Quick post. I was listening to a song and a question occurred to me. Where are the EVE heroes? Against a dark background surely all we have are anti-heroes? A lot of mockery is aimed at any who attempt to be white knights. EVE is a dark place and yet pretty much all other MMO's try to place the player in the role of some form of hero, boosting the ego and taking the player out of the humdrum 1 in 7 billion that is RL. Why have I fitted into EVE? Did I never want to be that? So I guess my question is:
Do classic heroes exist in EVE? Is such heroism even possible in EVE? How would you go about being one without opening yourself wide open to scams? Is the nature of the game so dark that heroes can't exist? How do you deal with that irony? What effect does this have on us and the psyche of new players coming in from other MMOs? Is it something special that we don't have classic heroes, or should we? Are our non classic heroes more genuine?------------------
Life is pain, and we have eternal life. We are all immortal, so there can be no harm. Let's play.
We are capsuleers, strange homonculoids of flesh and machine. We were once human, and we fight to preserve what is left of ourselves in the face of gargantuan temptations. The temptation to destroy. The temptation to steal. The temptation to shame and humiliate. The temptation to abuse and torture.
Death takes away everything you love so that you needn't worry about it anymore. We capsuleers are denied that final insult. It makes us restless and hungry. The memories of all these ultimately painless injuries embitters us and alienates us. We want to know death again. So we keep trying to inflict it on each other, to know what we're missing. To stay human. It is a race, a race to be the last to lose touch entirely.
We don't have heroism in EVE. We have something better. I've always been one to rogue about New Eden, as if EVE were a marginally slower-paced Diablo III meets Grand Theft Auto. It's almost like checkers, even, provided we're talking about the part where I make the wrong move and get jumped.
The closest to heroes I have would be the movers and shakers of low-sec. If I look up to them it's as I fire up my guns and try to kill them, as if a kill mail with their name on it will give me a permanent elevation in status, like if Hector were to turn to his Trojan comrades and brag "I killed Minerva Zen!"
Other times we revel in a shared feeling of accomplishment and camaraderie in our virtual Valhalla after a hard day's work to have a cold dark mexican beer together and shoot each other up. I see those I have shot and who have shot me and feel a glint of respect for them. They have something in common with me. We are all EVE players.
We have wound up with different choices and their diverse consequences. In many MMOs, They may make different character builds, but they all grind the same content. Not so here. I have chosen to do Faction War. As a result of that, many parts of the game are things I hear about but only remotely understand or don't have the stomach to do.
You might call my first answer the more in-character one. Or rather the one that I play with in my more reflective moods, thinking of what the single shard universe all means.
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