Goals update

In March, I laid out goals that I ended up accomplishing two months later. Along the way, an underlying goal for myself was to figure out what gameplay styles I liked and to identify what, if anything, I'm playing for. Time, I think, to lay out some new goals now that I'm more attuned to the game. Within two months, I want to

• Equip and operate Eemiv's Kronos Marauder with tech 2 equipment. Tech 2 modules have a performance edge over basic "tech 1" modules, but they require higher levels of skill training. For example, to mount 425mm Prototype Gauss Guns on the Kronos, Eemiv needed to train the Large Hybrid Turret skill to level I. To equip the tech 2 425mm Railgun IIs, Eemiv needs Large Hybird Turret to level V and Sharpshooter to level V (about four weeks' additional training time) ...  and when that's done, he needs to train Large Railgun Specialization to level I (just an hour -- but, several more weeks if I decide to bump that up Level V, too). Not all tech 2 modules have such steep requirements; the ship already mostly has tech 2, but there are some holdouts. Tech 2 modules also generally require higher resources from the ship -- power supply, computing power, etc. Fortunately, Eemiv has already trained up most of the core "fitting" skills that affect these systems to level V. I did a quick sketch of the math, and it looks like meeting this goal will require at most a month's time if I plunge right through it.
• Create a jump clone of Eemiv and move one of them out to low-security space. I enjoy high-security space mission running, but it's time to get my feet wet living and playing, too, in riskier low- or maybe even null-security space. Jump clones are a carbon copy of the character and, once every 24 hours, you can swap from one to the other. Therefore, I can e.g. jump over to my high-security clone after work and fly a mission for some ISK, and then on the weekend set out for more lucrative looting in low-security areas.
• Participate in at least two RvB weekend events, including one that involves flying and fighting in cruisers. This is for the Dengar character, and a chance for me to get more comfortable with PvP. Two weekend events might not seem like much, but even this might be a bit of a stretch because of a few competing real-world priorities.

I also have one stretch desire, not time-bound so it isn't a goal per se: train up Eemiv for tech 2 logistics ship piloting, and get experience supporting other pilots. This is a career/skill track I'm increasingly curious about, and even leans toward my playstyle in e.g. Team Fortress II and Battlefield: Bad Company II, where I often was a medic. 

Wear a helmet

About to set out on my commute
From Wikimedia Commons

While pedaling my bike last month, it occurred to me that there are some parallels between riding a bike and playing Eve. I somehow managed not to get hit by a car while in reverie thinking about this:

• Pick a route carefully
• A shiny, expensive vehicle only gets you so far
• Fit matters
• Don't put yourself on "autopilot"
• Learn by doing

Routing: there are two reasonable routes between work and home, and each has a major drawback. One is a low-traffic route that has a hinky and awkward-to-cross T-intersection, and the other offers a more direct route but more lights and traffic. I've taken both and prefer the former: one awkward spot is preferable to lots of stop-and-go at lights (and more exhaust to suck down). With Eve, too, I'm paying close attention to traffic levels and loss reports when wandering into and through low-security space.

Spaceman Spiff's pricey officer and storyline equipment didn't
compensate for fitting mixed guns and low Frigate skills.
From Bill Watterson (panel cropped and flipped)

Buying success: I bought a nice bike, but certainly I didn't splurge for a carbon nanofiber über-cycle. Besides cost, I don't have the skill to take advantage of one; a better bike doesn't make for a better bike-and-rider combination. Similarly, as I've learned with Eve, buying an expensive ship and giving it gear with better stats won't me a super-duper space cowboy. Even after spending time training up the skills to fly a nice ship, an expensive vessel can be stymied by equipping it with superfluous stuff, not adjusting the overview or other UI pieces to suit your needs, not training up important ancillary support skills, autopiloting, etc. As you may have surmised, I bought a couple of PLEX soon after I started playing to lay my hands on a couple of nice ships I'd like to train toward -- but, I've tried to be diligent, too, to try my chops with all the other littler and less-expensive ships I can get my hands on, and always keeping to the essential Eve adage of not flying what I can't afford to lose. In a broader essay about ship loss, Nonnak Severin also points out that "equipping the best item ... does not" make someone the best pilot in Eve -- for more, see below.

