CCP ponders life, mortality and downloadable souls in the EVE universe.
Death frightens us. So much so, in fact, that we often relegate it to impossibility – a phenomenon unique to the old, to the unfortunate, to people we are not. Despite that, an intrinsic awareness of mortality remains embedded within us, infiltrating our actions and our interactions, and even the games we play.
In EVE Online, death is not permanent. At least, not ostensibly so. Player characters, or ‘capsuleers’ as they’re called, are rendered immortal by an intricate life-support system that uploads their memories to a fresh clone whenever destruction is imminent. The original body is euthanised in the process, the brain skewered by lethal neurotoxins, its tissues seared by the very hardware designed to perpetuate its consciousness.
Previously, this translated to a player experience of heavy monetary penalties and a loss of skill points – the latter a commodity that can only be accrued through months of patient endurance. A harsh price, but very much an intentional one. And its severity goes right back to the original EVE design document.
“There was a massive manuscript for EVE Online,” creative director Torfi Frans tells me when we meet, “and the first sentence on the first page was: ‘death is a serious matter’.”
Do not go gentle
Frans goes on to explain that the team found the respawning process in other MMOs “unbelievable,” citing such early examples as Ultima Online. Death in those games, according to Frans, felt meaningless. Absent of risk. “Too soft,” he says, almost apologetically. This dissatisfaction eventually led to the creation of the high-tech capsule from which pod pilots in EVE Online derive their nickname.
It was meant to serve multiple purposes – as a metaphor, in part, for the players’ close relationship with their ships, but also as a way of instilling drama. Unlike many other games, the destruction of a vessel in EVE Online isn’t synonymous with the demise of its pilot. Instead, it casts them adrift in their hydrostatic capsules – fragile, defenceless orbs incapable of moving above a crawl. Like a World War II pilot in a parachute, is how Frans describes it. The helplessness of the castaway presents potential aggressors with a moral quandary. Do you or do you not shoot at something so powerless?
While few EVE players today would hesitate to pull the trigger, the act of ‘podding’ – destroying a player in a capsule – was once regarded as anathema. “The people who would pod were considered sociopaths or criminals,” Frans says.
The player-driven universe of EVE Online might have moved on since then, but the core philosophies underpinning the game remain the same. The developers are still chasing the dream of a good death. In the upcoming space combat spinoff EVE: Valkyrie – CCP Games’ dog in the nascent virtual reality race – that pursuit has evolved into a science of sorts.
“One of the things that makes you feel uncomfortable and jerks youout of the immersion [of virtual reality] is when your virtual body does something you’re not doing in the real world,” lead producer Owen O’Brien tells me. “I want to take that perceived shortcoming and turn it into something interesting.”
As an example, he references something that happens in the EVE: Valkyrie trailer that debuted during the recent Fanfest, CCP Games’ annual convention. It’s a breathtaking vignette captured from the perspective of protagonist Rán Kavik. The three-minute clip opens with a routine escort mission that builds to a brief, spectacular battle and finally ends in Kavik’s demise.
“If you look at the video, when you’re engulfed with flames, you’re freezing. You look down. Your hands start to let go of the flight stick. Your hands are moving and you’re like, ‘That’s weird.’ That’s the sensation I want,” says O’Brien. “I want that death to feel weird.”
And he wants life to feel just as jarring. O’Brien isn’t sure how they will present the idea of reincarnation just yet, but he has interesting ideas. He wants to investigate the player character’s transition from body to body, the sudden jolt of awakening in a clone vat, of being reborn into battle. Audio will likely play an integral role in this, the same way it already does with EVE: Valkyrie’s death sequence.
“The video starts and ends with breathing,” O’Brien says. “You begin in pitch darkness with just your breath, and then it kind of disappears and that’s where you start. And that’s [also] where you end and everything fades out.”
It all goes back to endings. Death is everywhere in the universe that CCP Games built. In the battles that rage between the players, in the themes that shape their games, in the bones of the lore itself. “The graduation ceremony for [EVE Online capsuleers] is an execution,” says Frans. “Because in order to rise and become immortal, you have to sacrifice your life. It’s the same trope as in Christianity, or with vampires. To attain immortality, you have to first die once.”
The pilots in EVE: Valkyrie follow a similar cycle of death and rebirth save for one critical exception: the cloning technology they use may be slowly destroying their minds.
