Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (9 page)

Minecraft
itself allows for this kind of collaboration. Special servers allow players from around the world to play alongside one another inside a shared world, working on large-scale projects of their own making. Cooperation in
Minecraft
is straightforward: people come together and build things. There is not much need for governance. But
Minecraft
is a relatively simple proposition. Other multiplayer video games are built from more complex systems and allow different sorts of human expression, collaboration, and rivalry. These realities require something a little more formalised, something closer to the councils, governments, and groups that administer the systems we find in our own reality. And in these games we see not only echoes of the natural world in which we live, but also the social and political systems in which we operate.

Launched in 2003,
EVE Online
is a science-fiction video game of unprecedented scale and ambition, a cosmos comprising 7,500 interconnected star systems and home to more than half a million people who barter, fight, and collaborate with one another in what has become a vast and fascinating social experiment.

As in life, your experience in the game is largely dictated by where you are born and live. High Security dwellers can keep a low profile as they eke out an honest living as a miner or trader, earning money with which to improve their ship or dwelling. The Null Spacers, who live in the galactic equivalent of the Wild West, by contrast, throw themselves into a Machiavellian world of intrigue, engaging in dynamic, player-led plotlines, conspiracies, and intergalactic heists.

In one notorious incident a few years ago, members of a mercenary group worked for twelve months to infiltrate a powerful ingame corporation. They took on jobs within the company’s structure and ingratiated themselves with its staff. Then, in one orchestrated attack, the group seized the company’s assets, ambushed its female CEO, blew up her ship, and delivered her frozen corpse to the client who paid for the assassination. Not only was this an act of astounding coordination, but it had real-world value too: the virtual assets seized were worth tens of thousands of U.S. dollars.

Few video games accommodate the unpredictability of human interaction and will with such freedom. For that reason,
EVE
’s population is diverse and enthusiastic. But for its developer, CCP Games, this presents a significant problem: how to develop and evolve the galaxy in such a way that it keeps everyone, from the day-tripping explorer to the money-grubbing space pirate, content. The solution? The Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a democratically elected player council whose job is to represent
the interests of the game’s vast population to its Icelandic creators.

Each year, scores of would-be player-politicians stand for the CSM. Just fourteen of those who campaign are elected. Every six months, CCP flies the successful candidates to their headquarters in Reykjavik for three days of intensive debate. During that time the council meets with CCP’s in-house economist, Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, and hears about the new features planned for the galaxy’s future. If necessary, they can contest these proposals in the interests of their electorate. Minutes are kept of each meeting and made public afterwards, so there’s full transparency as to whether a councillor is making good on their campaign promises.

‘Council members can have very different ambitions and concerns depending on which part of space they hail from,’ explains CCP’s Ned Coker. ‘You may have somebody who lives in the galaxy’s outer reaches and, as such, they will have a very different viewpoint to those that live in a more centralised area.’ Likewise, would-be councillors often campaign on specific issues, promising that, should they be elected, they’ll ensure they promote the interests of those who voted for them.

The run-up to the annual election reflects the way in which political parties work in real life.

‘Candidates come with their own platforms, create propaganda and do a lot of mustering both in the game and out in order to get elected,’ says Coker. This year, David Whitelaw, an oil-rig worker from the small town of Thurso on the north coast of Scotland, decided to attempt to interview every candidate in the final ballot for his
EVE
-themed podcast.

‘Candidates loosely fall within three categories,’ he says. ‘There are those who stand on a single issue. Then others who champion a specific play style such as piracy or industry, or who represent a large
group of alliances. Finally, there are those who propose to act purely as a communication membrane between CCP and the players. Lesser-known players will have to put more hours into campaigning than prominent candidates, and even then they are at a huge disadvantage. Having a positive profile in the community is a huge advantage.’

In May 2013, after months of campaigning both within the game and across social media, the lineup of the eighth CSM was announced. It’s the fifth time that fifty-four-year-old Robert Woodhead from Wilmington, North Carolina, has been elected as a council member. A seasoned veteran, these days Woodhead campaigns on his favourable track record, although his experience doesn’t preclude some grassroots leafleting. Last year he harvested thousands of player names from the game’s web forums and sent an in-game email to each, encouraging them to ‘Get out to vote’ when the polls opened.

‘I view the elections as good clean political fun, even a part of the actual game experience,’ he says. ‘You are being elected to be an advocate, not a legislator, and the campaign lets you demonstrate how well you can advocate.’ That advocacy is, according to Woodhead, surprisingly effective.

‘I have watched the CSM evolve over the past few years into a very useful tool for influencing the company,’ he says. ‘More and more people at CCP have come to realise that our feedback and advice is tremendously valuable, and we do help shape the game.’

CCP’s Coker agrees. ‘As a business we always get final say when it comes to whether or not we choose to act on the CSM’s lobbying,’ he says. ‘But it behooves us to listen to the council. They are a distillation of the game’s populace and they also hold a pretty large sway through their reputations. We’ve seen individuals in the council
make extreme efforts to impress upon people that they are standing up to “the man” if we make an unpopular decision in terms of game design or development. To some degree they have been successful.’

Indeed, in 2011 CCP held an emergency meeting with the CSM following in-game riots after the developer decided to take a more aggressive approach to selling virtual items. Disgruntled players believed that the introduction of micro-transactions—which offered items of virtual clothing, accessories and mementoes for real money (including, for example, a $70 monocle)—was evidence that the game was moving in an unwelcome direction.

‘The riots happened because CCP prioritised their vision over the needs of their customers,’ explains Woodhead. ‘They lost sight of the fundamental reason for
EVE
’s success—the depth and complexity of the social relationships that it spawns.’

