Why Go On?

I dunno, I woke up this morning with a serious question on my mind. The echo of some strange dream most likely. The after-thought of a restless sleep, or the under-pinnings of a moral quandary debated by neurons. Regardless, there it was. Right on top of my head. Why do I continue to play Eve?

Why indeed.

It is, after all, a damn good question. And I suspect the gestalt for a much larger introspection of general Eve activities which might include writing in this blog every day, creating arts, tweeting, being socially active, running the coolest Corp in the whole game, and generally being awesome 24/7. It could be part of that.

But I'm going to try and stay focused. Why do I keep playing? The surface answers immediately bubble to the surface, time invested, quality of content, an awesome group of nutters, chaos in general, the expectation of forward progress, the desire to experience what happens next, all of those are valid. And yet, they are truly only side issues when one examines the root.

Perhaps it is more the fact that I can't imagine myself NOT playing Eve? Maybe that is closer to the truth at the moment. My Eve career is finally my own now, and has been for the past two years. So instead of chasing my Son around his game of Eve, I've finally gotten to the point where I am playing my own game of Eve. That is part of it. A huge part. My Eve is much more settled and rarely steps to the beat of a random, "Why don't we move to the other side of the Universe" moment. Moments which defined the first years of the game for me. (If you don't know already, pretty much every decision I made up to and including joining Tuskers, was made because that is what my Son wanted to do. I pretty much just followed him around, with a few exceptions here and there, for the first three years. He stopped playing Eve, for the most part, shortly after that.)

As an extension of that thought, Eve is finally something of my own. The ideas, challenges, lessons and experience of those first four plus years finally coming to fruition in the form of Stay Frosty and A Band Apart. Every moment, every lesson, every experience having formed a massive ball of ideas unleashed upon a manifestation of sheer joy. Which is pretty much how I see the birth of Stay Frosty. Other people may have seen "drama", but I only saw destiny. Two sides of a fence. One man sees the future and the other sees a highway cutting thru his family farm.

Ultimately however, these are only expressions of the core. The core remains intact. I inhabit my first day experience. I own the fear of flying thru Null that first time, of wondering when and how those "reds" would kill me. The sheer joy of jumping thru a gate for the first time and anticipating what was on the other side. Of bumping a Titan. All those things I have done, the wars, the fights, the camps, the cloaking, the sneaking, the threats, the challenges, wins, losses, all of it. I own it all. It is me. And it continues to drive me each and every day.

This is why I cannot stop. To stop would be to kill all of that. To regulate it all to the dust bin of time. I am the only living memory of those moments. Without me, they will vanish. Gone. Forgotten.

But that isn't why I keep playing. I keep playing to make more. To see what is on the other side of that gate. To find out what is next. To experience the next thing. To do so with my friends. And to continue to challenge myself, my character, and my play-style. I feel as if I've only started scratching the surface of a much deeper and more profound experience.

That is why I keep playing.

Which is just nuts frankly.