Dear fellow spacenerds,
It has come to my attention that EVE is, as I predicted last summer [1], not dead. With the recent news about Death in EVE - opposed to the oft-discussed Death of EVE - I wish to inflict upon you an outsiders’ view of the meta-perspective of this Author, so to speak, that EVE has become in the public mind, and how meta-realistic functions within the game are interpreted by the Constitutive Other.
Some of my friends [2] know that I played EVE in the past. One [3] of them contacted me the other day; apparently their favourite source of daily trivialities about some external, non-sollipsist world had informed them that a million dollars would be destroyed in an online Excel Spreadsheet simulator. Their inquiry started with a reference to a news report, that contained a reference to a reddit post about a future event that might come to pass. Already we are down the rabbit hole of story-telling and interpretation from the Other.
Since we are not partakers of the Meta-narrative from the perspective of the Authors of said narrative, this effort of Reconstructing the Cold War [4] that Turned Hot will be partially foreign and anathema, ipso facto that it comes from the Constitutive Other, leading to the potentiality of pseudo-tribalistic opposition to this Other; viewing the intellectual effort as a Zero-Sum Game that you lost [5].
Thus we posit the question: Why is EVE Online, the popularly acknowledged exceptional game [6] that is keyboard-throw-inducing and abusive [7], still undying?
We source this to the continued reAuthoring of the Narrative; a steady stream of Dying Authors in the eye of the Public imagination where large-scale Empires verge on the brink of war and destruction; a Guns of August [8] style scenario unfolding repeatedly and allowing for wide interpretative efforts; where the “good” and “bad” can be reinvented as desired and become whatsoever is desired by the Medium of Communications.
Furthermore, the Narrative permits an eternal application of Political Partisanship, where salient animosities in the Public are exploited for the sake of inexpensive massmedia distribution; leading yet more Innocent consumers of entertainment into the Den of Lions, Bees or Hordes.
These two factors, coupled with an inflammatory rhetoric of Destruction, a reversal of the common desire to be a Millionaire [9], become instrumental in the continued Death, not of EVE but in EVE, as new cinder is brought to the furnaces of the Null-Sec Empires; as long as EVE can remain a Meta-Narrative where the various Authors of the Game continually Die in the Eyes of Public consumption, EVE will demand attention from the non-Sollipsist Outsider, and can remain in the undying Limbo where it has been since 2001 [10].
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References:
[1] Forum achievements sign of EVE death or meta-emergent gameplay? A philosophical framework on the reality of EVE
[2] “Friend” is a category of “people I know who are not immediately hostile to my presence”.
[3] A hardworking single mother from Wisconsin, who I later hired to be a feel-good reference in my online posting.
[4] Hopf, T. (2012). Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958. Oxford University Press.
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
[6] Bergstrom, K., Carter, M., Woodford, D., & Paul, C. (2013). Constructing the ideal EVE online player. Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies.
[7] Paul, C. A. (2011, June). Don’t play me: EVE Online, new players and rhetoric. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 262-264). ACM.
[8] Tuchman, B. W. (1962). The guns of August. Ballantine Books.
[9] Freedman, D. (2003). Who wants to be a millionaire? The politics of television exports. Information, Communication & Society, 6(1), 24-41.
[10] This does seem like BS, but it’s not. Rather, it’s repurposed bovine waste.
