So as some of you may have noticed I have failed to update my EVE Online 30 Days Experience post for sometime now. The main reason for this is that I have come to the conclusion that I will stay, and play EVE Online as long as I can. Since my last post so many things have changed that it really hard to get them all down into a simple blog post but here it goes.

Since my last post I was invited into a small upstart Corporation named Dead Men Chest lead by a cool group of dudes. Since then I have become fully immersed in EVE and have come to realize why so many people love the game. This small rag tag outfit has since grown to become a fully active Mining and PVP Corp with constant members online and operations underway. This is quite a change from the rather boring and dull start of EVE where most mission you are flying solo with no support or help.   Like other MMO’s such as World of Warcraft, everything becomes so much better when you get together with a group of people who are all trying to work towards the same goal.

This change has lead me to come to quite and interesting realization about online gaming as a whole, that simply it is one of the pinnacles in the future of gaming. While I am not discounting story or single player at all, it seems that multiplayer and massively multiplayer gaming do the one thing that no single player game can do, give you infinite possibility. With EVE and games like it the ability to both explore and discover taps into something that many of us gamer always cherish the most, discovery, learning new things, and most of all interaction.

Think back to you greatest memory of gaming that you have ever had, something that profoundly resonates with you to this day. Some will say that the death of Aris is FF VII they will always remember; some would say that the phrase “Would you kindly” would always have a different meaning. All of these moments that we as gamers remember are all link back to a single idea, drastic change or discovery of someone or something.

I recently had one of those moments with EVE Online about a day and a half into joining the small start up Corporation. I discovered that not all online gamers have the stereotype of being ridiculous airheads who just want to shoot shit and destroy things, that some of us (a small number in most online games) what to discover some new way of doing things. Now I want to be clear that I believe that this idea can be achieved with any multiplayer game, even in Black Ops or Battlefield Two.

I can remember the first time I discovered in Call of Duty how to easy it was to level up and move on up through the ranks, it engrossed me. However I am not that good at first person shooters so eventually that feeling died away.

With EVE I have regained this feeling but have also come to realize that it can only occur for a rather short period of time. Like any great “high” eventually these great feelings go away or become so common that they are no longer enjoyable to the end user. What EVE satisfies for me the best however is the diversity of this feeling that I get. Whether it is the conquering of an ore market with my corp mates or the further understanding of a complex system within the game, the greatest thing about EVE is this variety that exist.

To close, the only reason I started this 30 Days idea was to see the reasoning that drives so many to spend countless hours in online games. What I have come to realize is that there is not simply one reason someone will play at a stretch of 35 hours at a time, or devote a whole section of their life to a game. Instead people chose to play these games for their own personal (and sometimes unexplainable reasons) and that they simply must be allowed to enjoy what they experience. Now if you will excuse me, there are some pirates in low sec that need hunting.