EVE-Mag.com

The World Inside the Server is More Real Than You Think!

Okay—I have a confession to make.

I am a geek among geeks. In fact, sometimes, it seems as if my entire existence lives inside of a box approximately fifteen or so inches wide, and no longer than one inch tall. A glowing LCD screen is my office space, and my brain might as well be the harddrive.

Of course we don’t live in that techno-utopian world where everyone is hooked in by cables and wires—much like EVE, where your command center is your pod, and your body might as well be atrophying in that artificial womb of greenish goo. Even though it’s been predicted time and time again by so many Sci-Fi video games, books, movies, short stories, all the way back to the 1950’s where people theorized machines would clean the house, to now, where The Matrix controls your brain—we can still be told apart from our digital tools.

Or have we?

Let’s take me for example. I am a 20-something graphic and web designer. I’m a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to things like XHTML, CSS, Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, open source web applications, and working remotely in a paperless workplace. My commute is a short walk from my bed to my desk, where a silver box (a MacBook Pro) sits as my terminal to the world. I have clients in-state, out-of-state, and internationally. I make conference calls to discuss brand-name projects while I sit in my undies and fiddle with a Rubik’s Cube. I can work an eight hour day, traverse timezones, and even pretend I’m flying a spaceship on a server in Iceland, without leaving my chair.

Granted, some people have 4-hour long commutes, not 4-minute ones. But just about everything else applies. VPN, FTP and working remotely—heck, even faxes—was the stuff of Asimov fifty years ago. A paperclip is either a button on my mail client or a useless doohicky to make stupid wire sculptures.

Basically, my point is that technology has moved human society to a level not unlike that of EVE’s pod pilot. Depending on your job, you may be able to do everything you need to do, much like me, through a screen, without moving a muscle aside the ones in your fingers. Granted, the wires in the laptop may not hook into your brain like the capsuleer’s pod can, but on some days it feels to me, at least, like I might as well be floating in a puddle of bio-goo with a keyboard. Even my love life, while it has some very biological implications, would not have been possible without chemistry.com.

The Stigma of the Gamer - or, “But it’s not real!”
But let’s put down the established thesis that the internet is the new workplace, that we don’t need to move from our chairs for a great percentage of our daily activity. That’s obvious. Ever heard this complaint, dear MMO player, from a friend, colleague, parent, girl (or boy)friend?

“But it’s not real!”

This sharp, gut-wrenching protest of a phrase is usually said by one of your peers while looking over your shoulder as you explain the incredibly complex market dynamics of EVE. You may be trading in Antibiotics or taking out a POS in NOL-72, but they still cannot believe the fact that you spend so much time on a “damn game.”

I too once felt the sharp jab of the reality check—even gave it to myself from time to time just to remember the fact that this dynamic, gorgeous, and so uniquely human world that is EVE is ultimately just a bunch of ones and zeros on a server in Iceland.

But then I got to thinking—I log off of Tranquility, and in the morning I log on instead to my company’s work server, which is in Toronto of all places. I’m transferring files back and forth—ones and zeros—and getting paid to do. Not just ISK. Real-life money. The stuff you buy food with. And for the sake of this article, let’s try not to work out the conversion rate through GTC’s, or what the real-life value of a Titan would be. My point here is not about how you can live biologically off of Tranquility. My point is more about human culture.

Tell “but it’s not real” to a professional Starcraft player in Seoul. Tell “but it’s not real” to the guy who had to declare a taxable income from “working” in Second Life (not joking). Or tell it to Jim Rossignol, author of This Gaming Life, where he writes about the overall social perception of gaming and what it’s like in the three gaming meccas of London, Seoul, and Reykjavik—or, even better, what it’s like outside of them.

So, we have me, a graphic designer, who works completely remotely through cyberspace, and EVE—a dynamic world in cyberspace with a living economy where you decide what you want to be and hone your “skills” to work in just that profession, until finally you get rich and powerful and retire to managing your local alliance or pimping out a T2 battleship. Or Ferrari. Pick your ride—they’re both sexy.

The Human Dynamic
Now, what I am not saying is that EVE is just like real life, or somehow is exactly the same as real life. What I am saying, and what I think is obvious to anyone who plays the game for long enough, is that the basic dynamic of human interaction that causes things like politics, personal conflict, alliance building (literal and metaphorical), personal reformation—even real-life skillbuilding—carries over into Tranquility. In one of my past articles I discussed the tricky nature of trust in EVE via a thought experiment, and the fact of the matter is that trust in EVE is very similar to trust at the basic human level. But in EVE, more is similar to real life than trust. The nature of human communities in an EVE are very similar to the bureaucracies and volatile hierarchies of real-life communities. But the bigger you get, the more complex the community becomes, and the more communication that takes place within the world that happens to be called Tranquility. And the one of the main things that makes us human is the way we communicate—emotions, hierarchy, personal conflict, revenge, that whole ball of wax. My boss in Toronto is the hand that feeds, but I’ve never even seen her face. Yet our relationship is a very typical boss-employee relationship, and there’s no reason for me to blow her off simply because I’ve never been in the same room as her. Biology is only one part of the picture.

