The written word

Earlier this week I published a review of Roc Wieler’s YC113. In the introduction I mentioned that art and creativity wasn’t really a part of the Eve community, except for video. 

I was primarily referring to, of course, the award winning machinima series ‘Clear Skies’. But, there are more well known Eve videos such as the ‘Clarion call’ series by Rooks and Kings alliance  (and the parody Noirion Call) and countless frapsed battle reports on Youtube. Recently, CCP hosted a contest for this kind of content on eveisreal.net , allowing pod pilots to show off their video editing powers.

It takes some imagination and creativity to make these, but wouldn’t go as far as to call them ‘art’. It’s like the difference between a Discovery Channel documentary and a motion picture: both can be well made and entertaining, but in my humble opinion the first one remains a documentary, while the second one can sometimes be called art.

Screenshots of Eve Online are often beautiful, and nicely show how impressive New Eden looks these days. I have often done my best to create a specific snapshot, for instance by positioning all elements in a certain way; I have certainly done some post processing too, cropping, adapting contrast and light/dark levels. Is it creative? Sure. Art? Possibly.

But, I have to confess, I haven’t done justice to the Eve Online community. I have neglected to mention written fan fiction! Kirith Kodachi for instance is well known for his ‘fiction Friday’ series. Several bloggers are using a 'role play' style of writing on their blogs. Eve Travel is a good example; it's a travel guide to landmarks in New Eden. And for a fan fiction/RP styled source of news, you can head over to http://tech4news.org/ . 

There are actually quite a few role players in New Eden, who have fully immersed their in game persona in the background story CCP created. Alliances such as CVA and Ushkra’khan, while perhaps not always 100% ‘in character’ are also RP oriented. Pilots participating in factional warfare – war between the human races in New Eden – are also likely to be interested in or actively enaged in role playing. And let's not forget those real life model citizens who, in Eve Online, pose as fearful space pirates.. Many of these pilots maintain their RP persona on their blogs and twitter feeds.

It is in the written word that the Eve Online community displays a lot of it’s creative powers. I hope that, by pointing this out, I’ve made up for the fact that I have forgotten to mention it in the previous blog post..