Games & Virtual Geography

EVE-Online is an MMO in every sense of the phrase; I dare say no other interactive environment compares to EVE’s “massive” or “multiplayer’” aspects in even the slightest sense.  A brief summary of EVE is next to impossible, but I’ll try to convey the jist.  You, the player, are a Capsuleer, one blessed with immortality via speed-of-light cloning technology: you are fearless, for you can never truly die.  You and your fellow Capsuleers in the galaxy of New Eden craft your own fate; vast territorial defense and assault, weapon and ship manufacturing, space station and star base construction and defense, factional warfare, scientific research, scamming, pirating, shipping, mining, etc: if you can imagine doing it within the context of the game, odds are you can.  The players in EVE are the final word: they create and control nearly every aspect of the galaxy’s economy and shape and define its borders and wars.

Each node of the map is one star (disregard the glows, its a data overlay)

The simple beauty of the massiveness of EVE’s world is hard to explain without one having played, but I’ll try to lay out the basics.  There are some 64+ regions in EVE; and within each region is about 100 stars; these hundred stars are divided down into constellations each made up of dozens of stars; around each star is an entire solar system; each solar system is composed of planets (from none to upwards of 20) with each with its own moons (again, from none to dozens), asteroid belts (again, from none to dozens), and stargates that link solar systems to other solar systems.   There are significantly over 5000 charted stars, each with dozens and dozens of celestial locations (and not to mention a massive wormhole exploration aspect of the game that can easily double the total number of systems in the game), making for 10′s of thousands of unique locations.  Travel between systems (aka solar systems or stars) happens only at stargates; each system has a few stargates that link it to nearby systems.  This enormous size means travel time can be quite large over long distances: a trip across 40 systems could take an hour easily.   The result of this series of connections is the galaxy is turned into an immensely vast web with stars as nodes and jumpgates as connections.

With a universe nearly as vast as an actual galaxy, traditional server systems like sharding or instancing would be a ludicrous concept; EVE-Online’s massive galaxy is a single-shard experience: all players play in the same galaxy, in the galaxy.  The strange greeting of MMO players, “Oh, you play XXXXX game? What server are you on? … Oh, well I’m on a different server…”, is impossible to have: if you are a part of EVE, you are a part of the entirety of New Eden.  While a select few economic hub location, notably the solar system of Jita, can experience literally thousands of players in the same solar system, the population of New Eden is spread out across the stars: occupying, sieging, and viciously defending territory, resources, and bases.

The vast scale, limitless possibilities, and finite connections make for an intriguing sense of geography.  The concept of critical geography, and its subset of extroverted geography,  seems best suited to EVE’s universe.  The world has no real ‘boundaries,’ just connections between locations; you can literally point your ship out towards a random direction, accelerate to maximum speed, and fly for a week if you choose (tho you’d just end up at some random point in space).  The ‘borders’ of territories in this galaxy are determined by player actions; meaning and importance of area changes by the week as systems fall and are retaken by opposing player factions.   The world of EVE is a dynamic power struggle for domination of the galaxy with massive groups of players struggling to control valuable systems filled with precious recourses. Its the quest for control and influence that drives social interaction and gives significance to place while the large web of stargates connections define routes of  transportation and passageways for factional interaction.