me in the back with an energy sword!" complained the Halo player. No: your teammate did it digiliterally.) Skills take time to develop: sometimes five minutes, sometimes weeks. Once that countdown elapses, bam, you can do something new or better. Each skill has five levels of mastery, with stacking bonuses (e.g. an additional 5% boost in mining laser efficiency for each tier), and each level takes exponentially more time to reach. Some skills are prerequisites for others. The clock ticks in real time, and it ticks even when you're not logged in: my capsuleer right now is training Industry to level 5, and it won't be fully baked for nearly four days. It doesn't matter whether I play a lot or not at all during that span: come Monday morning, my character will reap a four-percent boost to manufacturing time.

At first, I lamented that Eve didn't have a more Elder Scrolls-esque recognition for "getting better" by doing. Maybe it's the educator in me. But, then it dawned on me that Eve's closest relation in this regard isn't an RPG, but rather the turn-based strategy game Civilization. (Note, again: strategy games, unlike RPGs, don't care too much about characterization or storytelling.) Civilization doesn't have skills per se, but it does have a technology tree: you invest time in unlocking technologies, from the wheel to nuclear physics, with each technology leading to another. Like an RPG's and Eve's skills, Civilization's technology allow players to do stuff: fly, communicate, wage war, and foster commerce.

The skill queue has a neat mechanic without a parallel in Civilization: all skills in the queue must begin within 24 hours. I could line up 23 hours of quickie skills, and then one more that will take 26 days to train (e.g. Advanced Weapon Upgrades V, clocking in for me at 25 days, 19 hours and 50 minutes) -- but, until the time remaining dips below 24 hours again, I can't add anything more to the in-game queue. This is a nice preventative against, say, lining up a month's worth of skills, then returning to the game world as something of a badass (although lacking commensurate knowledge, something else I mentioned at the beginning and about which I'll write later).

No surprise, there are myriad third-party tools and apps that help players plan their skill queuing much further ahead then the 24-hour start-time requirement. I use Vitality and Aura. It's daunting to see that it will take 100 days to fulfill the remaining minimum skill requirements to fly a kind of über ship that caught my eye. But, it's also been nice to see the counter for piloting a new miner tick down to just three days. And, hey: while the clock ticks down for the big ship, I'll use that miner to harvest resources to start building smaller ships, or just harvesting ore to sell to pay for the big guy. One thing leads to the next.

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.