But I’m not talking about human biology and the nature of human life—that’s a different article. What I’m talking about is the “human dynamic,” or the way we form communities in any given environment. And forming communities takes communication—which is what happens in EVE, chiefly due to the openness of the game mechanics; the “sandbox style” allows humans to be humans on a remote server, working towards common goals and against common competition, within an open framework that provides them resources, but doesn’t tell them how to use it.

This sort of dynamic could in fact be compared to what, in philosophy and systems theory, as “emergence”—basically the way slime mold grows or how a termite colony gets built. To put it more finely, emergence happens when a number of simple, seemingly meaningless interactions become complex patterns in an open environment. Like, for instance, the real-world stock market. Or the market in Tranquility itself.

Now, GoonSwarm may be Tranquility’s equivalent of an emergent termite colony (no insults please), but the interesting fact of it is that humans are still making GoonSwarm happen, and GoonSwarm is still pissing off a whole bunch of other humans when said get ganked in Empire. And GoonSwarm is only one of many alliances, or complex human communities, in EVE. The human dynamic is still present, in all its emergent glory—insults fly, retaliation ensues, wardecs are made. The sweaty organ that is human life is in full swing among the ones and zeros of CCP Games, and it’s because in Tranquility, emotion and intention can still be expressed—even if it’s in a chatroom format. And with that said, think about how detailed the social interactions of EVE will become when Ambulation is released. What we call “life,” or at least what life “does” comes about when simple things get complexified—whether it’s carbon-based or silicon-based. It doesn’t matter what the platform is—what matters is what’s being done and what’s being said, and the fact that molecules are getting recycled. Ambulation will break that chatroom window format of rising and falling corporations into the subtleties of mimicked biological interaction. But it’s not just because it looks real—and Ambulation is only one part of the growing human dynamic in EVE. “Life” happens on Tranquility because massive amounts of zeros are being turned into ones, and vice versa—and the people on the other side are making it happen. They care—and as such, for them, Tranquility is as real as anything else.

Now, again, what I’m not saying here is that Tranquility “is real,” or is the same as real life. Tranquility is a completely different world than ours—but it’s a parallel world, and it’s parallel because its laws (the game mechanics) have been able to successfully transfer the human dynamic, with all its raw emotion and carbon-based angst, onto a silicon-based server. Again, we’re not talking human “life” here, as in human biology—you are not Tranquility, and Tranquility is not alive. But your brain is in Tranquility, and through its sandbox venue, other players are making your brain react with decisions. And that is real—we’re talking about human culture and the way humans act. And if that is not the defining factor of human life itself (this writer might be willing to make that argument), it is certainly one of them.

Life is not just happening in EVE because it looks similar, like it will in Ambulation—it doesn’t need to look like anything. It’s about the function, not the form, even though the form may help us along the way. Life is happening there because the basic activities of interaction are there, and they’re showing themselves in complex patterns, like in the market and the rise and fall of alliances. And that’s the same dynamic that causes the market fluctuations and the rise and fall of real-life corporations—chiefly, humanity interacting with more humanity in an unbounded world.

Backwards Compatibility - We Support Homo Sapiens 1.0
Okay—but what’s the point of a parallel world if it’s only one-way? The guy in Second Life who had to pay taxes on his Second Life income sounds to us like a complete anomaly because he had to pay real-life taxes on income that was generated in a virtual simulation. But a virtual simulation stops being virtual or simulated when the two worlds meld and start communicating—in his case, in the form of currency. Which, for us, is a lot more potent of an example than human emotion, mentally and culturally speaking. The man who lost the first Titan in battle may have cried, but culturally speaking, emotions are ephemeral. Even though I would personally argue emotions are emotions and have the same value even if it’s a reaction to a silicon-based event, money is a material thing, and it’s less biased from an outsider’s perspective as proof that the outside “game world” is influencing the inside “real world”.

The thing is, where do you draw the line, especially when the two worlds are interacting in a basic material fashion—like in a currency? That’s gray area. It’s relative now. Which is the real world, and which is the simulated world? It doesn’t matter, because one is affecting the other.

Gamers, rejoice! Your holy grail for passing the reality check test has arrived!

