In my efforts to learn more about the pretty space game EVE Online before it suddenly turns into Deep Space Nine with the Walking in Stations expansion, I've been reading a great deal about the Council for Stellar Management, an organisation of players, appointed by player vote, that bring important player concerns directly to developer CCP, acting on their behalf. It's basically the first democratically-elected governing body in a virtual world, to which players can submit their grievances and suggestions which are then passed on to CCP if deemed important enough to address.

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While EVE Online developer CCP is currently focused on getting their newly announced yet unnamed largest expansion ever ready for next March, they definitely have some new tricks up their sleeves aside from EVE and the White Wolf World of Darkness MMO. At their annual fan festival this past weekend, footage was shown of a "Halo-like" shooter that took place on a planet like earth, with weapons and buildings reminiscent of the space MMO's art style. There was also footage of a land vehicle driving across the planet's surface.

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I don't think I will be able to resist the call of EVE Online much longer. At CCP's Fanfest convention in Reykjavik, Iceland, the company has revealed further plans for the upcoming Walking In Stations expansion, which for the first time will allow players to get off of their ships and socialise a bit. Where will they socialise? In player created bars and shops, apparently. Players will be able to purchase blueprints, install them in empty sockets in space station promenades, and customise them with different NPCs, rules, vendors, and custom dialog. Space stations will also have mini-games available to play and wager on. It's so Deep Space Nine you'll think every inanimate object is secretly Odo.

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The US Army are working on fake soldiers, that are, to dumb the science down a pinch, holographic projections imbued with artificial intelligence. These fake troops can then be used for stuff like training exercises. Anyway, to test the AI for these holo-soldiers, the Army wants to set them up in games like World of Warcraft and Eve Online. They figure that if the AI - which can be designed to speak in local slang and make human conversation - can pass for human in the online realm, they'll be on the right track. Hopefully the AI doesn't act too human, and end up quitting the army, moving in with its parents and blowing 19 hours a day grinding away on WoW.

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EVE Online has received its ninth major expansion - Quantum Rise.

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There's a more or less constant trickle of mainstream articles discussing people 'finding love in all the wrong places' — but Tom Francis has a hilarious look at his attempts to play the dating game in MMOs. He tracks his progress in EVE Online, WoW and City of Heroes. The CoH section is my personal favourite, featuring Francis' trenchcoated character, 'Manley Power,' whose bio page read "Power's two favourite things are commitment and changing himself".:

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OK, many video games are indeed played on a TV, but correct me if I'm wrong, EVE is a PC game, so it's most likely played on a monitor, right?

Thus ends my attempts to Bazooka Joe every post I do today.

Ahem, anyway. We told you about the Council of Stellar Management a couple weeks back. They just had their big congressional session up in Iceland, home of CCP, the developer of EVE Online. A New York Times reporter went up to report on the proceedings and, surprise surprise. People are more civil in person than they are online!

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Veteran UK game journalist Jim Rossignol, currently one of the Big Four at the Rock Paper Shotgun blog, has just published a book called 'This Gaming Life,' documenting his experiences in three different cities pursuing and documenting the culture of online games.

He covers the widespread competitive game scene in Korea, looks into Quake's evolving role in the London game scene, and visits Iceland to see the birthplace of EVE Online, to develop what he says is a story of "how games change the lives of gamers".

I thought the idea of a "travelogue" of game culture was interesting, so I asked Jim a few questions about the book, and his experiences.

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The latest expansion to CCP Games' deep space MMO EVE Online has just gone live, bringing space-miners, space-moguls, and space-fighters alike into the Empyrean Age. The expansion focuses on two of the most important aspects of any MMO, storyline and PVP, introducing factional warfare, a system of militia ranks, system occupancy, combat zones, and factional warfare bases for players to capture and control. Each of the factions now has a corporation open to all pilots to help coordinate war efforts.

Along with all of the healthy player killing comes an entirely new region called Black Rise, which contains 49 new star systems and 40 new stations, many of which are already sworn to a specific faction.

It sounds to me like folks hungry for some ship-on-ship PVP might want to sign up for their umpteenth free trial of EVE Online.

Empyrean Age Features Page [EVE Online]

Iceland. It's where all the cool kids go to have a summit. Reagan and Gorbachev rapped about nukes there in 1985; 20 years later, the Supreme Metal Council condemned the overuse of the devil horns hand-signal. And now something billing itself as EVE Online's democratically elected government will meet there, probably because it's too far for Something Awful to show up and grief the shit out of it.

The Council of Stellar Management -- which sounds like something from Dilbert -- was formed by EVE developer CCP back in March, and now the two bodies will meet to discuss issues both real- and virtual-world pertaining to the game. The CSM's nine delegates and five alternates serve six month terms and were elected back in March. Developer CCP is based in Reykjavik (holy shit I spelled that correctly the first time).

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