EVE Online Research Articles

They didn't ask: Online innovation communities as a latent dynamic capability

Many contemporary video games demand considerable involvement from players, but in general, researchers have not considered such contributions as an innovation activity. To address the nature of gamer contribution, we conducted a longitudinal qualitative case study of the community surrounding the EVE Online video game. We employed grounded theory to investigate how the role played by community members changes over time, which influences their contribution to the innovation process. A dynamic classification model that highlights patterns of innovation contributions by different subgroups of the community emerged from this investigation. The findings were further analyzed utilizing Hirschman's theoretical framework, which was integrated with research on innovation communities. The results indicate that when properly activated, gamer communities can function as online innovation communities capable of contributing not only to product development but also to co-creation and strategy processes, constituting an external dynamic capability. This paper contributes to the literature concerning innovation communities and the dynamic capabilities of companies. Such insights also have practical implications because identifying different subgroups within communities is of strategic importance for companies, assisting managers in targeting segments of the community that could contribute more to the innovation process, as well as to other business operations.

Ghosts of the Titanomachy: Structure, Commitment, Economics, and Risk as Causal Mechanisms in an Online Battle

Background In January 2014 over seven thousand EVE Online players engaged in a 21-h battle that came to be known as the Battle of B-R5RB, in which an estimated $330,000 of virtual property was destroyed, calculated in real U.S. dollars as measured by time. Aim To discern why players were willing to commit time and resources to fight in a large-scale virtual battle, which in turn informs how players perceive risk and develop large-scale emergent political structures. Method Drawing from multiple case history and journalism reports on the Battle of B-R5RB, the author combines the inductive ideographic case study approach and process tracing method to uncover key causal mechanisms. Results The author inductively theorizes that the Battle of B-R5RB resulted from the Null-Sec’s anarchic structure, player commitment to their respective Corporations, measurable economic value, and risk associated with permanent loss. These mechanisms closely align with the offensive realism and anarchy. Discussion and conclusion The Battle of B-R5B is a relevant example of real-world emergent political behavior developing in a virtual world setting. Analysis of this single battle suggests that players are willing to project actual value onto virtual assets. Perception of value is magnified in virtual worlds lacking overt governance or security structures. Players must form groups to mitigate risk, and the greater the risk, the greater the commitment to the group.

Intelligent Trading Agents for Massively Multi-Player Game Economies

As massively multi-player gaming environments become more detailed, developing agents to populate these virtual worlds as capable non-player characters poses an increasingly complex problem. Human players in many games must achieve their objectives through financial skills such as trading and supply chain management as well as through combat and diplomacy. In this paper, we examine the problem of creating intelligent trading agents for virtual markets. Using historical data from EVE Online, a science-fiction based MMORPG, we evaluate several strategies for buying, selling, and supply chain management. We demonstrate that using reinforcement learning to determine policies based on the market microstructure gives trading agents a competitive advantage in amassing wealth. Imbuing agents with the ability to adapt their trading policies can make them more resistant to exploitation by other traders and capable of participating in virtual economies on an equal footing with humans.

Citizens of the future

Over the last decade, a variety of ‘citizen science’ projects have turned to video games and other tools of gamification to enrol participants and to encourage public engagement with scientific research questions. This article examines the significance of sf in the field of citizen science, focusing on projects such as Eyewire, Be a Martian!, Sea Hero Quest, Play to Cure: Genes in Space, Forgotten Island and the ‘Project Discovery’ experiments in EVE Online. The sf stories that frame these projects often allegorise the neoliberal assumptions and immaterial labour practices of citizen science, even while seeming to hide or disguise them. At the same time, the fictional frames enable players to imagine social and technical innovations that, while not necessarily achievable in the present, nevertheless point to a future of democratic science, social progress and responsible innovation - blips of utopian thought from the zones of crowdsourced labour.