The emergency summit demonstrated CCP’s commitment to listening to their players and showed that the CSM has real power in representing the views of the game’s populace.

‘Some people think the CSM is a PR stunt,’ says Coker. ‘There are always conspiracy theorists. They think we flew them over here, got them drunk, and told them what to say. But that incident showed the system works. Players not only felt like the CSM was working hard for them (after all, they all put their real jobs and lives on hold for a week), but also they held us to task.’

While the CSM is closer to a lobbying group than a governing body, it’s not immune to corruption. Councillors are privy to forthcoming changes in the game and some unscrupulous members have used this information to their advantage. In 2009, one councillor, Adam Ridgway, bought items worth thousands of dollars for stockpiling ahead of a game-design change that would drastically increase their
value. As these virtual items carry significant real-world worth, CCP closely monitors the actions of both CSM members and its own internal staff who play the game.

‘We hold the CSM to a high standard,’ says Coker. ‘We even have an internal affairs department that follows players to see they’re not using insider information for personal gain.’ Ridgway stepped down from his position on the CSM as a result of his indiscretion.

Sociologists and economists increasingly study
EVE Online
. ‘Within
EVE
we can see a political community that models hierarchy, authority, rule of law, power, violence, and distribution of labour,’ says Felix Ciuta, senior lecturer in international politics at University College London. Players project onto this blank space their political and ideological principles. The way in which people act in the game might not reflect the way in which they act in the real world. But their virtual behaviour almost certainly is an expression of their ideas about how the world really works. Its populace is, when set against the Western world’s increasingly disaffected electorate, energised and politically engaged. Why? Perhaps its players find here a virtual world that they are able to affect in meaningful ways, where their voice and actions are heard and seen. The game makes visible and comprehensible a political system that, in life, is often opaque, confusing, and, to some, distant. Even in the farthest reaches of virtual outer space, the game reflects our world and, for some, makes it more approachable.

Birth, life, creation, hubris, death, and politics: at least some of the appeal of these video-game realities is that they offer a means to understand the world around us, in manageable chunks.

They are usually built up on familiar and recognisable rules and systems. The recognition evolves into comfort when it’s possible for us to triumph within those systems: they imply that our world, too, is fair, when in fact it is, very often, capricious and unfair. Witness how game designers try to turn the slippery and mysterious act of falling in love into a manageable, reliable system (often to ridiculous effect). In
The Sims
you can make someone fall in love with you by tickling them repeatedly; in
Harvest Moon
you make someone fall in love with you by presenting them with an egg laid by one of your chickens each day; in
Fire Emblem
, relationships are formed through mere proximity to others on a battlefield.

Moreover, video games flatter us: their worlds exist for our benefit, and, usually, revolve around us. A video game requires a player: without input, it is inert. Our world, by contrast, seems indifferent to us. The cogs around us, both natural and human-made, turn regardless of our interest or input. It is sometimes difficult to know whether we matter, whether anyone cares. When a company loses our details or forgets about us for some reason, we talk of being ‘lost in the system.’ This is how loneliness is seeded in the human heart: a sense that the world and all of its people are indifferent, oblivious.

Video games are different. They deal in the language of cause and effect; they offer constant feedback to our interactions. Their sound effects offer an aural indication that our presence and interest have been registered. Their high-score tables offer encouragement as well as the hope of improvement and yet further approval.

Likewise, a video game’s creator is not a distant, seemingly uninvolved god. He, she, or they not only lay down the rules of the creation’s existence; they are also on hand to listen to our comments and cries, the feedback that many then use to iterate and improve upon virtual existence. Often, in video games, there is a back-and-forth between a creator and the people who live within his or her
creation. In these realities, we have an opportunity to influence the systems that govern us.

Marilynn Strasser Olson, in her 1991 biography of the American illustrator and writer Ellen Raskin, wrote, ‘Games as arbiters of rules and objectives are a metaphor for a vision of life that can be ordered, understood, and won.’ We play video games in order to be comforted by a particular vision of life, an ordering at times dramatic and at times systemic. In this way they share an essential characteristic with literature: the fiction brings order and sense to the randomness of life. Video games comfort us as their worlds abide by certain rules and order. Moreover, they present us with the opportunity to master the rules and to flourish. It’s something that goes beyond mere victories of plot, in which we rescue the prince or princess, vanquish the antagonist, save the world. It’s in the way in which our video-game characters visibly overcome obstacles and trials, their progress measured in distance travelled or points gained.

Like sport, video games make simple the criteria for success and failure. They clearly establish their rules and parameters, and explain what we must do in order to progress. Their screens are less like windows to other worlds and more like mirrors that reflect how our world functions.

Superficially, at least, video games improve upon some aspects of our own reality. For a human who has experienced life’s petty and major injustices, what better place is there to spend one’s time than in a virtual world, where struggle always leads to success, where effort is repaid in kind, where there is justice and glory for any and all who want it? In their ordered systems, we catch a glimpse of a kind of prevailing justice, which our own world is often unable to match.

4

DISCOVERY

On March 28, 2011, a man who calls himself Kurt J. Mac loaded a new game of
Minecraft
. As the landscape filled in around his character, Mac surveyed the blocky, pixelated trees, the cloud-draped mountains, and the waddling sheep. Then he started walking. His goal for the day was simple: to reach the end of the universe.

Nearly three years later, Mac, who is now thirty-one, is still walking. He has trekked more than seven hundred virtual kilometres in a hundred and eighty hours. At his current pace, Mac will not reach the edge of the world, which is now nearly twelve thousand kilometres away, for another twenty-two years.