Something dull thudded against the side of Chim's head. Something thick and hard and dull. It took him a moment to realise that it was the window of the pod he was floating in. Two seconds ago the pod had ejected from what was now a decimated shell, previously a mining freighter. Now he felt another dull thud from behind and all too late realised that the structure of the pod was falling away around him. 

When he was nine years old his father broke his arm as punishment for lying to him about not going to school. From that day forward he was schooled at home, where his father could keep his eye on him.

When he was fourteen, he kissed his first girlfriend for the first time. It took her four days to find someone else to kiss for the first time. He broke that other boy's arm as punishment. It felt like the right thing to do then.

When he was fifteen, he was put into a home where he would be "properly looked after". He wasn't. It was a converted internment camp where they sent the junkie kids and the girls who had stabbed their parents to death and the boys who had set their houses on fire.

When he was fifteen he left and got a job as a scrubber on an old carrier. It was a lot better than waiting to be stabbed or burned. Here he felt useful. There was always something to do, and provided you did the job right, you were praised. It made more sense to Chim than being ignored until you did it wrong.

When he was fifteen he died for the first time. He didn't remember anything much about it. Just that the list of memories to go through in that last second was a lot shorter back then. But he never did remember much about anything after that first death.

"It's not death," they told him at training. "Consider it...relocation."

They had a funny way of trying to make everything sound more palatable. It simultaneously made him feel more comfortable, and nauseous.

As the last breath left his lungs, he felt his muscles snap into the position in which this body would be found. He always tried to starfish his body. For no other reason than it was amusing to him in that final moment before relocation. Someone would find the frozen body of a clone and it would haunt them. Why did he stretch his limbs out like that? What did he see that made him do that? Who was this man that would put his last ounce of strength into trying to take up as much space as possible? These questions fled through his head as his body froze solid, and the last muscle movement would be the corners of his mouth twisting upwards into a sly grin.

****

He woke up groggy, as usual. He stood up slowly and walked to the mirror. It was a little ritual of his every time this happened. He felt as though he needed to check that he was still himself. That he hadn't somehow accidentally had his thoughts, his essence, inserted into a different body. There were stories, where a friend of a friend would know a guy that had been put into the body of a woman, or the other way around. But it had not happened to him.

Not yet.

He cursed under his breath.

Maybe next time.

oh...that's how it goes...

Whilst trying to figure out whether i wanted to sign up for a subscription account (I did, so I did) I tried a new character on a trial account. I ran all the tutorial agent missions and had a bash at doing some mining. That coupled with the plan I was formulating about storylines and in-game activities convinced me that I needed to re-subscribe. Running the missions as a Minmatar I found that it was...not so much easy...but not that difficult.

Not so for the Caldari.

I have found, since birthing Chim into the world, that Caldari are supposedly the chosen race of CCP. I cannot for the life of me understand why.

I have my reasons, and it won't mean that I will change races or anything. But man...the ships suck. I can only assume that they get better later on. In one of the missions very early on (the one with the pirate guy who has a tower that webs you, whilst two guys wail on you) i get destroyed so quickly it doesn't even seem worth it until i can get into the Merlin.

I have to train for it anyway. Which means 6 hours of not being able to do the mission. I'm thinking i'll just have to do business missions...or exploration. But i remember quitting exploration when it got to the part with learning how to use scan drones. Those things are completely fucking useless. Or maybe I just need to be a higher level at that too.

I have watched all the tutorial videos, asked for help on the rookie channel. Everything. And whenever it gets to the bit where i'm supposed to see a red ring around the bit i need to be searching within. The red ring doesn't show up. So i'm blindly making the search area larger and smaller until i can get back to finding a 33% gravimetric reading to start again. And then i just stop bothering.

Apart from that, no probs.

< fiction > Night people.

A cold hand reached up and gently pressed the small, circular lamp. A dim haze of chilled, sterile light bloomed out from the disc and the hand dropped once more. Chim sat up slowly, a nagging urge to rub his face spread across his brain, but he knew to ignore it. He knew that it would be pointless. Long stretches between periods of sleep always made his arms, head and face constantly itchy. He would ignore it again for as long as he could. He stood up, wrapped the bedsheet around his shoulders and padded over towards the window. He waved his hand, half-heartedly, in the general direction of  the vid screen and it hummed immediately to half-life. A dull blue faded across the cabin and with it the voices of various pundits and opinioneers. Someone shot at someone else, somebody different got upset. Same old, same old.

Chim dragged his feet over towards the table, pulled out a chair and dragged it towards the window. By now the voices from the screen had become unintelligible static. Background noise that was easy to ignore. Chim liked it that way. He looked upwards and his eyes found a moon. He stared. Days seemed to pass while he watched the rock and the rock watched him back.

From the cabin he could see forever. He was surrounded by it. It stretched off into the distance in every direction. At least when you were on a planet there was a sky. You could look up and be drawn into the colours. Here there was black, and that was all. Here out in the middle of occupied nowhere there was nothing but black. Stars and moons and other assorted rocks gave brief respite, and every so often an array of clouds would commandeer the windows, spraying colour into the room beyond making Chim think it had been worth it to get here after all. Much like the colours that feeling didn't usually last very long.

