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 McKnightâs 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."