Diplomatic Relations in a Virtual World

AbstractWe apply variations and extensions of structural balance theory to analyze the dynamics of geopolitical relations using data from the virtual world Eve Online. The highly detailed data enable us to study the interplay of alliance size, power, and geographic proximity on the prevalence and conditional behavior of triads built from empirical political alliances. Through our analysis, we reveal the degree to which the behaviors of players conform to the predictions of structural balance theory and whether our augmentations of the theory improve these predictions. In addition to studying the time series of the proportions of triad types, we investigate the conditional changes in triad types and the formation of polarized political coalitions. We find that player behavior largely conforms to the predictions of a multipolar version of structural balance theory that separates strong and weak configurations of balanced and frustrated triads. The high degree of explanatory power of structural balance theory in this context provides strong support for both the theory and the use of virtual worlds in social science research.

On the connection between real-world circumstances and online player behaviour: The case of EVE Online

Games involving virtual worlds are popular in several segments of the population and societies. The online environment facilitates that players from different countries interact in a common virtual world. Virtual worlds involving social and economic interactions are particularly useful to test social and economic theories. Using data from EVE Online, a massive online multi-player game simulating a fantasy galaxy, we analyse the relation between the real-world context in which players live and their in-game behaviour at the country level. We find that in-game aggressiveness to non-player characters is positively related to real-world levels of aggressiveness as measured by the Global Peace Index and the Global Terrorist Index at the country level. The opposite is true for in-game aggressiveness towards other players, which seems to work as a safety valve for real-world player aggressiveness. The ability to make in-game friends is also positively related to real-world levels of aggressiveness in much the same way. In-game trading behaviour is dependent on the macro-economic environment where players live. The unemployment rate and exchange rate make players trade more efficiently and cautiously in-game. Overall, we find evidence that the real-world environment affects in-game behaviour, suggesting that virtual worlds can be used to experiment and test social and economic theories, and to infer real-world behaviour at the country level.

Everyone in Space Wants to Hear You Scream

When considering player voice in the context of game sound, existing examinations remain inconclusive. As player voice exists in a liminal position between reality and virtuality, some academics see them as sonic violations of the game space. Voice can convey information about identity, which may oppose our understanding of the avatars within the game world. Voice can facilitate social communication, which may remind us of the physical world outside the virtuality. Mediations of voice into the virtual world may introduce obstacles or inflections that interfere with our enjoyment of the virtual space. Alongside these concerns, however, we can also find virtual worlds that prioritize and privilege player voice. Player voice can become part of character identity. Gameworlds can encourage us to communicate ludically, without disrupting immersion. Interruptions and disruptions can be limited by players. Amongst others, the virtual world of the long-running MMORPG EVE Online demonstrates how voice can coexist with immersion. Marketing materials for the game now place player voice at the center of consumer focus. Including an interview with one of the videographers who placed player voice at the center of his fan videos, the article uses EVE Online as a case study for the integration of player voice into virtual worlds. By examining virtual worlds and the role of voice within them, this article develops a framework for understanding player voice in the context of game sound. This allows us to recognize how player voice, an often overlooked aspect of game sound, can function within virtual worlds.

Feudal alliances in a hyper-capitalist world: Power and organization in EVE Online

EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online game that has gained notoriety for player organizations boasting thousands of active members. The complexity of these groups presents substantial challenges, and leaders have explored multiple approaches to organization and governance. They often employ structures and language drawn from historical social systems, family or nationality to create social order. Here we examine the use of feudalism in EVE – as a structure of power, an indicator of legitimacy and a mechanism of waging war. We demonstrate that even as leaders incorporate feudal language into their organizations, their application of these concepts is influenced by capitalism and individualism. We argue that the final social and economic system is neither truly feudal nor capitalist, but instead an accommodation between the two, shaped by player knowledge, experience and in-game needs. We conclude that such systems support legitimate structures of power, which encourage player participation and produce more sustainable player organizations.

Destruction as Deviant Leisure in EVE Online

In this article, I argue for the inclusion of ‘deviant leisure’—a concept borrowed from the neighboring field of Leisure Studies—to provide Game Studies with a more robust theoretical toolkit to examine negative player-to-player interactions within online gameworlds. As a means of adding additional vocabulary to describe norms violating behavior, this article uses the Massively Multiplayer Online Game EVE Online as a case study to demonstrate how deviant leisure can be an effective framework for unpacking some of the behaviors observed within gameworlds that don’t quite fit into other commonly used categories such as dark play, griefing, trolling, or toxicity. Of particular value for Game Studies, deviant leisure has within it an embedded critique of the social order. In this article, I argue that what is happening in EVE is a rejection of games being coopted by society into becoming an activity that must be productive, and instead via the lens of deviant leisure we can recast these events as a struggle for gameplay to return to leisure for leisure’s sake.

