Spaceholder

This month’s topic was proposed by @KatiaSae of the much praised “To Boldly Go” blog. Katia asks: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As an astrophotographer, I’ve found it in the stars and planets of New Eden. Where have you found it? Perhaps you’ve found beauty in the ships we fly? Maybe it’s the sight of profits being added to your bottom line? Or maybe it’s the pilot portraits you see in the comm channels? Where ever you’ve found it, write about it and post an image.” Don’t be afraid go beyond the simple visual aspects of EVE as well. Is the EVE Community in itself a thing of beauty? What makes EVE the game, the world, the Community, so appealing to you?

As always, I’m late to the party.  I didn’t get CrazyKinux’s original e-mail about this one for some strange reason.

Fortunately, having been late to the party, I’ve had a chance to read some others’ thoughts about what is “beautiful” in Eve. I’m enjoying the outside-the-box thinking.   I was originally going to write some crazy nonsense about how awesome Planets in Eve look.  Then I thought about writing about the Eve Community, but I did that last week. Then @TheMittani (MY CEO) directed me to this wonderful, delicious article at Massively, a website which is apparently read by – judging by the comments – thousands of people who take video games way more seriously than anyone I know does.

That article is one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen written about Eve. Not in a damaging way, but it’s just a Really Bad Post™, and I know a thing or two about Bad Posting.  However, in that horrible post, lies one of the most beautiful things about Eve Online.  the never-ending buckets of tears and rage of pubbies.

Articles like that are one of the main reasons I still play Eve.  The writer’s impotent rage where he pounded angrily away at his keyboard for what must have been hours,  trying tell me that I’m a terrible person in real life based on what I do in a video game.  I am, in essence, a role-player.  I play a role in Eve that is not only allowed, but also glorified by the creators of the game. The future is a horrible place, and it’s up to you to navigate the land mines that are people like me.

Should one of those landmines hit someone, we get anything from long winded psychological evaluations of why we’re bad people, to illegible all-caps keyboard mashing in local.  A couple years back I decided to try my hand at recruitment scamming. I managed to get someone to fall for it, and made about 200 million ISK off the guy.  I just found that it was way too much effort and I really didn’t want to invest the time in it.  However, the 200 million ISK was nothing, I got an eve-mail where the guy threatened to come to my house and harm me.   I of course fired a petition off to CCP with the contents of the evemail as I didn’t quite know how stable this individual was. I added him to the watch list of my alt, but never saw him, or any of his alts log in again.  Eve was obviously not the place for him.

Eve Online is the ultimate griefing game. In World of Warcraft, if you die, you lose nothing aside from a little gold. In other MMORPGs, you have similar, or even lesser death penalties.  In Eve, you lose your ship, all it’s modules, and possibly any implants you had in your clone if you’re podded.  This should never make you angry enough to pound over a thousand words trying to psychologically evaluate why the person that podded you is the scum of the earth in real life.

On a similar note, I recently re-joined Goonswarm’s Blackops group (The group that they named the ships after). We’re AFK cloakers that you hate so much, and I think it’s funny as hell to check NPC kills in a system on Dotlan, park there for a few hours, and watch the NPCs killed go from hundreds to 0.  Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you’ll get people raging in local about cloaking ships, and how dishonorable it is.  It’s great.

So, does this all make me a terrible person in real life? No, because I have a wonderful sense of reality vs fantasy. And video games, as much as some people hate to admit it, are a form of fantasy.

I was chilling out last night, playing some Eve Online (a terrible spaceship game) when the news broke: The President of the United States was to make an announcement about national security. It was 10:35pm. This had to be big news, since it couldn’t wait until morning.

I continued to talk to my fellow goons on jabber, while watching the live stream from MSNBC on one of my monitors. Slowly the news came out, Osama Bin Laden was dead. Fox News at first reported that he was killed a week ago, but we pretty much agreed that the President would have probably waited until tomorrow to announce if that was the case. After about an hour, President Obama popped up on my screen to inform me about what we all now know what happened. Osama Bin Laden was dead, killed by a US specops team. Facebook went nuts, twitter went nuts, pretty much everyone went nuts.

Now to the morality of it. No, I’m not talking about the morality of ordering what was basically an assassination on another human, but the morality of feeling joy, at his death.

If you’ve been following the news, you saw people in the streets celebrating, shouting, chanting, singing, all because one tremendous shitbag was killed, and I don’t know how to feel about that.

Revenge is human nature. Someone gets you, you have to get them back. It’s especially common in Eve, where some people plot their revenge for weeks, months, or possibly even years. You feel good when you’re able to exact your revenge, anyone who says they don’t is lying, or something’s wrong with their brain. It’s programmed into you, and hey, it’s just a video game, right?

Last night, it wasn’t just a video game, but goddammit, I still felt good. Even though very little of it touched me personally, I felt, not a sense of revenge, but accomplishment. We accomplished something. (For those of you who watch The Daily Show, Jon Stewart said the same thing tonight, fuck you Jon Stewart, I had this half written before I ever watched your hilariously entertaining show.)

Now, as I mentioned, students were “raging”, people were gathering and chanting all because the world’s biggest cockmonger was shot in the eye (in the fucking eye!) and I really don’t know how I feel about it. That’s probably why I’m writing this, is I’m trying to sort out those feelings.

On September 11^th, 2001, we saw people in the middle east dancing and celebrating much in the same way many Americans were last night, and it was really just salt in the wound. How should I feel about that? Does that not make us just as bad as them? Or are they, in hindsight, not as bad as we labeled them?

Roughly 80% of the United States population, according to the 2010 census are religious. I know the Christian Bible and Jewish Torah tell you not to rejoice in the death of an enemy, and I’m pretty sure other such moral guidelines exist for other 10% of spiritual peoples. However, I’m an atheist, so I’m not guided by principles written down thousands of years ago. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a set of morals though.

Video games give me a bit of an outlet, I guess. I can be immoral and uncouth in Eve. It’s almost expected of me. Heck, there are plenty of games where you get to play the bad guy, and you’re even rewarded for it. I think it’s a grand outlet, and helps keep the monster in check in real life.

This isn’t a video game though. This is real life.

Will those that were out partying last night eventually look back and say “You know, I shouldn’t have done that!” or will they find a way to justify it by saying “I was celebrating my country, not the death of another human.” It still seems a bit hollow to me, and I genuinely feel bad and quite embarassed because of it.

Even writing this, I can’t get the smug look off my face.  I’m happy the fucknugget is dead, and a quote from Mark Twain that’s been passed around the internet like herpes the last day really sums it up:

“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”