Traders in London and New York are apparently addicted to an online game that lets them behave like Gordon Gekko and Master Chief at the same time.
Eve Online, a rare hit from Reykjavik, is not one of those warm, communal efforts at Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). It is brutal, backstabbing and rather proud of it.
Not surprisingly, its 200,000 players are 95 per cent male, with half coming from the US and the bulk of the rest from Europe. Large numbers are based in New York and in London, where a supercomputer serves up the game as a single universe, as opposed to the multiple servers or shards of something like World of Warcraft.
Trading for items is a key part of the game using the ISK – inter-stellar kurrency, which is also the symbol for the Icelandic Krona.
One player set up a bank, offered high interest rates and then paid the interest from other deposits before trying to convert $200,000 in ISKs on eBay. He was caught and ejected from the game. Others staged a successful IPO in the game to raise money to build space stations on the edge of the universe.
No sooner had they done so than they were attacked and taken over by another fleet, meaning investors lost all their money.
“It’s all about power – financial, political and military, it’s a dog-eat-dog world,” Magnus Bergsson, chief marketing officer for Eve, told me on the fringes of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
“You have a space ship and it can be full of valuables. I’d collected mine over eight months and I lost everything in a matter of seconds when I was attacked. I cried for about three days.”
The dread of losing everything forces people to team up to protect their assets and Magnus says these friendships driven by fear mean the social ties are stronger than in other games.
“The people in Eve Online, although I never see them, really are my friends. You don’t get many chances to save a friend’s life, but in this game you do.”