Fit: one reason my previous bike rarely got used was I realized after a few bouncy trips down the C&O Canal bicycle path that it was just a poor fit for my body. Ladening the bike, too, with unnecessary gear made it a pain to get it up and the down my apartment stairs. In Eve, fitting refers to what equipment you strap onto your ship: guns, engines, armor plates, etc. You want to fit your ship with an eye toward the types of enemies you might encounter, e.g. a pirate hunter will equipment weapons and protection against the type of damage a particular pirate type deals out and is susceptible to. You also fit your ship in response to your skills: my main character has higher skills for armor than shields; I get more benefit from fitting gear that helps my armor stats than equipment suited to shields. And fitting also refers to broader guidelines and principles: for example, don't equip both short- and long-range guns (because then you bring only ~50% of your potential firepower onto an enemy) and don't mix armor and shield buffing equipment (stick with one). The folks at The Mittani have a BINGO card for poor fits as part of their Awful Loss of the Day; here's a recent one, also by Nonnak Severin. But beyond that, and back to my ill-suited previous bike: the ship and gear need to be a good fit for what you want to do. With Eemiv, I prefer railguns at long range over combat drones, hence a Megathron over the drone-friendly Dominix. With Dengar, I'm enjoying quick movement and rapid fire, hence sticking with an Incursus frigate and not catapulting to something much bigger.

Armor buffer tank
From Giro

Autopilot: an actual thing in Eve, which has the downside of depositing you significant distance from your destination, making you vulnerable to attack. Just don't do it. On my bike, this is the metaphorical state of not being mindful of my surroundings, spending too much time thinking (e.g. about this blog post). My bike has only the most meager of buffer tanks against damage.

Experience: it matters. I now know the traffic sensor by the mall will, in fact, detect a bike; that the biggest hill is early on the commute home, so maybe I shouldn't pedal full-speed until I cross the train tracks; that most drivers will yield to me at four-way stops. And I've learned that even the people who blow me up are also very nice and offer insight; I'm not the only person who sometimes needs to drop out of a fleet to tend to family; and that there is never a want of something to do in Eve.

Make good decisions

[I made a pretty bad spreadsheet error before I posted this. See the next entry for the correction.]

I made a few additions to the skill-planning spreadsheet I created and shared with the world. It was easy enough to have it calculate how long it would take to train all the 105 skills I've identified as "important" up one level from their current state. Today, I plugged in the math to calculate how long it would take to max out all those skills to level 4.

22.5 years.

Yes, it would take over two decades to train all the skills useful to my capsuleer to their maximum level. That's almost twice as long as the game's existed. Among registered users at Eveboard, the character Drahcir Nasom has the most Level V skills: 286, developed for almost 11 years. In that time, Eve has made lots of changes to how skills and skill-learning work. In fact, this summer they will make some tweaks to skills affecting resource processing and drone operation. Those seem relatively miniscule, though, compared to a massive 2010 skill-learning overhaul and another affecting ship piloting last summer.

Last week, I wrote about how this spreadsheet has helped me make decisions. One specific example is the Cybernetics skill. This skill allows the character to use increasingly potent implants, some of which increase core attribute values. There are five attributes, and their values affect the rate at which the character learns skills. Therefore, more powerful implants allow for faster skill training. That said, the accelerated rate is relatively small, perhaps shaving a few hours from a skill-training time that otherwise takes days. Thanks to the spreadsheet, I ascertained that the time up front to max out Cybernetics and install the most powerful implants will save much more time from future training. It's a good investment.

Currently, my Cybernetics level is at 4, and the math above is based on how rapidly my character trains with current-level implants. Maxing the skill to level 5 and plugging in the appropriate implants does, in fact, shave some time off that 23-year figure.

It brings it down to just under 22 years.

Removing the implants and their bonus? Over 27 years to max those skills. If, after looking at the spreadsheet, you're curious: my VLOOKUP skill is about level 4.

These numbers, though, are kind of red herrings. My "important skills" cover a lot of territory, and only a few of them are so important that I feel an urge to max them out: Cybernetics for one, plus a few that are prerequisites for ships I want to fly or more advanced skills to develop. In truth, right now there are fewer than a dozen that I'd prioritize maxing out.

