Sportsmanship in EVE Online
Posted by Janka
EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online game about spaceships, and if that sentence made your eyes glaze over you might want to skip this post, unless “sportsmanship” is interesting to you in general (in which case I recommend you read it anyway). If EVE is familiar for you, you can skip the next four paragraphs.
EVE differs from most (all?) other MMOGs in some crucial respects, most of which belong to another post (or ‘con speech) completely. For this post, what is important to understand is that EVE is not a level- or score-based game where you can measure your achievement against filling some objectives set by the game, such as reaching a particular level or completing a particular quest or raid. There is no “end game”. You cannot win the game, you cannot finish it. Instead, it is a sandbox game where you measure yourself only against other players – you fight for regions, resources, glory and fame, but the game itself rewards none of these. You get no points, no levels, no nothing. The only reward is the fame and glory themselves, and the resources you can control to produce more of those.
In EVE, you set your goals yourself, and you can go about achieving them in different ways. You can change your goals at any point (though if you have made them known first, people will spot this, and you might lose glory in their eyes). Skills and equipment help, but in the end what scores you a kill or wins you a solar system and gives you the upper hand on a regional market is player skill and dedication. While you can play this game solo or with a small band of friends, in the end, if you really want to be one of the “big players”, you have to do it by banding together with others. The biggest powerblocks in the game consist of thousands of players. Co-ordinating that is no little feat and requires real commitment. Even the tiniest alliances, in serious conflict only for the control of some small local area of space, require co-operation with tens of other players, against similar bands.
While “dying” in the game hurts (more than in most games), it does not obviously really kill you off or exclude you from the game. You can push someone out of a particular solar system, you can kill their structures there, you can make them die in horrible ways when they enter the regions you control, you can make it pretty damn close impossible for them to win that control from you, but you cannot make it completely impossible, and you cannot stop them from coming at you and being a bloody nuisance at least. The only thing that can break any player alliance in EVE is the loss of morale, the loss of interest in the fight. Competition is fierce, and the human emotional drama involved is as high as or higher than most of the players probably ever experience in their work places or other such “real life”.
If you think this a little insane, compare to competition sports and their following. Just saying.
Views regularly surface in the game that when it comes to spaceships actually shooting at each other it is not “sportsmanlike” to crush the opponent using superior numbers or otherwise superior force, such as ships specifically designed against their attack. There are several pejorative names for people who are “cowardly” enough to use superior force to crush someone “brave” enough to put up a fight in a fleet that will most likely lose. I totally disagree with these views. Fights in EVE, when they happen, are not “fair”. They are not supposed to be fair. When the shooting starts, the fight is over—the guy with best numbers, ships/modules, and discipline wins. The game is not about who can actually shoot the best. The game is not about spaceships and pretty explosions. The real game is about who can scheme, plan, co-ordinate and maneuver themselves into a position where the unfairness is on their side. It is about forcing or tricking your opponent to commit to a fight they cannot win.
I do believe there is room for sportsmanship in EVE, however. It is just not about the tricks you use in a fight. As far as I am concerned, once you are in the game and the game is on, any trick you can pull (apart from abusing bugs that the game devs say not to abuse) goes. Some tricks are more stylish than others, granted, but still, if you score a kill you score a kill and your enemy calling you lame because they do not like your style is just them being—unsportsmanlike.
Sportsmanship is about attitude. It is not about what you do to win or lose within the game, it is about how you behave once you have.
If you pull a particularly neat trick and win, it is ok to rejoice and gloat a little. It is fine to feel good about yourself if your game is at the level where you are clearly on the top of most of the people you meet in your region. It is great to take pride in your achievements—even if this is just a game, it is a game that takes very real intelligence, dedication, and co-operation to be good at. It is, however, not sportsmanlike to jeer at your opponent who just lost, to put them down, to call them names, to question their worth as human beings and to wish they go to bed sobbing over how mean you are. It is not sportsmanlike to tell someone you just made explode how they are useless and will never amount to anything. It is sportsmanlike to offer the customary “good fight” salute on the local chat, and (where you can safely do so) to offer them advice on how to get better.
If you get royally screwed, or royally screw up, or a trick is pulled on you, and you lose, it is ok to feel pissed off and to kick and throw your toys a bit—as long as you do this in the privacy of your own home. It is, however, not sportsmanlike to kick and scream where others hear. It is not sportsmanlike to make excuses or to blame your opponent of “cheating” or “cowardly tricks” (or “blobbing”, to give an example of an in-game pejorative). While I do believe in PR and publicity as parts of warfare in EVE, I still think it is not sportsmanlike to engage in a smear campaign against your opponents simply because you are upset that you cannot win them on the field. It is sportsmanlike to offer the customary “good fight”, and to congratulate your opponent on a trap nicely sprung, and to express a wish to meet them on the field again another day. Be gracious – and then lick your wounds, analyze why you lost, learn from it, plot and scheme and gather allies, and then go spring a trap on them and watch those towers burn.
Sportsmanship is about the wish and ability to respect your opponent regardless of whether you win or lose, even when you pull a crazy trick at them, even when you have an inside man working on their morale or stealing their assets, even when you are doing your best to make the game not-fun for them in order to force them out of some plan they are trying to execute. There are ways of making things not-fun for the opponent and more fun for your guys that rely on disrespecting, dehumanizing, demeaning and humiliating the other guys, on robbing them of their value as a respected opponent and as a human being, and those ways are used in EVE, both in the hearing of those opponents and in internal pep talks and propaganda.
Personally, I just think those ways are lame. Not sure about “wrong”, and definitely not “against the letter of the rules”—but certainly lame. If I cannot win with sportsmanship, with respect to those who play with me, I’ll rather not win at all.
Not sure what is respectful? Here’s a rule of thumb: if you would not talk that way to/about the 12-year-old sister of your best friend, don’t talk like it to or about another player in the game, unless you know for a certain fact that the player is a friend and does not mind. (For all you know that stranger is the 12-yo little sister of your buddy – or your own grandfather, or you professor at college, or the next-door neighbor. Not that it should matter; all other players are humans and deserve courtesy, regardless of whether you personally know them or not.)
(This post is for Queneva, who first asked me the question “Do you think there is a place for sportsmanship in EVE?” in a discussion following her post about a rather disturbing subculture in the game.)