EVE Online is not for Everyone: Exceptionalism in Online Gaming Cultures

EVE Online is not for Everyone: Exceptionalism in Online Gaming Cultures

Deep learning is combined with massive-scale citizen science to improve large-scale image classification

Pattern recognition and classification of images are key challenges throughout the life sciences. We combined two approaches for large-scale classification of fluorescence microscopy images. First, using the publicly available data set from the Cell Atlas of the Human Protein Atlas (HPA), we integrated an image-classification task into a mainstream video game (EVE Online) as a mini-game, named Project Discovery. Participation by 322,006 gamers over 1 year provided nearly 33 million classifications of subcellular localization patterns, including patterns that were not previously annotated by the HPA. Second, we used deep learning to build an automated Localization Cellular Annotation Tool (Loc-CAT). This tool classifies proteins into 29 subcellular localization patterns and can deal efficiently with multi-localization proteins, performing robustly across different cell types. Combining the annotations of gamers and deep learning, we applied transfer learning to create a boosted learner that can characterize subcellular protein distribution with F1 score of 0.72. We found that engaging players of commercial computer games provided data that augmented deep learning and enabled scalable and readily improved image classification.

Cultural Imprinting, Institutions, and the Organization of New Firms

Do firm founders from nations with more predictable and transparent institutions allocate more autonomy to their employees? A cultural imprinting view suggests that institutions inculcate beliefs that operate beyond the environment in which those beliefs originate. We leverage data from a multiplayer online role-playing game, EVE Online, a setting where individuals can establish and run their own corporations. EVE players come from around the world, but all face the same institutional environment within the game. This setting allows us to disentangle, for the first time, cultural norms from the myriad other local factors that will influence organizational design choices across nations. Our main finding is that founders residing in nations with more predictable and transparent real world institutions delegate more authority within the virtual firms they create. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2018.0056 .

To Win at Life: Tradition and Chinese Modernities in EVE Online

EVE Online is well-knowns for allowing bad behavior like scamming, stealing and betraying, and previous research has explored how that behavior is enabled and governed by the affordances of the game. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the “community norms” that are often contrasted with the developer’s management. Here, I consider the influence of culture in China on the play of EVE. Where the narrative of globalization suggests that the world is becoming more homogenous, anthropologists look at the micro-level to see how new forms of modernity are created. EVE’s (intended) single-server design, liberal economy, and radical freedom are particularly characteristic of an assemblage of global flows, and the game’s neoliberal fantasy is transformed in play.In EVE, tradition is used by Chinese people to make sense of their modern situation, explaining to themselves why Chinese players play more conservatively than others. Without suggesting that Chinese players are universally or essentially different from players in the rest of the world, these differences can be at least partly attributed to the culture of modern China. I consider the lifeworld of a typical EVE player in China, who are over 95% young men, focused on the need to save money and provide for their family, both their parents and their potential children. Players frequently compared the conservative attitude toward money in the actual world with their own conservative play of EVE, or their perceived conservative play of other players.

Barbarians at the Imperium Gates: Organizational Culture and Change in EVE Online

This article looks at organizational culture and identity of different organisations in EVE Online, using a combination of critical historical and ethnographic approaches. We argue that it is helpful to understand major organizations in EVE as analogous to early polities, in terms of the ways in which claims to leadership and power are demonstrated (for example through the writing of history). Yet, as we show, these organizations have strong cultures which demonstrate resilience and a resistance to top-down cultural change, meaning that the successful implementation of such change is governed by rank-and-file members rather than their leadership. We propose that the cultural (rather than political or social) nature of this resilience is centrally important in understanding how organizations in EVE function. This unity of practices and understanding allows EVE’s major organizations to suffer huge losses to their position and prestige, and yet remain viable communities and potentially resurgent powers. This seems to challenge the ‘social network’-type descriptions often used to explain the persistent groups seen in many online games.

