I discovered Eve Online at the perfect moment in my life. I was starting a new life and striking out on a new personal adventure back in 2008. My Son and I loved video games and he had grown up on PlayStation and Nintendo games, when he was little he would watch me play hours of Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider. He was finally getting old enough to become interested in computer games and one fateful day he yelled downstairs for me to come up to his room to check something out on his computer. And there it was - Eve Online. I had never heard of this game before and he excitedly told me everything he knew about it, as he slowly rotated a spaceship on his screen. We were hooked.
For those first few years Eve Online gave us something to share together. Dark days were coming in both of our lives and playing Eve together gave us both something positive to share, our adventures in Providence, the wars, the decisions, the adventures - back then I let him drive the narrative and I pretty much just followed along. We learned about Eve together and we talked about it, planned it, and shared in the good times and the bad times. As he got older he started moving in his own directions, often joining Corporations without me for a time. This was a good thing. He was getting older. Like all of us.
Eve slowly became the connective tissue that bound a lot of our lives together. As we started making friendships and connections way beyond what we could have ever anticipated. Before long and without realizing it, I had created a network of friendships that spanned the globe. Some of those friendships continue to this day and I know I could land virtually anywhere on this planet and there would be an Eve player somewhere nearby. And some only lasted a short time as people came into our lives and then vanished back into the mist of real lives. But, even then, we had shared something profound and meaningful - even if it was only for a brief time.
Like everyone else that plays this game I struggled to find my own path. I made choices that turned out to be the wrong choices, followed people I shouldn't have followed, or made dumb decisions based on incomplete information. But along the way I learned an incredible amount about the sandbox, about how Eve really worked, the Meta Game, propaganda, humor, memes, and the fundamentals of massive online communities. In the beginning I thought playing Eve might help me become a better marketing professional and along the way I learned that what Eve was doing was much more profound than that - it was making me a better human being.
It took seven years of playing Eve Online before I met another Eve player in person. And I had to go all the way to Iceland to make that happen. Since then I've met thousands of Eve players in person, traveled the world, and had numerous player meets right here in my own home. Once, when I was at my lowest point, the Eve community came together and saved me. And I've never forgotten that sincere act of kindness on their part. I am still, to this very day, humbled by that moment in time. And appreciative.
But there has been another transformation that Eve has been responsible for that I haven't truly noticed until recently. Eve has allowed me the opportunity to explore a long-dormant part of my insane creative mind and slowly feel confident in parts of that brain that had been ignored for most of my own career. I'm not sure anyone reading these words would understand what a tremendous struggle it has been for me to feel confident exposing myself to the world creatively. Certain people in my past spent an incredible amount of effort to make me feel that side of myself was unworthy. And for years and years I suppressed an entire side of my creative soul. This community has been so supportive over the years that it has given me the confidence I needed to open that side of myself once again. And feel the confidence to expose it to the world. As I look back at the last fifteen years this is the thread I see that connects it all together. And makes sense of why I continue.
On that first day back in 2008 all I knew was that Eve was a spaceship game that would work on my Mac. That it was made by a company in Iceland. And that it was a sandbox game running on a single server. That's it.
And now I count many of the people who make the game happen as my friends. I've been to Iceland more times than I can easily remember and will be there again in September. And my artwork graces the walls of hundreds of people all around the world. And I could easily write another thousand words explaining the rest. But I won't.
The words. The images. The art. The passion. The friends. All of it. Because of this weird little dark, harsh, and strange internet spaceship game played every day across the world wide web.
Who would have thought.
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