Tuesday, April 20, 2010

WOMEN IN EVE

Welcome to another special installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!



I am completely unqualified to speculate about WOMEN IN EVE. Please don’t read this with the same voice tone as PIGS IN SPACE, as I don’t know many people (or women for that matter) who like being associated with pigs. Or space(ships). Face it, EVE and internet pew pew spaceships are for Geeks.

While there are certainly female geeks, my distant memories of middle school inform the theory that there is less socially adaptive advantage for women to embrace their inner geekdom. Geeky girls have plenty of opportunities to cross over into other social spheres, whereas the male geek may be more stuck in his social stratus in those formative years.

Despite the fact that half of us playing EVE are over 30 and over the gaming hill (defined by being unable to compete with a 15 year old in ultra-twitch FPS due to age-dulled intellect and slow reflexes), the problem with WOMEN IN EVE began in grade school. Boys with geeky tendencies get sucked into video games early. While there is a sizable and growing proportion of gynecogamers, the estrogenergic ones are dwarfed by a testosterone train (shaped like an Avatar Titan) pounding down the gaming section of your local big box store. If you want to see more women in EVE, you need a better gateway drug for the feminine young-uns than the weak Link, Space Invaders and Mario most of us cut our teeth on.

Once the brain has formed, it is nearly impossible to change deep perceptions of the utility in sitting at a computer for hours at a time yelling into a microphone while punching F1 through F4 and talking smack in local. I can’t even get my wife to play Wii with me despite purchasing fodder such as Agony Christie murder games and Lego cooperative love fests. Selling a non-hardcore gamer on EVE falls below futile into grave folly territory. I often wonder why I love the griefer-infested dark Darwinian paradise of New Eden so much myself! Sadly, that love likely betrays a Machiavellian participant in the endless chaotic drama that pulses through the best sandbox on earth.

Given the upward trend in subscriptions, I think CCP has at least been able to attract the cross dressing role player crowd in addition to the uber-I’m-not-gay homophobic mouthbreathers. Maybe CCP should stick to what they know and keep encouraging those cross dressers to Harden the Fuck Up. If a few exceptional females choose to jump on the train now and then, we all benefit. If EVE remains the ultimate sausage fest in a vacuum, at least it is a damn entertaining exercise in exploring the fun to be had on the dark side of the human behavioral spectrum with a bunch of cross-dressing spaceship fetishists. It may cost a few thousand real world dollars to have your Titan ganked by your ex-corpmates, but it is about the fun, damn it! (The fun shall not be confused with the epeen, see mouth breather comment above…)




