Something Like a Mission Statement

     This is the beginning of an experiment, since I have lately been more and more prickled by the inclination to write about the games I play, and this accumulation of nudges has finally achieved critical mass. Hence, welcome to Afterburning Weasels, a blog of, as yet, no reputation or merit. Bottles of champagne are on the left, please break one over the captain's head as you leave. It might give the ship ideas, and that is, after all, the point of this project: try to write, and free from mental chains the ingenuity of my muse, or something like that. Come ye, of the wilderness and listen. Or don't as you please, perhaps an idea will come roaming to you instead.

     There is always something sad and, indeed, risky, in this releasing of ideas into the wild, for they take on lives of their own at that point, and the creator relinquishes the control that they had while he or she was cultivating them. Yet at the same time, so much of what we, human beings, do and are, is taking in such free-roaming ideas into ourselves and then re-releasing them with new perspective or elements, that there is much happiness and satisfaction in the practice. So, as long as I have something to say, that I can articulate, here it will go, and may others make good use of what they find.

     As it has been primarily my changing relationship with the game of Eve Online that prompted me to begin writing, subjects relating to Eve are what this blog will likely focus on, though I will not limit myself to speaking of Eve exclusively. But given Eve's significance in sparking the whole endeavor, for a first post it seems right to offer a brief of my relationship to it, and try to say why Eve matters to me now.

     Many things have been said about Eve’s player-driven events, the feats of theft and war, politics and industry, and this impressive scope for inter-player interaction is of course, one of the things that I praise in the game when describing it to others. But I do not like taking part in such events personally. I do not fly in combat often, my killboard is abyssal, I do not make isk efficiently, or plot effectively, or even converse with many other players. I have been positively averse to socializing, in all forms. Yet it the prescence of such a universe of blogs, tournaments, anecdotes, and meta-mechanical interaction that currently prompts me to stay in the game. Even though I have very limited interaction with it directly, the network at play in the background makes Eve far more engaging than any other online game I have tried. 

     I have often heard words to the effect that Eve is a game which it is far more fun with friends, and I certainly have come to agree, for the more I speak to other players and try new things, the more I enjoy myself than I ever did in my first few years. I have come to appreciate the social aspect of Eve, despite having started out as initially disconnected from it, and indeed, mostly unaware of it. That introverted tendency, which started off very strong, has been reversing itself for a long time, and now here we are, public writing. I may still play Eve in a rather personal and limited way, but it no longer seems to me that to play it so, I must do so by myself. However, as I have hinted, I did not start out from that view.

     I don’t remember my first experience with Eve fondly. Finally installing a trial I found in my stack of demo discs back in 2008, I spent a summer mining in a rookie frigate, looking around confusedly, scared witless by low-sec, and lost in the interface. I think I made about 30 mil across the three month subscription I upgraded to when I found out there were skills I couldn't train on a trial account. During that time, I wondered how I could get into a cruiser (I had no skill plan and couldn't even figure out what my attributes were for), never asked one question of another player, and generally failed to play the game, until, tired of orbiting rocks, I left. The whole experience had been unengaging and unpleasant. I did not consider returning for several years.

     It was the Incarna debacle that got me back into the game, funnily enough. I’d kept hearing things, once in a while, about what was going on in Eve on gaming news sites, so it was on the corner of my radar, and when the Jita Riots broke out, the community aspect of the game materialized in a way it had failed to before. Players of a game were mad, and it was making news. But why? To me at least, it seemed to be because they loved their home, and that home had been tainted, positively damaged, by a failure to fulfill what it wanted to be, as if a contractor hired in good faith to improve the dining room had built a closet instead. But the residents did not want to live in a desecrated house, naturally they wanted things fixed. I can’t describe it as well as I’d like. What came across to me was that the players’ world mattered to them. Eve was a place that was more than the sum of its parts, an interesting place, and now for me, a place that I wanted to be a part of.

     I did not want to play spreadsheets in space or build the perfect battleship. I did not want take part in the grand designs unfolding through those implements. I was not even particularly interested in playing the game itself, at least as a game. But I did want to be part of a world that was not constructed by the artifice of writers (which I had much experience of), but written by the actions of its characters, its living inhabitants, and I wanted those actions to make sense in the way life does, not the way art does. I was very tired of fictions where unrealistic actions were attributed to humans, and humanity was consequently washed away to stereotypes that undercut the tale they had meant to support – I’m looking at you, Warhammer 40k. So I re-subscribed, just in time for Crucible. Since then, I have been playing off and on, generally about 5 months of each year, until I finally entered college and could rely on stable internet. Sarhyl has about a quarter of the skillpoints her age would indicate, but at least she can sit in cruisers now.

     So now I play Eve every week. I have a few friends to fly with, I’ve been in wormholes and lowsec, and I know (technically) how to make money, even if I don’t often do so very effectively. I read most of the Eve-related blogs and news sites, watch the forums and try to learn new things. Eve is an odd game. In many ways, if you don’t look beyond the programming, it does not offer much, even though the graphics and mechanics have certainly changed since I first undocked. Some changes are good, some things haven’t been changed that I wish would be, and much that has been promised that still hasn't been delivered on. I don’t care too much about that, just as I don't worry over the numbers behind my ship. If I ever feel I’m not getting enough out of the game, I’ll quit. Until then, however, I will see if I can  return a little something to the universe that came alive for me and still is alive for me: the Eve I play to be part of what goes beyond it. What I have to offer to that broader horizon is my perspective, so that is what I intend to follow hereafter.

     Unless, of course, I break and start posting nothing but incoherent tirades about rocket badgers, the mortal enemy of my most heroic weasels. Hopefully we will avoid that. In the meantime, once again, welcome!