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Hrr, nie wymagalo odemnie zadnego loginu, pierwszy raz to otwieram, anyway, przeklejam.
The kingdom is in crisis. After pledging to treat its citizens equally, the government stands accused of unfairly favoring one powerful, well-connected political faction. Many citizens have taken to open dissent, even revolt, and some are threatening to emigrate permanently.
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A scene from the multiplayer Internet game Eve Online.
This specter of corruption has emerged most recently not in some post-colonial trouble spot but in the virtual nation of an Internet game called Eve Online (population 200,000) where aspiring star pilots fight over thousands of solar systems in a vast science-fiction universe every day.
So now, in a sociological twist, the company that makes Eve, CCP, based in Iceland (population 300,000), says it will tackle the problem the way a democracy would. In what appears to be a first, the company plans to hold elections so that players can select members of an oversight committee.
The company will then fly those players to Iceland regularly so they can audit CCP’s operations and report back to their player-constituents. And taking cues from transitions to democracy in the developing world, CCP says it will call in election monitors from universities in Europe and the United States.
“Perception is reality, and if a substantial part of our community feels like we are biased, whether it is true or not, it is true to them,” Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. “Eve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation, and we have to address it like a nation being accused of corruption.
“A government can’t just keep saying, ‘We are not corrupt.’ No one will believe them. Instead you have to create transparency and robust institutions and oversight in order to maintain the confidence of the population.”
That confidence has been badly shaken in recent months as many players have become convinced that CCP has rigged the game in favor of a mighty alliance of players called Band of Brothers.
“Once again it seems that several of your employees have been up to no good,” members of a rival alliance called Goonswarm wrote in an open letter to CCP that was posted on the Internet over Memorial Day weekend. The letter detailed various allegations of misconduct, including a claim that a CCP developer had improperly infiltrated a Goonswarm group.
For nongamers and those whose gaming habit consists of a few rounds of Minesweeper during conference calls, it can be difficult to understand the emotional depth and commitment among players of so-called massively multiplayer online games, or M.M.O.’s. Players of such games, who generally pay about $15 a month for access, often spend thousands of hours over many years building their online personas, accumulating virtual power and wealth and often making friends with other players from all over the world.
The most famous and popular M.M.O. is the fantasy game World of Warcraft, which now has more than eight million subscribers. But there are factors that make Eve in some ways more intense than World of Warcraft or other M.M.O.’s.
Most notable perhaps is that all 200,000 of Eve’s users occupy the same virtual galaxy. In most online games, including World of Warcraft, players are split up among dozens or even hundreds of copies of the game world, known as servers. Each server may have a total population of only 10,000 or 20,000 people, and at any moment perhaps only 5,000 players are actually online.
In Eve, however, there is only one game world, and there are routinely 30,000 people within it at one time. And while a serious World of Warcraft guild might have 50 members, major alliances in Eve have thousands of members.
Also contributing to Eve’s distinction is the management of its “reality”: the game’s story line and politics are generated almost entirely by the players, not the game developers.
In Eve, for example, player alliances control vast expanses of digital real estate, including hundreds of planets. There are some areas that are safe for all players, known as Empire space, but much of the galaxy is called “0.0” space, which means that there is zero security or police presence there to protect players, as in many games.
In the 0.0 systems, virtual life is a literal free-for-all among warring player groups. If you fly your spaceship into a 0.0 system controlled by another alliance, you will almost certainly get shot on sight, no questions asked.
And so the various alliances of Eve Online fight epic campaigns for control of territory that essentially continue around the clock for months on end.
In an interview over an Internet voice chat program, the player known as SirMolle, chief executive of Evolution, one of the player corporations in Band of Brothers, said that his alliance’s goal was to take over every solar system in the game.
“Our goal in Eve is to control all of 0.0 space, and when that’s done we’re going to take over the empire one by one and control the empire as well,” he said. (SirMolle would not reveal his real name but said that he is a 40-year-old manager for a heating and cooling company in Sweden.)
The content is not real, in much the same sense that Tony Soprano and Scarlett O’Hara are not real. But for players to feel as if their investments of time and money have worth, they must believe that the company that makes the game is maintaining the fiction in good faith.
And so CCP’s credibility took a hit earlier this year when news leaked on Internet message boards that a company employee who played the game under the name T20 as a member of Band of Brothers had in essence given his in-game friends rare and valuable technical blueprints that allowed them an unfair advantage over other players. Band of Brothers returned the blueprints to the company, but the damage had been done. One player for Band of Brothers, Blacklight, who said he is a business consultant in Britain in real life, called the incident “a blow” in an Internet voice chat interview.
Then, over Memorial Day weekend, Goonswarm publicized its latest allegations. Last week the company rebutted those specific charges; in the case of the alleged infiltrator the company said that the employee was merely trying to fix a bug in the game code. But a broader problem was revealed: Many Eve players, writing on various message boards, said they simply do not trust CCP anymore.
So now CCP plans the radical step of opening itself up to independent oversight: nine player-overseers who will act as ombudsmen for the game’s subscribers. The company says it will hold the elections in the fall.
“I envision this council being made up of nine members selected by the players themselves, where you announce your candidacy, and if you win the election, they come here to Iceland, and they can look at every nook and cranny and get to see that we are here to run this company on a professional basis,” said Mr. Petursson, CCP’s chief executive. “They can see that we did not make this game to win it.”
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