As a programmer, I have the dubious pleasure of enjoying overcomplicated, highly technical games such as EVE Online. For those who don’t know, EVE is an MMORPG that functions essentially on the opposite premise from World of Warcraft. Pretty much nothing is done for you in EVE. There’s a million ways to screw up and nothing you can do once that’s happened. It’s rather like real life in that way. Despite its poorly-done Python UI and downright pathetic Mac port (it’s the cider wrapper layer on top of wine emulation), I enjoy the game, primarily because it exposes so much of the “nitty-gritty” details of how its universe works. A player has control over very detailed numbers and data relating to the functioning of their spaceships and even their bodies. Often it’s too much data; it’s very easy to forget one tiny thing and lose millions of ISK (in-game money) and a great deal of time because of it. Neglecting to bookmark a wormhole exit comes to mind. EVE also does nothing for you. To install implants or activate jump clones, you have to manually pause your skill training queue, for example, even though this is something the game could very easily do for you, and there’s no apparent reason to make the player click the extra four buttons.

In any case, the thought behind this whole bit is, games are addictive. This is not a new discovery, for the world or for me, and I don’t expect anyone to be astonished by the revelation. For people such as me, who fall in love very easily with inane technical details and exacting numbers and gated progression (the need to finish task X before being able to learn the details of the task Y that follows), EVE is particularly so. It’s easy to say “I’ll just do one mission and then get to work,” and in a game like World of Warcraft where quests or even group dungeons are typically short these days (vanilla WoW notwithstanding), that would mean an hour of playing a game and then several hours of productive time. Setting aside the question of the “well just one more” syndrome, which is another problem altogether, the same comment made about EVE usually involves suddenly realizing I’ve spent six hours I meant to use for coding just finishing the one task! It always takes longer to blow up NPC ships than the mission description suggests (even using the Cliff Notes available online). Then there’s travel time between areas of a complex to consider, especially in a slow ship like most of the more powerful ones, and time spent salvaging wrecks (an extremely profitable activity well worth the effort if you have the time to spend, especially on more difficult missions), and then there’s organizing and selling/using whatever you gained from the mission and the salvage.

EVE unfortunately has the problem that for some play styles (including mine), play consists of paying intent attention to the same thing happening over and over for an hour or three, most of that time spent with no user input (and what input there is is also repetitive). Taking one’s attention off for a moment lends itself to finding the entire effort wasted. This would be a spectacular thing for some forms of autistic, but I’m not one of them! Oh well. I still like the game, because there’s a very real sense of accomplishment to completing various tasks.

The upshot of it all is that the existence of such games tends to sap the time I’d otherwise spend making progress. Yet, if asked if I’d rather the game be taken away, I have to say no, because I still need the distraction. What I want, really, is more control over the length of the distraction. “Just do it” doesn’t work for everyone, people!

I would recommend EVE Online to compulsives and the technically minded. I would not recommend it for those who don’t have the patience to wait before being able to explore facets of the game. Some of the higher-end stuff takes literally months to gain the skills for.

This post didn’t really have a conclusion, or a solid point. I just kinda felt like getting all that out. :-)