GamerNode: Features - Exploring Space: EVE Online

..article continued from page 3

However, Gonzales offers a different reason. "We wanted a game where one player really could make a difference, and where his or her actions could resonate across the game universe and uniquely claim that success. That's not possible in sharded worlds. In these setups, an entity can rise to prominence but never achieve true "global" dominance because their influence is limited to the instance or shard they exist in. EVE is one world. When an alliance conquers a region of space, it is uniquely theirs."

The phrase he coins here, "sharded worlds", becomes an important issue in the case of the MMO concept for games developers. There are hundreds of versions of Altdorf, of Ironforge, of any landmark or main player hub in MMO titles throughout the genre. There is no one legendary weapon, simply one per server. The disadvantage of splitting these worlds is that nothing feels unique. To see Band of Brothers fall wasn't simply surprising, it was devastating: this was because there was only one galaxy, one player community and one Band of Brothers space-area.

To browse the main website for the game is to notice the large amount of online literature that sits alongside the main wiki content that explains everything from mining to why you can't password a floating box in secure space. These chunks of storyline are a fundamental part of what it takes to understand the universe of EVE as a creative medium: to hear the stories of individual characters and to compare it to your own experience, to then seek out these characters in the game itself. They are present, and they do exist. Even in the novel EVE Online: The Empyrean Age, there isn't a single protagonist, antagonist or bystander that doesn't have a place in the game's dark universe.

But where lies the need for the literature? Is it not enough to simply rely on the player-created narratives? Must we be exposed to storylines beyond our control? "The literature serves two main functions", explains Gonzales, author of the novel in question, "it describes aspects of the setting that we cannot yet portray in the virtual world, and it engages an audience that is eager for storytelling in a way that exposes them to just how deep the rabbit hole goes when it comes to the actual game." Gonzales goes on to mention the fictional characters: the reason for their presence is simple, he states: to have anywhere between two to two thousand players asking around in chat where a fictional character resides creates a sense of community, of shared interest. The fiction allows people to bond, much like those in World of Warcraft who were communally excited to find Thrall on his throne in the Orc city of Orgrimmar.

• (0)
• 
• 
• 
•