More banter on the topic of WOMEN IN EVE:
  1. The Ladies of New Eden

  2. Is EVE a man's world?

  3. Sorry, No Pink Spaceships Here Please

  4. EVE Blog Banter: Chicks 'N Ships

  5. Eve Blog Banter: The Girls Who Fly Spaceships

  6. It’s not about fluffy bloody Kittens people!

  7. Space Boobies Are Bad, m'kay?

  8. Special Blog Banter: I Like Girls

  9. Special Edition or making Eve More Casual

  10. I wish my wife played EVE

  11. Is there something special about women?

  12. CK's Blog Banter

  13. The Female of the Species

  14. EVE Online Can Appeal to Women By Adding Casual Content

  15. Blog Banter: The Ladies

  16. Women Who Want EVE

  17. Tech 2 stilettos

  18. New Eden doesn't need to change for Eve – Adam needs to get over himself

  19. EVE Online and… women (sorta)

  20. Think Outside the Spaceship

  21. EVE's monthly banter - Women, women, women

  22. Girls Just Wanna Have... Guns!

  23. Draco Horizons (Blog) <-- Needs to add intro (with links) and list of participants

  24. Don’t change Eve for me!

  25. Where Are Teh Laydeez of EVE?

  26. Where Are All The Wenches?

  27. EVEquality: The Rise of the Female Gamer

  28. Women? In MY SPACESHIP? Is she from Mars as well?

  29. Blog Banter: Captain Kirk Hates Eve 

  30. The Female of the Species

  31. The Ladies of New Eden

  32. EVE and the X by X Genetic Succession Unit

  33. Sociability V

  34. Girl on Girls in Space

  35. What women want (in Eve)

  36. Time Is On Our Side

  37. Roc Appeal <-- Needs to add intro (with links) and list of participants

  38. Women in EVE

  39. Getting In Touch With Our Feminine Side

  40. It's a woman's world (they just don't know it yet!) 

  41. Women in EVE – Can it be done? 

  42. You'd Rather Be Playing The Sims, Right?

  43. Blog Banter #17 – Women in Eve

  44. How To Get The Betty’s

  45. EVE: WTB girls?

  46. All about EVE

  47. Ladies to the gunfight

  48. Hell hath no fury

  49. The Ladies of New Eden (An Analysis on How Men are not from Mars, and Women are not from Venus)

  50. EVE Blog Banter 17: The Ladies of New Eden 

  51. The Ladies of New Eden

  52. Getting ladies to play Eve Online

  53. Why Don't More Women Play EVE?? <-- Needs a link to the original banter post in the intro

  54. Getting Girls to Play EVE 

  55. Et Tu, Brutus? » Blog Archive » Girls, Girls, Girls.

  56. Why I don’t play Eve Online | Restokin

  57. Ladies of New Eden | My Blog <-- Make sure to add a list of the other participants!

  58. The female podling « Ore, Pirates, and Pods

  59. Tinkers Blog: Ladies in Space

  60. Ideas on How To Attract More Female Pilots <-- Make sure to add a link back to the original post!

  61. Ladies of Eve - Blog Banter

  62. Your agent has ended your mission for not attaining more women <- More links to participants please!

  63. Let's Fly, Ladies!!

  64. Bringing the Sisters to EVE

  65. EnerlaNET Forums - 52 days of Eve Online

  66. In Search of the Sisters of Eve

  67. EnerlaNET Forums - Be a man! Fight back!

  68. Getting more Eves in Eve Online

  69. Making Bannan Peels Relevant: Gender Inclusiveness in CCP's EVE Online

  70. Daughters of EVE

  71. Women in Eve

  72. “Prove It”: Women In EvE

  73. It’s Hip To Be Square: Taking Videogames Out of the Basement

  74. The X-Factor

  75. The Ladies of New Eden... A Blog Banter Entry by Cattie

  76. Gal-Ristas!

  77. Question: Tell Me What You Think About This? <-- Needs to add intro (with links) and list of participants

  78. Ain’t No Sunshine

  79. What Women Want…

  80. Lady Vengeance, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pew-Pew

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Riding the Drama Llama

EVE never fails to provide opportunity for intrigue and interpersonal chaos. Keeping pilots working together in an Alliance is a monumental task. I have never tried to run an Alliance, but I can only imagine how much work it would take to keep the ship on course. I have just experienced the pain that affects all pilots when an Alliance ship hits a reef or two on the way out to sea.

My now-ex alliance just lost 1/3 their membership as 4 corps left including the biggest industrial corp and the biggest PVP corp totalling hundreds of pilots. I logged in to find that my corp had dropped roles, and I was stuck in a 0.0 station without any blues as the corp was between alliances! Despite logging in daily, hanging on Vent and reading all corp forum posts and Eve mails, I was completely out of the loop of the coming major changes.

Through all the accusations and bad blood, I am still not sure what happened. I don't want to ride the drama llama but I also don't want to be trampled by a drama llama stampede. Having just contributed 9 figures in ISK to the Alliance fund to build an outpost, having the corp drop from the Alliance shortly after stings badly. If the leadership had indicated that things were shaky, I could have used that ISK for multiple other projects. If trust is the true currency in EVE, this account has been bankrupted by poor communication.

Hopefully things will work out well for all involved parties. I really enjoyed flying with pilots from both the alliance and my corp. It is hard to see things sour and have no clue what happened. I am taking this as a cue to strike out into a new chapter in my EVE saga. My goal is to establish a new foothold in 0.0. I now know much more about null-sec life, so I have ideas about the parameters and strategic situations that will work best for my style of interaction.

My quest to leap off the drama llama and seek out the Temple of Tranquility is about to begin!

Sunday, April 4, 2010

My copilot joined the Guristas!




I was blown away to find out that my son joined the Guristas! I hope he will be an exceptional pirate!