I wrote to a friend last week that in Eve, "you can be fair to pretty good in multiple areas of gameplay, or truly superb at one." It might've been more apt to replace or with and: I'll take most of the skills important to me up to level 3 or 4 and, in the course of trying them on and getting into a groove, decide on a subset to get really good at, i.e. max out. Given enough time, maybe that group grows. What I didn't think of at the time is that there's a whole area of skills and experience I right now don't plan to delve much into, e.g. frigates and destroyers and their commensurate small-scale weapons, missile-heavy Caldari hulls or laser-happy Amarrian ships, or stocks and market manipulation. Put another way: I've tagged 105 skills as important, but the game offers close to 400. And, of course, anything can change.

It occurs to me that this openness of pursuits, with a vast timeline and squirrely to-do list and no due date, reminds me of another project I'm involved with. I've edited Wikipedia since July 2005, and one of that project's tenets also seems relevant when thinking about Eve skill training: there is no deadline.

There are good folks in New Eden

After Die Hard, Scrooged is my favorite Christmas movie. It starts with a pair of promos for a TV network's rendition of A Christmas Tale: the first from milquetoast execs, the second from the boss, Frank Cross. The latter is meant to make viewers terrified to miss the special, and it sets the tone with a bevy of "similarly" terrifying issues: acid rain, drug addiction, international terrorism, freeway killers.

Ah, freeway killers. Ran into them. Twice.

The first time was kind of a stunner. I had picked up a contract to haul a bunch of stuff from point A to point B in the game's high-security (high-sec) area. High-sec is new-player friendly, a usually pretty safe if boring sandbox to figure things out. Alas, I was suicide ganked, i.e. my ship blown up out from under me, and then someone picked up all the precious cargo from the scraps (I'll explain the suicide part in a bit). I had a browser window open over most of the game and caught a flash of red, heard an explosion, but didn't see it happen. Dang. I did, however, get kill rights on the offender, i.e. I could later fight them without fear of retribution from the in-game cops.

My capsule docked, and I started puttering in the market, shopping for a new cargo ship with my insurance money and trying not to think too much about the now-lost collateral I had to give up to snag the contract. In the midst of this, I got a message from another player who'd been nearby, saw what happened, and followed the offenders. (Yes, offenders: the in-game cops showed up and blew away the guy who killed me, which was predictable, hence the suicide part of suicide ganking; however, he had an alternate account simultaneously logged in or a colleague in the area who scooped up my cargo, which is perfectly legal.) He sent me the location in case I was interested in sweet vengeance, and he also offered to just blow him up if I sold him those kill rights (a cool mechanic). Not being anywhere near my regular crash pad and combat ship, I just gave him the rights and, not too much later, got a notice telling me the attacker had been blown up. Nice!

Around the same time, I also got a message from another player. He offered condolences on my loss and offered me an invitation to join his tiny, four-player corporation. They're more into the player-versus-player (PvP) aspect of the game, which I'm not quite ready to jump into (of my own volition, at least), but it was a nice offer, regardless.

The other time I got destroyed, it was totally my fault: I picked up a contract that would take me into low-security (low-sec) space, where guns are freer to fire without repercussion. Sure enough, I blindly jumped into low-sec just hoping for the best. I was immediately warp-scrambled (i.e. I couldn't escape with my faster-than-light drive) and my poorly-defended ship was blown away in seconds. I completely deserved it.

And, I learned from it, too. I discovered a filter built into the map that lets you see how many pilots have been in a particular area in the last half hour, and also how many kills within a similarly tight window. There are some other useful views, too. This meant that before I picked up my next contract going into low-sec, I checked recent activity and made an informed decision about whether to take the contract. I did, and got in and out unscathed. And I now have, too, a new ship hull to train up for: the game has blockade runners, which can equip extra protections (even a cloaking device) to deal specifically with low-sec space. It's about 20 days of skill-training time, and I might queue up the long ones when I'm next on vacation.

Funeral dirge

As I began playing Eve, one refrain in the tutorials and wiki pages had me defiant, doubtful, and insecure: "accept the fact that you'll lose your ship."

Yeah, right, I thought. That's just for the folks who shoot at other live folks. I'm going to play it cool, conservative, stock up on overwhelming firepower before jumping into anything.

Um, no.

My pride and joy, the Brutix battlecruiser Lady Roso (somewhat named after my wife), got blown up last night. And it was completely unnecessary, stemming from inattentiveness on my part.