Making Science Fiction Real: Neoliberalism, Real-Life and Esports in Eve Online

In this paper, we argue that EVE Online is a fruitful site for exploring how the representational and political-economic elements of science fiction intersect to exert a sociocultural and political-economic force on the shape and nature of the future-present. EVE has been oft heralded for its economic and sociocultural complexity, and for employing a free market ethos and ethics in its game world. However, we by contrast seek not to consider how EVE reflects our contemporary world, but rather how our contemporary neoliberal milieu reflects EVE. We explore how EVE works to make its world of neoliberal markets and borderline anarcho-capitalism manifest through the political economic and sociocultural assemblages mobilized beyond the game. We explore the deep intertwining of behaviors of players both within and outside of the game, demonstrating that EVE promotes neoliberal activity in its players, encourages these behaviors outside the game, and that players who have found success in the real world of neoliberal capitalism are those best-positioned for success in the time-demanding and resource-demanding world of EVE. This thereby sets up a reciprocal ideological determination between the real and virtual worlds of EVE players, whereby each reinforces the other. We lastly consider the “Alliance Tournament” event, which romanticizes conflict and competition, and argue that it serves as a crucial site for deploying a further set of similar rhetorical resources. The paper therefore offers an understanding of the sociocultural and political-economic pressure exerted on the “physical” world by the intersection of EVE’s representational and material elements, and what these show us about the real-world ideological power of science fictional worlds.

Is Betrayal in EVE Online Unethical?

Betrayal is common in EVE Online. While not all gameplay based on deception is wrong, betraying a genuine friendship is wrong in any context. While some neo-Aristotelians have argued that perfect friendship is impossible online, it is possible for imperfect people to become Aristotelian character-friends even across imperfect communications channels. Good people are disposed to form friendships when they spend large amounts of time with others; people who make a hobby of feigning friendship are displaying bad character. While the possibility of betrayal does make EVE more interesting as a test of social skills for all players, that does not justify the actions of those who choose to betray.

Scaling Technoliberalism for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

The sandbox genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) addresses players as subjects with agency to shape worlds, impact populations, and make history through their actions within virtual environments. Designed features afford feelings of empowerment and solidarity that undergird technoliberal forms of subjectivity, which uphold technological structures as legitimate means to emergent effects in virtual worlds. This article uses ethnographic fieldwork and player interviews at EVE Online fan conventions to examine how the ideas and affects of technoliberalism are afforded through procedurally-encoded game processes, yet are aestheticized through branding onto player communities and their platforms. This smooths over the contradiction at the heart of technoliberalism that players’ agency to shape virtual world content is contingent on rules encoded into platforms whose development and adjustment are beyond their control. These contradictions are the key to understanding the pleasures of freedom and complexities of control in designed environments beyond gaming.

Editorial

This special issue in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research highlights the ways that EVE scholarship has matured. A sub-discipline within a sub-discipline, writing about EVE no longer focuses just on what makes this particular MMOG so different to the more mainstream online games and virtual worlds, but now describes in fascinating depth the elements of this virtual world that have taken 15 years of play to develop. As guest editors, we are excited to share this collection as these five articles exemplify the contributions that EVE Online scholarship will continue to make long into the future.

Temporary Break or Permanent Departure? Rethinking What It Means to Quit EVE Online

To date, much of the research about massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and the people who play them has focused on studies of current players. Comparatively, little is known about why players quit. Rather than assuming MMOG play begins and ends with personal interest, this article uses a leisure studies framework to account for barriers and participation to play. Drawing on survey responses from 133 former EVE Online players, this article demonstrates that quitting is not a strict binary where one moves from playing to not playing. Furthermore, quitting in the context of MMOGs is not always a definitive act as some players will leave and then return to a particular game numerous times. Ultimately, this article argues that the voices of former players are an underattended demographic that can add further insights allowing game scholars to better understand why players gravitate toward particular games and not others.

Predicting Virtual World User Population Fluctuations with Deep Learning.

This paper proposes a system for predicting increases in virtual world user actions. The virtual world user population is a very important aspect of these worlds; however, methods for predicting fluctuations in these populations have not been well documented. Therefore, we attempt to predict changes in virtual world user populations with deep learning, using easily accessible online data, including formal datasets from Google Trends, Wikipedia, and online communities, as well as informal datasets collected from online forums. We use the proposed system to analyze the user population of EVE Online, one of the largest virtual worlds.