Launched October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 fell to earth over a half century ago, on January 4, 1958, just about two weeks short of my second birthday.
If you didn't grow up watching Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley, grown, serious, trustworthy men, unlike today's cable news chattering class,
manipulate little plastic models of spacecraft on TV as all America sat mesmerized, it's perfectly understandable if it strikes you a little odd,
a wee bit self-absorbed, that I pair such a world historical event as the commencement of "The Space Age" with the mere personal, the birthday of an insignificant human infant -- me.
And both events happened such a long, long time ago that I can readily imagine most MMO gamers, reading this, already cringing at my manifest senile decrepitude and more than likely irreversible, utter ignorance -- for we've long known only youth know anything -- of all that is important and worth knowing of life, of love, and most especially of
any game play worthy of the name.
Yet Sputnik 1 casts a long, long shadow for something so tiny,
above the surface of the planet only three months, precisely because its consequences were so personal for those alive at the time or born soon after. Mundanely, it beeped around the planet and revealed
some data about the upper atmosphere. But fundamentally, its advent forever altered the imagination of nearly every man, woman and especially child then alive. James Cameron was 3. George Lucas, 13.
For my narrow age cohort slice of that larger generation then "busy being born," Sputnik changed everything so fundamentally as to be incalculable, at least for we who were made by it. The very school system we entered as children only a few years later had already been turned upside down by the event, before we arrived. We knew no different. We were fed from the start an urgent stream of math-science education and glowing incitements to achieve great scientific and technological feats for the nation and, beyond, for the betterment of mankind itself.
In a year punctuated by nuclear attack drills -- third grade for me -- the quickest among us were assigned to play chess in the back of the classroom as an alternative to rote learning for those still striving to "catch up." Narrow, nationalist fear of Cold War mutual assured destruction was to be transmuted into a new fearlessness in the service of higher human purpose. We were, indeed, "to boldly go where no man had gone before."
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 Let's not descend into legalistic quibbling. The actions Alexander Gianturco (The Mittani) rehearsed and those in which he engaged at the EVE Fanfest 2012 Alliance Panel, as initially reported by Eurogamer.net "CCP launches investigation after Eve Online FanFest panel accused of mocking suicidal player" and Massively "CCP investigates player panel that encouraged cyber-bullying," and which are viewable in their entirety on YouTube "Alliance Panel @ CCP Fanfest 2012 in FULL in HD," are clear forms of bullying as we all have known and understood bullies and bullying since grade-school. They occurred online in "cyberspace," in EVE itself, in EVE forums, and via the webcast of the EVE Fanfest 2012 Alliance Panel. Whether these acts violate any nation's or state's laws defining the crime of "Cyber-Bullying," whether these acts violate EVE Online's End-User License Agreement (EULA) or its Terms of Service (TOS) is beside the point. Legal or contractual status does not change the nature of these acts. And if we cannot plainly, frankly recognize and discuss these acts for what they are, as well as their present and likely future consequences for EVE, that itself is more than sufficient indication of the level of animosity to which player-to-player relations have fallen in EVE Online, in no small part due to The Mittani's and his GoonWaffe followers' long-sustained fomentation and exploitation of contempt for non-PvP high sec players, especially "carebear" miners, not just as players but as persons. Browse almost any EVE Online Forum thread to discover them in action.
In the long term, I would like to see hisec itself become a realm of misery and fear. In the past two weeks as I have been murdering miners, I have found the average hisec dweller to be truly execrable.
-- "Alexander Omega," GoonWaffe
If we break 10k votes this year, we're going to annihilate Jita - and everyone is invited.
'annihilate jita' means 'camp 4-4 in tornadoes and destroy every single freighter coming in or out of it' fyi
-- @TheMittani
In no small measure, Alexander Gianturco has ridden precisely this kind
of "bad boy" persona and a bully ethos of public ridicule of "The Other" in EVE as he and his define it to the Chair
of the EVE's player representation body, The Council of Stellar Management (CSM).
This persona and ethos have been, to significant extent, that for which he has both
sought and received admiration, applause, and most recently over 10,000
account votes in the CSM7 election. In what he insistently called by the Stalinist term, his campaign "agitprop," he argued repeatedly that the job of CSM chair required someone of his order of thuggishness.
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 The following is a response that grew too big for a comment to Liang Nuren's Social Contracts and Political Maneuvering in Eve Online in his blog Failing In So Many Ways, itself a response to Mittens and the Magic Circle by John Carter McKnight (Aporia: John Carter McKnight’s Mostly Academic Blog). I'll likely get around to writing an opening summary of their back and forth, joined by others, but in the meantime, it's likely worthwhile to read through their pieces before proceeding to read what follows.
An intial observation:
John Carter McKnight is quite right, at least about the class of EVE players who are
griefers and the larger class that embraces, let us say, the "griefer
social contract." Whatever griefers claim in defense of their EVE,
their gameplay practice depends upon high contiguity and continuity
between game and life. The essence of griefing, as one but hardly the
only mode of PvP, is to reach beyond the virtual, beyond the pixels,
to "harvest the tears" and impotent anger of the actual
player, the real person behind the avatar. Griefers say "HTFU It's
only pixels." But pixels never cry.
