Socializing Gamers - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 35

ol ine, otherwise you're mostly fair game.” 41 For many, the idea of death
or risk in a game may not seem like a particularly big deal, as players die
in games all of the time. However, the penalty for dying in EVE hearkens
back to the penalties invoked in older games, like EverQuest . A player
who is not properly prepared for the risk of death may lose almost all of
their net worth and months worth of training in one fell swoop. In a world
where a single ship can cost about as much as a small, used car would in
the real world 42 the central role of player versus player (PvP) and death is
quite meaningful. In EVE “you do not have any safety, like you do in a PvE
[player versus environment] Warcraft realm. You do not fl ag on PvP. It's
always on.” 43 Any EVE player can attack any other EVE player in any zone
in the game. There are non-player character (NPC) police that will attack
those with malevolent intentions in certain areas of the game world, but the
CONCORD police 44 are there to merely react to what has happened, rather
than to prevent the attack in the fi rst place. As a result, other players can
destroy your ship, knowing they will be destroyed by CONCORD in order
for their friends to loot the materials your ship contained. When your ship
is destroyed, and “you will lose a lot of ships while you learn the ropes,” 45
you are jettisoned into space in your 'pod.' NPCs will not attack the pod,
but players can, resulting in getting 'podded.' Although being podded is
“nothing personal” 46 for EVE players, it can result in a loss of “ a month's
full-time training or more.” 47 EVE does have game mechanisms to mitigate
losses from death, including ship insurance and clones that can store your
skill points in case of podding, but the existence of both programs speaks
to the regularity of death in EVE and its potentially dire consequences. An
up-to-date clone can of set much of the damage from podding, but insur-
ance does not cover all components of the ship, making death in EVE a
signifi cant, harsh experience.
Logging in to EVE means being greeted with a message about the num-
ber of other players sharing the server with you, a number that is frequently
in the mid-fi ve fi gures. An introductory cinematic introduces players to the
world of New Eden, which was discovered when explorers left Earth and
used the EVE gate to pass through a wormhole in space. The gate later
collapsed, leaving “thousands of small colonies” in a state of “complete
isolation to fend for themselves, cut of from the old world” and “clinging
to the brink of extinction.” 48 Players are encouraged to forge their own
fate in an emergent world where the bold are rewarded and the meek are
punished. After choosing a race, bloodline, ancestry, and biological sex 49
players design their avatar and select a name. Players then move into the
world of EVE where they are treated to a “crash course tutorial” about
the basic mechanisms of the game. This includes early lessons in piloting a
ship and ends up in a space station where a variety of dif erent tutorial mis-
sions are vaguely matched to potential careers within the game. Although
the introductory process has been adapted throughout the development of
EVE to make learning the game less frustrating and smooth out portions of