I was running a level II mission. "I hear some pirates are blocking a useful acceleration gate," said the agent who asked for help. "Flay them, and leave their vacuum-desiccated corpses as a reminder to all who follow!"

Good money and a quick fight; no problem for my tall ship and gallant crew. Generally speaking, level II missions can be knocked out by a cruiser-sized ship; taking a battlecruiser (a baseline hull for level III missions) is often overkill, i.e exactly what I want. Huzzah!

Unfortunately, it didn't take long before I started getting knocked around like a ragdoll. One of the dozen or so pirates consistently jammed my ability to lock a target. I could latch onto something to shoot if I got very close, but then it didn't take long for my shields and armor to get stripped away. Soon after I jumped in the first time, I frantically recovered my drones, jumped out, and repaired the ship. I thought, maybe, I'd destroyed one enemy vessel -- but, that might've instead just been me losing target lock again. There was a six-hour window to complete the mission, though, and it was decent money; I figured I could just wear this out through attrition, with plenty of time to walk and play with the dog between waves.

The second time I jumped in, I figured out what ship was jamming me, and managed to tear it apart. Things were looking up!

But then another ship began jamming, and I was pretty close to the bad guys. Shields and armor gone, and rapidly taking damage to the last line of defense, the underlying structure. I begged my drones to return and started the jump-out sequence. But, too late: before I could escape, Lady Roso disintegrated around me; there was a brief flash of explosion before my character's capsule -- a vessel within the vessel that, in this instance, acts as an escape pod -- jumped to safety. It reminded me a bit of the Odyssey's destruction in Deep Space Nine's second-season finale: a frantic battle with a big ship and tiny support craft getting torn apart by smaller but better bad guys. The show's producers used a ship of the same class as The Next Generation's USS Enterprise to stun viewers: "This could just as easily have been Captain Picard blown to bits." I was almost just as jarred by how quickly Lady Roso bit the dust.

Baffled, too. Two of the enemy ships were battlecruisers, just like mine -- I thought that was odd, not having seen any in previous level II missions. But other tough missions instead have twice as many enemies or strong missile and laser batteries. This wasn't the case here: those two battlecruisers aside, the others were all frigates or tiny fighters, and not too many of them. On the face of it, it shouldn't be tough; yet, the persistent jamming incapacitated my ship.

Fortunately, Roso was insured (yes, this game has insurance: six levels of coverage, in fact); I bought and fit a new battlecruiser, New Roso, and set forth. I had to hop around to a couple of stations to pick up fittings: railguns from one station, a pair of capacitor rechargers from another. Along the way, I trained up on the Electronic Warfare skill so I could equip an electronic counter-countermeasures module to diminish or eradicate the jamming. I read online that pirates and other non-player (i.e. AI) characters aren't particularly affected by jamming buster busters, but I hoped for the best and launched into battle.

I didn't last long, jumping out before recovering a pair of my intrepid drones. A fourth time, I at least got all my drones back before fleeing. The dog, on my lap during that last attempt, was quietly weeping into my leg.

I'm not sure what prompted this, but I checked the mission directions again. Maybe I thought there'd be a clue. Ah. The part of eviscerating those villains? Well, it wasn't there: all I was supposed to do was fly out, see whether there were bad guys (yes), and use the acceleration gate they were protecting to make my escape. Not for the first time, my recall might be wrong: it might've been sufficient just to get jumped and to high-tail it out of there. What I do remember is this: the mission description says killing the bad guys is optional.

Dang.

Pick your Axis power

This weekend, my wife and I took a cutlery class at William-Sonoma. The presenter got into the real nitty-gritty about knives, and some of it tickled my Eve brain.

There are lots of knives (bread, bond, sushi, santoku, etc.) just like Eve presents different hulls (frigates, freighters, battleships, and the like). Japanese knives are lighter, thinner, with a steeper blade angle than ze Germans'. These differences lend themselves to different cutting styles in the same way missile-heavy Caldari ships lend themselves to a different play style than the drone-happy Gallente. You need to fit the knife in your hand correctly to control it;  you need to outfit your ship correctly to use it well. There are cheap knives and ships you won't mind dinging up, and plenty of high-end items that provide great power but that you'll want to use wisely. Often, there's a right knife or ship ideal for the job, and plenty to choose from -- but, you can get through most jobs with just a few you're comfortable with. And sometimes, you just do or pick things because they look pretty.

Go figure.

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: 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.