But I mean it when I say it. To make the point a bit finer when I say EVE affects this world—or, namely, the humans who inhabit both realms. Before playing EVE I knew nothing about market economics. Zero IQ. Nothing. The E-Trade homepage couldn’t have meant less to me. But by playing with ISK, I have a feel for what a living market can do, and suddenly I’m looking at penny stocks and real-life investment opportunities. Granted, it’s not the same “stuff,” but it’s the same logic. You can tell someone “buy low and sell high,” but if it doesn’t make sense to them at a gut level within a contextual environment—such as a given market, real or simulated—they’re never going to get it. Similarly, leading a successful EVE-Online corp may be a young high-schooler’s first exposure to bureaucracy, power games, and the wisdom of Machiavelli. And because that’s basic logic that is universal—cross platform, so to speak, from carbon to silicon, it’s “real,” no matter which platform it started on.

Again, here’s what I’m not saying: that if you learn specific skills in EVE, you learn specific skills in real-life. Building a battleship doesn’t translate to building a wooden table. What I am saying is that being involved in an activity that replicates (and in the case of EVE, at least as far as my argument is concerned, it doesn’t mimic, it replicates) real life will teach you how to think… in real life. It makes you think in terms of the human dynamic itself—it teaches you how to communicate, how to delegate power to underlings, how to coordinate the movements of multiple people for a set goal, and then achieve that goal in the face of equally organized human competition who are operating in the same dynamic, in the same world.

(And this is why the fact that EVE is unsharded is so essentially to replicating the human dynamic. The real world isn’t sharded, so a world that will replicate it, can’t either.)

And in a world where education is standardized and “intelligence” is measured in the form of endless multiple-choice boxes, those same teenage SAT takers are putting those brains to work for purposes that may be in-game, but cause those real-life neurons to make more connections than ever. These are skills that cannot be objectified or put into teacher lesson plans—it’s real, organic learning, as good as any other simulated learning. Teaching one how to think so they can learn more is much more useful than learning disconnected facts, which is so prevalent as the “standard” of western education.

I think it’s Jim Rossignol who cites the story of a child in This Gaming Life who learned how to read by playing Zelda. Is it really that surprising? I would have learned vocabulary like “profit margins” and “Donchian channel” in an economics class, but they would have been nothing but words to me. In EVE, they’re life-saving tools. And to be honest, half of what I learned in my Advanced Placement courses was how to take the AP Test. Why do we call it “real-life” education, and say that learning how to navigate corporate hierarchy in a generated world is not?

Simply put, Tranquility is not just an alternate world, it is, in every philosophical sense, a parallel world, and it is so because it affects the non-virtual worlds of those who interact with it. A career in EVE is less of an entertainment venue than it is a virtual obsession, even occupation, that needs constant and consistent growth, both for your virtual character and your own brain. CCP has created not just a game—they have created a social and economic platform that is realistic enough that the human dynamic can be transferred without being so truncated it loses its human, cyclic nature of birth and death—this is the “social darwinism” so many mention in reference to EVE. It may still be caricaturized in the form of 2D avatars and chat windows, but, it’s still there, and it still works. And it will only get better—Ambulation is going to remove that major truncation, and, if it’s done well, the social dynamic will take leaps forward—and so will the human dynamic. Tranquility will be closer to reality than it even is now, and not because it feels real or looks real, but because it will replicate it better. And yes, it will “replicate” it much, much better than Second Life.

Life is More than Molecules, Life is More than Numbers
So, had enough yet of all these philosophical examples and reality-bending metaphors? What am I really trying to say? What I am trying to say, though all this existentialist dialogue, is simply this—the philosophical, technological, and sociological implications of not just EVE, but MMO gaming in general, given that it is of the sandbox variety (otherwise it’s still just a “game”), is nothing short than what writers like Asimov predicted—virtual worlds that re-create the boundaries and limitations of this world so well, they cause the interactions within those limitations (the Game Mechanic) to transfer almost seamlessly in their function from the world outside (the human dynamic). They can even look completely different, like EVE avatars do from real humans—it’s still both real humans that are making the market charts going up and down.

Thus, we have to ask a number of questions, and pick where we put our cultural respect and authority much more carefully than before. What is really life—or, rather, what really defines life? Is it defined more by material (i. e. the platform, whether microprocessor or neuron), or is it defined more by how little bits of life interact with other bits of life? Is moving dirt around the same thing as moving ones and zeros? Because CCP has not created AI—Tranquility is not alive. What they have created is a parallel world that so mimics the various laws and dynamics of “meatspace” that it’s hard to tell it apart from “cyberspace.”

True, you may be typing on a keyboard—you might not be suspended in goo, and you might not have cables in your head. But you keep thinking about what you’re going to do when you log on next, even after that client closes down and you go to bed. And those thoughts, my friend, are the ghostly traces of a parallel, binary-based world inhabiting your carbon-based neurons. It’s more than just a server that’s tricking you—it’s reality itself.