To my great and persistent dismay, I cannot get in to playing EVE. I want to want to play it. I find it theoretically fascinating. From a sociological/academic/game theory perspective I think it’s one of the neatest virtual worlds out there. And I really, really dislike it for all the wrong reasons. That said, space games as a general rule have never quite done it for me. Sci-Fi is fine, I like Star Wars and Star Trek like everyone, I like a good (or bad) novel or movie what with the aliens and the spaceships. I am not opposed to sci-fi as a genre just about anywhere save for “fly a spaceship around space” games.
But really the deal here, and I cringe saying this to my deepest inner soul, is that in many ways EVE just isn’t pretty enough. I can’t anthropomorphise my character, and I don’t want to explore the “world”. (And a small part of me has just died committing these words to screen.) In WoW, sure, yes I like the pretty but damnit, I was not some namby pamby RPer who would only play an elf. Gear was always function over form. My female undead mage wore leggings and tunics from 60-70, and if you’ve ever seen an undead female in leggings you know what a sacrifice to aesthetics that was. And I have never, ever, save for in jest, RP walked ANYWHERE just to see the sights. And yet. There was a strong element, deep and dark though it may have been, of enjoyment that I took from really loving the imaginary world my character was living in. There is an element of make-believe, childish imagination and sensory enjoyment that the world and the characters that inhabit WoW provided. I gut-level like the colors, textures and noises of the game. I developed strong emotional attachment to my characters, reminiscent of the personalities I gave to my plush animals as a child. Not, I think, in a particularly childish way, but more like how a character in a good novel becomes real to you somehow. Even with my min/max uber efficiency tendencies, there was a bit of my brain that secretly (or, in the case of my rabid obsession with non-combat pets, not too secretly) really REALLY liked “living” in WoW’s aesthetic of a fantasy universe.
This part of my brain is, to say the least, underwhelmed by space.
Turns out, especially in the EVE version of space, space is big. it’s also dark, cold and exceptionally hard to stylize. Also, one’s avatar is no more than a head shot of a very hard to personalize stone-cold space bitch, swarthy shark-like space he-man or, assuming you have the artistic eye for human proportions of an iguana, a deeply off-putting skeletally inbred space-hick of creepiness. This avatar never comes out of their ship, and the ships, while being quite beautifully rendered are.. well… ships. Big, clunky, awkward, metallic ships. The ships look uncomfortable. They don’t strike me as being particularly fun to captain. They probably smell weird and look a lot on the inside like the ship from Alien Resurrection, all rust and steam pipes and rugged functionality. There’s a chance that I might be able to look past this and get in to the game were the UI a place of attractive buttons I could push (honestly, kill me now) but no, even that is as cold and stark and austere as the rest of it, and even more irritating given the fact that as UIs go, EVE’s is not particularly good, functionally speaking. It’s fine, just a bit.. clunky. You learn to live with it, but it’s not as though in my case I can look through the design of it to the brilliant ease of use.
To my great disgust, I’m finding all of the above so off-putting that I really can’t work up any enthusiasm for playing the game even with the incentive of being a) a better girlfriend to Harry b) less bored c) intellectually stimulated by playing a game I find to be socially and academically fascinating d) part of another guild (which I always love) and e) a member of a snooty self-identified in-crowd of EVE players who’s nerdy elitist club I would very much like to be on the inside circle of. Even with ALL of these very good reasons why EVE is the place for me, every time I sit down to play it I end up with my head on my keyboard, groaning like a sick hippo as all my will to live seeps oh so slowly out of me and in to the infinity of darkness that is space. Until, of course, I go play Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Did you know how many options there are for the bow on her head!?
/facepalm.
I am sure, as Harry and I progress on this blog I will have a great many more things to say on the subject of EVE. Hopefully they will become more constructive as I settle in to accepting (or find a way around) the fact that it simply doesn’t appeal to me.
As it stands, me liking EVE feels like it would be a magic bullet. All the fun and togetherness of WoW with even more personalized goals and even more dynamic small group play! Right now I really miss WoW because I really miss Harry. I miss having a place where we were evenly matched, where we learned and problem solved and critically thought about things together. So far, the best (if not only) place we’ve found this kind of interaction with each other is through gaming, and if I could just get myself a little bit more enthusiastic about EVE I feel like we could have it again, easy, without having to work at it. It could go back to how it was. Not liking EVE enough to get really involved in it both disgusts me in a more roll-my-eyes-can’t-believe-what-a-girl-I-am kind of way but it also scares the crap out of me and makes me feel guilty. We don’t know quite how to find the same connection WoW gave us, we don’t know where too look for it or what to try outside of an MMO, and certainly not outside of games. If I could only fall in love with EVE it would be so easy. Save for a few months when we took a WoW break, we’ve never been without a default, go-to, always easily accessible activity that we find stimulating to do together, and I think it has somewhat shocked and scared both of us how much we have come to expect and need that kind of interaction, and how very very bad we are at providing it for ourselves outside the framework of an MMO that we both enjoy.
Which, of course, means that here we are on this little blog. With that, I’ll end this rambling post and let Harry explain in his post just what the heck we might be doing on this little rock we’ll call our own in the great icy wilderness of the internet.
