| Hi everyone, it's Cecilia. Today we're talking about space warlords and capitalism. But first... This week's top gaming news: - Microsoft and the Federal Trade Commission went head-to-head in court this week over the company's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Deal foes criticized Microsoft's approach to game exclusivity — although Microsoft's CEO said Call of Duty will stay on PlayStation
- Microsoft eyed buying Square Enix, Sega and Bungie
- Pokemon Go maker Niantic laid off 25% of its staff
When space role-playing game Eve Online is in the news, it's usually because there's been a heist. There was the 2017 inside job in which an individual infiltrated other players' corporation, socially engineered their way to the top and made off with the equivalent of $10,000. In April, another player leveraged the game's corporate voting system to grab control of the majority shares of a company — and the equivalent of $22,000. Eve Online's space heists go viral because they prove that, with the infinite possibilities of an online role-playing game, a lot of people really just want to do capitalism again. Bloomberg calls itself the "chronicle of capitalism," which is why, on the occasion of Eve Online's 20th birthday, I interviewed its developer Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, the chief executive officer of CCP Games. In the beginning, Pétursson said, there were raw materials. Then, labor specialization — hunter-gatherers, merchants, miners, eventually agriculture. In both real life and Eve Online, the economy was emergent. Eve Online's earliest players logged in to mine materials, build means of production, craft spaceships and conquer territories. "Out of that, the economy would emerge," Pétursson said. "We made the game be a problem where the economy is the answer." He cited Israeli professor Yuval Noah Harari's idea that the single unique human trait is our ability to enact flexible social organization at scale. Today, Eve Online's one million players have engineered organizations that depend on thousands of people to deliver on tasks from security to accounting. (There's a very active Reddit job board.) Eve Online's economy is so complex and realistic that some players refer to it as "spreadsheets in space" — a joke that became a reality with Eve Online's official Microsoft Excel integration last week. Pétursson said that at first, "we had this weird imposter syndrome about whether we were making a real economy because we were a game." In 2007, CCP Games hired an actual economist. After playing the game and speaking with its space denizens, the economist concluded that Eve Online wasn't like an economy — it was an economy. And, in many ways, Eve Online is better at capturing what's going on in an economy because developers have perfect visibility into all of its systems. Real-world economic activity is statistically inferred. Pétursson pointed to inflation. "We claim that the price of goods is inflating," he said. "But the price of goods is stable. It's the money that's deflating." Developers wanted one stabilizing currency among Eve Online's fluctuating monies. In 2008, they introduced PLEX, which can be exchanged for time playing the game, among other things. "It was inspired by how many countries in Africa use cell phone minutes as their medium of exchange," Pétursson said. Comparisons between Eve Online's economy and our own can get depressing. Recently, Eve Online is coming out of a period of austerity. There was too much stuff in the game. "When a feudalistic world-domination game has too many weapons stashed away, the need and drive to go conquer someone else's territory is very different," Pétursson said. "They have too much to defend it with." To counteract this, developers increased the scarcity of minerals needed to make things, which drove up prices. Players couldn't make as much stuff, so they were forced to dip into their stashes. "This was very frustrating to players, naturally," Pétursson said. "Our upbringing says that the line should go up — it's how everything works. You'll have more in the future than you have today, not less." Planned obsolescence makes for a great video game. Players destroy space ships (once, famously, $300,000 worth) and need new ones. In the real world, though, destruction is just destructive. Pétursson pointed to the fashion industry, which profits handsomely while perfectly good clothes are getting thrown out and accounts for 10% of global CO2 emissions. "Because our economy is a virtual one, it doesn't matter whether we're recycling," he said. "It's electrons, not atoms." The makers of hit game Genshin Impact released Honkai: Star Rail a couple months ago. I love its gorgeous, anime-style art and exciting RPG combat. - A Magic: The Gathering card with a $2 million bounty has been found
- Sega Europe extended the offer period for Rovio Entertainment
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