“It’s not as smooth as the capsuleers’ tech. Sort of more hotwired together so the process is rougher,” explains O’Brien, who also hints at how the procedure might take its toll.
“We’ve had this discussion about jitters they get in the cloning process,” O’Brien says, our voices pitched low to keep from disrupting other interviews in the second floor of the press area.
“Physical or mental?” I ask.
“Both.”
In much the same way that death serves as a reference point in our own lives, as an end date for all our pursuits, it also functions as a guide in EVE: Valkyrie. “The reason [Rán and the other Valkyries] broke from the Guristas is they discovered something about what happened to their deaths,” says O’Brien. “We’ve got the story up until where they break away and it’s like, ‘What happens next?’ You’ve forged your own path, but where are you going?”
There’s a pause before O’Brien adds, a little slower this time, a little more thoughtfully. “Something we’re still exploring is how much of each of these cycles do you remember and carry with you. Because who you are is defined by your memories.”
“Some would say you’re defined by your soul,” I joke.
He laughs. “But what is your soul? Can your soul be downloaded somewhere else? Are you the sum of your experiences and memories, or are you something more than that?”
CCP’s videogames are most definitely a composite of influences: the life experiences of their creators, their philosophies, and even the societies that contain them. Frans says that EVE Online drew inspiration from Iceland’s stark, cruel landscape and its Viking origins. “Iceland was essentially an anarchist state for the first 300 years. There was no central government for a long time. There was a just a parliament, but no executive power. “It’s like this crazy anarchist place full of feudal warlords who define their own rules.”
In a similar vein, the factions in EVE Online parallel a smorsgabord of real-life cultures. The Minmatar are tribalists, the Gallente are hedonists who occasionally see fit to worship flash-in-the-pan ideas like movie stars. Frans’ favourite race is the Amarr, archetypal religious zealots who draw heavily from the rituals and iconography of Catholicism. “There’s a heavy focus on guilt and sin, and so on. And a kind of strict adherence to dogma.
“It’s interesting when you start learning about Catholicism,” Frans adds. “It’s like learning about math. It’s you figuring out how they conclude and derive particular religious truths or doctrines, it’s all raw logic when you read through it. It’s like somebody going through an axiom in maths.”
The Caldari, on the other hand, are a corporatocracy with Taoist-like leanings, one that may have drawn inspiration from Japan’s employment infrastructure. Certainly, Frans’ description suggests so. “They are a government entirely run by corporations where if you’re born in a corporation, you –”
He stops himself. “Just, let’s say in comparison: if you’re born into the Samsung hospital, you go to the Samsung school, then you end up in the Samsung graveyard. and that’s your life.”
Much like other works of science fiction, EVE Online also carries undercurrents of social commentary. Frans, who identifies as entirely secular after a trip to North Korea, tells me the developers are working on the game in a ‘cynical generation’, as he calls it.
“We see authoritarian power structures and rulesets made up by people as something to question and doubt,” he says.
He brings up the Amarr again. Tactfully, he describes the theocratic empire’s dogmatism and religious zealotry as stumbling blocks in technological advancement, adding that the Amarr “hold back on themselves” because they’re so focused on the dogma of their religion. Because their minds are not open to new things. And also because of their history as slavers.
“They enslaved the Minmatar, and that slowed them down,” says Frans, “in the same way that the Greeks had steam machines two thousand years ago, but it didn’t make sense for them to have an industrial revolution because they had an abundance of slaves.”
He continues: “you could argue that if they didn’t have slaves, they’d have had an industrial revolution two thousand years earlier because they had the technology and the skillset, but they didn’t need to use it. In the same way that we today have such an overabundance of cheap labour, that there’s no need for us to develop robots to sit at toll gates or flip burgers.
“We have all these humans beings wasted because it is not economically efficient to replace them with robots and have humans do something that requires thinking.”
EVE’s children
What it all comes down to is videogame development as an exploration of humanity itself, from the manifestation of its worst aspects to investigations of its best. Life itself has no answers to these questions. But games could provide ways to record and understand our own extrapolations, even in examples as unlikely as EVE: Valkyrie.
“The nature of life and death, what it actually means to be alive, and does life have value if you never die?” muses O’Brien. “Do you somehow lose a little bit of being human because you don’t die?”
He answers his own question. “I think yes. I think ageing and dying is part of the nature of being human. I think if you take that away, then you become something else. Maybe better, maybe worse, maybe you lose a bit of your soul. Because if you’re only here once and every day could be your last, it matters more.”