At first the darkness had been interesting. Exciting, even. But now it seemed to be just miles and miles and miles of nothing. Darkness used to be comfortable. A sign of night and of peace and quiet. Time for creativity and for secrets. The night had once been his friend and his partner in crime. Now though, night was all that there ever was and it was no longer Chim's friend. Night people don't stay night people in space.

They just become people.

The chair groaned as it grew accustomed to the weight upon it's back legs. The dry-heater clicked on and almost instantly the cabin seemed to warm. At least it would not be a cold night as well as a sleepless one.

Testing...

There seems to be a few common threads between myself and the greater EVE community, or at least those who talk/blog about it. They are pretty much the reasons i keep finding myself coming back to the game, and apparently the reason everyone else does too.

Firstly, to date I have been playing EVE for roughly a month. I played for a week on a trial, loved it and signed up for the three month deal. Then had two more weeks, had no idea what I was doing and lost my original excitement and stopped playing. After a few months away I decided to get back into it. Apparently, this is not uncommon. I can't help but feel as though CCP have set the game up just so, almost as a way to ward off...how should i say it...slackards. (I know i just invented that word, but it does the job nicely.)

There is, regardless of this huge step upwards in difficulty (which I have been informed is the first of many) something mesmerising about the world the game is set within. It's like when someone asks you what you want to eat. If they give you two or three choices, you have no problem. If they ask you to choose from everything edible in the world, it's almost not worth trying to decide. One you get past this initial barrier there is the realisation that as huge as the world is, there is still only a finite amount of stuff you can do. Which makes the whole thing much more palatable. It's still a difficult choice, but not insurmountable.

Secondly, (this will probably make some of you stop reading altogether. I know what the deal is. It's OK) having come across from another MMO, the difference in...everything is very daunting to begin with. The other players, the style of play, the goals, the activities. Every. Single. Thing. More than any of those things though, is that by all appearances, the people who play EVE actually want new people to learn how to play and get involved. Other games, or rather the players of those games, have this weird idea that new players, more players, will kill the game. That somehow newer players have no idea what they are doing and will be completely unable to learn, so the game will have to be made easier. I understand that most of the reason new people are welcome is because it's easier to kill noobs. And I am fine with that. I am quite looking forward to it in fact. Just as I am looking forward to getting better and being able to do the same to future generations of noobs. But it is nonetheless refreshing and almost unsettling to feel welcome. Or at least as welcome as it's possible to feel.

Thirdly, this is the game I have always wanted to play. Since I was twelve and tried to learn to program in QBASIC in an attempt to program a game that was like Frontier: Elite II, this has been the game I was looking for. The idea that whatever happens affects someone else blows me away every time i think about it. The idea that the whole game is built on the premise that players run the systems, become the crime bosses, run companies into the ground and build empires upon the ruins of the old. I am not sure that anyone outside of the game (and even some of those inside it) understand just how fucking magnificent the idea is. It feels very close to how this sort of thing should be done. Once you get past the steep learning curve (we've all seen the XKCD strip right?) and appreciate just why it has to be like that (we don't want to be sitting around for a month of learning before we can get into a ship, of course) it's very easy to see, to me at least, that something of this scale is obviously going to be scary at first glance. But you just have to dive in and make it happen. And when it does, it makes me grin like a crazy person.

Something else that struck me as I started playing. In any other game I have played, with very few exceptions, you start the game as either someone who is destined to be a hero of some kind, or someone who has the powers/abilities of a hero thrust upon them and is forced to act for the good of others despite their own status or beliefs. EVE, on the other hand, abandons you in deepest space and that's it. You are not special or exemplary in any way save for the fact that you are a capsuleer. (Which I am given to understand is something special in itself in that you (plus the rest of the subscribers) are part of a group of people who are able to clone themselves and are gifted with the piloting skills that you will require.) But, aside from that, you are not the saviour of humanity, nor are you expected to perform any specific taks or fulfill anyone's premonitions of fate. In that way it is much closer to the pen and paper RPG's that seem so much rarer these days. There is no storyline (unless you choose to follow the missions) that is not created by you and the people that share the universe with you.

Strangely enough, it was just before all the controversy in the summer that I first started playing. And that whole rioting/subscription hemorhaging/anger but not merely in a typical, pointless, internet ranting way, that all made me even more excited about the game. The fact that people were so angry that they actually protested in-game. The fact that this was a world, not just a collection of numbers and textures. There was a power structure, a way for people to make their grievances known that was just as futile and impotent as protesting in real life, but looked equally cool and like something that you really wanted to be a part of. I wanted that from my games. I still do. If i'm going to be paying monthly, I want what I do to matter. I don't want it to be just busy work, like reading a book or watching a film. It's interactive for a reason, and although it may be more widespread than I am familiar with, EVE is the only example I've ever found of a truly living world in a game.

I'll see you in there.