The main argument:
Liang Nuren does indeed make a strong case for what might be called a
sustained double consciousness on the part of gamers of the divide
between real and unreal: "Truly, the social contract in Eve Online
requires the ability to simultaneously follow both
real life and in
game laws." And he makes an even stronger ancillary case about
McKnight's neglect of the role of internal EVE politics in the
instant case of The Mittani's behavior and its aftermath, which
I'll set aside for the moment.
But
Liang Nuren's ensuing comments and those of others in support of
the existence of an EVE "social contract" probably do all that's
necessary to convince John
Carter McKnight that, yes indeed, "EVE Online players are one of the
last remaining populations of believers in the 'magic
circle.'"
The
difficulty Liang Nuren runs into, without yet having extricated
himself, is that his argument turns upon a deft substitution of
"social contract" for "magic circle"; thereby, importing the
discourse of community, consent, politics, legitimacy, etc. (and
perhaps more strange historical baggage than he realizes) and raising
the object of inquiry from the strawman "fairy"
structural-formalism, at which, flogging his Rosinante forward,
McKnight wants to tilt his much-practiced lance, to an order of
phenomena that must be interrogated with more complex, nuanced
socio-political questions.
However, wherever Liang Nuren & company approach specifying what this EVE
"social contract" might be, and how and where it and consent to
it arise, they fall promptly back to a kind of structural-formalism
that must delight McKnight.
Their
EVE "social contract," when it comes to specifics, is not truly
consensual at all, except in the trivial sense of "Love it or Leave
it." And more devastating, it is not ultimately socio-political,
for they wish to derive it from the mechanics and rules (or rather
lack of rules) of the game.
By the
main thread of their reasoning, implicitly, all players consent, when they sign up to play, to
what amounts to the "griefer's social contract" and to the
moral inversion whereby "harvesting tears" and all sorts of other
real world "bad behavior" no one would teach a child is not only
"ok" but to be celebrated, simply due to the undisputed fact that,
structurally and formally, CCP's game mechanics and rules permit,
even explicitly authorize, such behavior.
In
commenting, Alex Satrapa, quite correctly, completely collapses the
detour Liang Nuren tried to take to rescue EVE from McKnight's
criticism: "Consenting to PvP the moment you undock is not even a
social contract, it's a built in rule of the game: it's part of
the fabric of the Magic Circle of EVE."
So
much for "social contract." We have never left the formalist
"magic circle."
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 A Coward's Guide to Starting Out in EVE
Rule #1: Never let your Skill Queue run out of skills to learn. If you flee EVE in terror, you want to come back stronger, not the same 90lb weakling you were when you turned tail yesterday or the day before. To be sure, always keep a long, multi-day skill tailing off the end of your queue.
Rule #2: Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend. In Love and War, logistics win out. Ships, weapons, rigging, skills, implants, clones are expensive. You will be vulnerable if you cannot afford the best, over and over. Keep your eye on the almighty ISK and you won't cry so much when you lose and have to replace armaments and assets.
Rule #3: Given a choice between fighting now or fighting later, fight later. (And don't let your skill queue run out!)
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 The Minmatar Fenrir is easily the fastest of the great sluggards that are the massive freighters of EVE, clocking in at a base speed of 80 meters per second. But it has also the smallest cargo hold of all the freighters, starting at a base of 720,000 cubic meters. In consequence, the hoi polloi, who never question the pursuit of bigger as better, almost invariably overlook the Fenrir in favor of that behemoth the Caldari Charon, which leads all EVE freighters with a base cargo capacity of 785000 cubic meters. While the Fenrir can be brought to a maximum capacity of 900,000 cubic meters, with level 5 training in Minmatar Freighter Spaceship Command, comparable full training in the Caldari Freighter skill book will increase the Charon's capacity to 981,250 cubic meters. Of course, there are also those esthetes who choose their freighter simply by style; among their kind, the sleek Amarr Providence seems to be the favorite. There's no accounting for taste. I have my racial pride: I prefer the junkyard, everything-and-the-kitchensink aesthetic of Minmatar ships.
But is there a practical, more objective measure of which freighter, day in and day out, running regular hauling routes about high sec, is the "best freighter" in New Eden? I think there is: Jump Gate Efficiency. And the "best freighter" by this measure is clearly the Minmatar Fenrir.
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 To my tastes, Mark726's EVE Travel is far and away the finest EVE blog on the in-game universe of EVE Online or, for that matter, on any EVE topic. That he has chosen to write a peaceful tourist guide to "Sightseeing in the Cluster" is a bonus stroke of pure whimsical genius. From concept to execution -- Wordpress theme choice and adaptation, artwork, endlessly inventive images, and in-character voyaging capsuleer narrative and exposition -- EVE Travel is the epitome of what all good MMO writing ought aspire to be: good in-world photojournalism. How much time, how much of our lives do we who play this and other MMO "games" end by spending simply "dwelling" in the virtual realities they present? Scary to think about. But, however cynical a pure keyboard jockey we might style ourselves, these fictive places become to varying degrees real to us, as they never can to "outsiders," to non-gamers, who never venture in; nor to peek-a-boo gamers, who come and go so quickly, who knows what they're thinking. Most all of us can reel off such remembered imaginary places, as real at least in recollection as vivid dreams but so much more real in that we have traversed these dreams in common with so many others.
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