So a few posts back I recounted that there are a number of channels I have managed to get into in Eve.  If you have been following you will know that for nuubins like myself this has been particularly useful because Eve is a pretty complicated game in some respects.  Anyway, three of these channels are:

  • Tweety Pub
  • The Autocannon (home of R1FTA pilots and friends)
  • I G (The Imperial Guardians  public channel)

Tweety I talked about earlier, friendly guys but they seem to be in the wrong time zone and I have been virtually alone in their channel for the last two weeks.  IG have been pleasant enough but no-one actually got in touch following their recruitment mail despite the fact I had been sitting in the channel for a week or more.  To be honest it doesn’t matter – they are obviously a great gang of people and are very active.  Its just the whole working together thing and the way the corp runs ops and stuff that I am a bit fearful of.  I am worried that I will end up having to work in my free time by being committed to ops. You know like all those moronic raids they have in WoW? What a nightmare.  The main reason though is that an Amarr corp is really not going to fit well with Moriarity’s back story. This is why I never really took the initiative.  I liked seeing what might happen by just being there but without having the will to engage with them on my part I think I will just leave it and quietly move on.

Anyway there is something about the whole process of interacting in these channels that says something about the ‘reality’ of eve. The best way to get this point across is to describe what happened  in one channel and compare it to another.

In one channel there was a character who had the following BIO:

“A liberal muslim ACLU lawyer professor and an abortion doctor were teaching a class on Karl Marx, known atheist.

“Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Marx and accept that he was the most highly-evolved being the world has ever known, even greater than Jesus Christ!”

At this moment, a brave, patriotic, pro-life Navy SEAL champion who had served 1500 tours of duty and understood the necessity of war and fully supported all military decision made by the United States, stood up and held up a rock.

“How old is this rock, pinhead?”

The arrogant professor smirked quite Slyly and smugly replied “4.6 billion years, you stupid Christian.”

“Wrong. It’s been 5,000 years since God created it. If it was 46 billion years old and evolution, as you say, is real… then it should be an animal now.”

The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of ‘Origin of the Species’. He stormed out of the room crying tears.”

The logic was so obviously flawed and a bit creepy that I actually thought it was a joke. So I asked in the channel:

“Is your bio ironic?”

“Nope.”

“Ok are you like a born again Christian?”

“Yes we are forever born again and again to worship and obey jesus then die horribly again too.”

So this was some sort of Hindu Christian with an obvious hatred for Muslims. The problem was actually trying to decide what was real in this interaction.  This always is the problem with the internets and any other form of mass media  isn’t it? He might still be pissing around?  I could not decide. I certainly still don’t know what to believe.

Then in another channel I discovered another reality. I was faffing around planning and writing the previous blog post and costing up the money I needed for my first salvaging operation.  When I had the answer I mused out loud in the channel that I needed 3million ISK more to be able to get away from NPC missions.  Before I could type anything else my wallet flashed and someone had given me 3million isk!

This would have taken me around two nights running level 1’s.  It is and was a huge deal. It struck me that this was a reality of a whole different order. Suddenly I could plan and get on with Moriarity’s career.  This was quite a step forward. A different kind of ‘reality’. No more missions!!

So in this simple interaction I discovered two realities.  First, there is the reality for us as players, the so called metagaming reality. Here you can never be sure of anything or anyone in Eve. It is not hard to know that the game is full of players who do their best to use this reality to undermine each other; scammers, griefers and alliance leaders.  The second reality, is the reality of Eve for the characters. This reality is composed of brute virtual facts, you cannot do very much without ISK.  It is what is gradually charming me about the game. The ISK was there and I could use it.  It was somehow more real and more concrete for Moriarity than all those musings about the Hindu baby Jesus.

In the channel we joked that I should spend the ISK  on “Hookers and Blow”. Sadly these are not a reality for Moriarity – didn’t I read somewhere that CCP were planning something like this? Anyway as we joked my wallet flashed again.  Another 3million ISK!  I had just received more ISK in ten minutes than I had earned in a week grinding missions!

I won’t go into details of who did what but I will tell you the only channels, of the three named above that I remain in is, “The Autocannon” and the realities of eve continue to unfold.