EVE Online has an image problem and possibly an actual corruption problem (though I’m not entirely convinced). For those of you following the story, you can find a summary of all the relevant details here. Corruption by admin staff is nearly as old as MMOs and there’s nothing new or particularly interesting about the EVE corruption scandal unless you are an avid player of EVE.

What IS interesting is CCP’s response (detailed in the same article above). They’re setting up a player-run task force to supposedly oversee the games’ development and will go so far as to fly the players on that task force to Iceland (where they are headquartered) regularly to…..Well, to do what, I don’t know. As Raph points out, the idea of flying some people out to walk around an office and magically detect corruption is a bit silly. I don’t mean to sound overly cynical, and I’m sure CCP has the best of intentions, but it’s pretty clearly an empty PR exercise designed to make the player representatives feel important, feel included in some sort of inner circle, and thus be pre-disposed to saying nice things about CCP.

The quote that caught me and made me go “ugh” though was this one, from Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s top exec (who generally rocks). He said,

“Eve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation, and we have to address it like a nation being accused of corruption.”

I don’t know whether he was really serious when he said this or if it was an off-the-cuff remark but it is a nonsensical assertion.

First, to clarify, I’m assuming that he’s kind of mis-using nation and that what he means is state. Nations do not, in and of themselves, really deal with corruption, and nations do not govern, for they are simply a group of people who share a common identity and usually some sort of common ancestry.

Governments of states do govern, however, for it’s the state’s political structure that maintains dominion over a geographic area (indeed, that’s the very definition of a state). Nation-states SHOULD then, actually mean a state that exists largely to govern a particular nation. Israel and Japan are examples of a classic nation-states, for instance, but political scientists (which is what my degree was in) use nation-state to refer to virtually every state regardless of whether the borders of the state approximate ethnic borders or not. I have no idea why, since it is ultimately confusing and senseless to do so.

So is Eve a state, a nation, or a nation-state? No, no, and certainly not.

What’s a state? It’s an entity with a political apparatus that governs a geographic territory. The geographic territory is absolutely critical. When a particular state loses control over its territory, the state effectively ceases to exist. The most fundamental means by which a state governs/controls that territory, and, in fact, the root of a state’s power, is the use of violence. Typically, aside from very specific exceptions, the state reserves to itself the sole right to initiate violence and ultimately, that’s what backs up its laws (or whims if you’re unlucky enough to live in a dictatorship). Eve/CCP are missing both territory to govern and the ability to use violence to compel people within a territory to do things (or outside of the territory if we’re speaking of war-mongering states).

Here’s the thing: Virtual worlds are called virtual worlds precisely because they are not the same thing as the real world. (I’m leaving aside epistemological arguments here which, while possibly valid, are fairly uninteresting in this context.) Here, I use real world to encompass that which is. Virtual worlds are simply part of that which is (the real), and are thus always, inherently, and forever subordinate to the real world. In Eve, for instance, you do not fly a spaceship around. You provide input to servers that move bits and bytes around and spit back out a 2d image that your brain translates into 3d. You’re not weightless, etc. You’re sitting in a chair, at a computer, enjoying a shared illusion (again, I’m not interested in epistemological arguments, particularly if your exposure to them is limited to having watched the Matrix three times). It’s not that fundamentally different from reading a book, except there you’re not sharing in real-time.

In other words, virtual land ain’t. Further, the only thing CCP can directly affect are the bits and bytes the players are effectively pushing around. They (along with all virtual worlds) have no way at all of exercising real governance over the people/players (as opposed to their bits+bytes avatar) I assume he means are their state’s population. EVE, CCP, and Eve’s players are, instead, subject to the governance of the states that govern CCP and the users that use EVE.

Are Eve’s players (or the players of any virtual world) a nation unto themselves? Again, certainly not. They come from a variety of nations and ancestries and in fact are explicitly organized in-game in such a way as to fight against each other. They gather together to participate in an enjoyable past-time, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking it is anything more than that, regardless of how passionate some of their users are (as with any virtual world). They lack any common heritage and calling them a nation (or a nation-state) is nonsensical as a result. A special interest group is much more appropriate.

Virtual worlds are services, not states or nations. Their users come from various nations to interact in a shared illusion, but at the end of the day it’s a medium by which we (hopefully) enhance our real lives, not create second ones (which is impossible anyway, of course). Making a friend in WoW is no different at some level from making a friend via email is no different from making a friend via telephone chat is no different from making a friend via writing letters pen-pal style.

Any talk of creating actual (as opposed to pretend) countries or states in a virtual environment is pointless. It cannot, fundamentally, happen, for the virtual world will always be completely dependent on the physical and the trump card in the physical world is the ability to initiate violence (and get away with it). The pen is mightier than the sword only until the sword gets sick of it and chops the pen up.