The J!NX Aion line follows the company’s recent journeys into the universe of EVE Online, and while those shirts are certainly attractive enough, they make me think of mining ore and falling asleep at my desk. The Aion shirts, on the other hand, make me want to give up my habit of wearing a button-up shirt over a t-shirt in order to show off my plumage. I have always wanted plumage.

Check out the full J!NX Aion line at the company’s website, and be sure to check out the Dungeons & Dragons page as well, because there is nothing as beautiful as a t-shirt that says “Rock Me Asmodeus”.

Get a fresh look at running around, blowing s—t up in Dust 514, the console FPS that CCP is developing to coincide with its EVE Online MMO.

It’s not just pretty to the eyes. Listening to this with headphones on, there’s some great sound this – although I swear that Warthog-looking thing comes to stop with a Flintstones-car skidding sound at 1:54.

DUST 514 [CCP on YouTube]

EVE Online developer CCP’s global posse mounts up for this EVE Fanfest video, which explains the only way to follow the company to the top — harden the f—k up.

This is perhaps the most glorious self-promotional thing I’ve ever seen a company do. Not only do they have the attitude down, the lyrics are pretty damn inventive too.

Every day is a fight, there’s no room for bloopers
Bugs coming at us like in Starship troopers

And just when you think it can’t get any better, Techno Viking shows up. I cried real tears.

I’ve gone ahead and included the full lyrics for the song below. Feel free to sing along, though if you’re at work you might want to keep it down a bit — the language gets a bit rough.

Thanks to everyone who directed us to the clip! We owe you more than you will ever know.

Lyrics:
Intro
First off – let me make a short introduction
I’m the space 5.0, keeping EVE from destruction
Guard is the name, Lead master of the game
Top dog in the gamemaster hall of fame

Im chillin at my desk with two girls and one pimp cup
Sippin champagne, reading mails checkin what’s up
Isk spamming scum bags disturbing the peace?
WOOP WOOP its the sound of space police!

Every day is a fight, there’s no room for bloopers
Bugs coming at us like in Starship troopers
We help when we can, every child, every man
Treat the boogie man to a permanent ban!

CHORUS x2

We’re CCP! We march on fearlessly!
Excellent is what we strive to be!

If you’re going to follow us to the top

HARDEN THE FUCK UP!

You best watch out bitch if you’re an exploiting scammer
Guard will gank you in the face with his big ban hammer
Remove all your Isk , throw your arse in the slammer
Make you share a cell with a manic ISK spammer

Like a never ending spam thread on racist biking
This song has something for everyone’s liking
Holy shit I see local spiking

…ladies and gents, its techno Viking!

Chorus x2

Ever flowing – never standing still
We roll with the punches, move in for the kill
The competition ends up six feet in the ground
With fists full of awesome we go round after round

United we stand never ever growing weary
We cannot fall cause gravity is just a theory
We reach higher than the giants in operations
Patience soon well be crip walking in stations

We’re more agile than a president dodging a shoe
We need three continents for our massive crew
From Atlanta to Shanghai to the Icelandic nation
Throw your hands up for World Domination!

Chorus

Why have an amazing time in a foreign land when you can sit at your computer desk, staring at a screen for hours? EVE TV will begin streaming from this year’s EVE Fanfest on Saturday at 12.00 GMT (9am AEST), broadcasting the finals of the 2009 PVP tournament live on stage. That will be followed up with a replay of Torfi Frans Ólafsson’s keynote on EVE’s next expansion, Dominion, wrapping up with Saturday’s keynote on the future of EVE Online and CCP’s new console shooter, DUST514.

I begged to be allowed to go this year, but since the cosplayers are mostly spaceships we ultimately decided to pass.

EVE TV [2009 EVE Fanfest via Voodoo Extreme]

People walking about in vinyl clothing; barely dressed women writhing about on stage; and men performing the art of fire poi for screaming women in the audience – this is what I saw during my brief visit to CCP’s Succubus Club party last night at the Heavens night club in downtown Seattle. After standing in a rather long line for a good half hour I was allowed to enter the dark, smoky depths. So smoky and strangely-lighted that the few pictures I managed to shoot look like they were taken in a smoky, strangely-lighted club. Go figure.

After snapping off a few shots and avoiding the crowd at the bar, I found a quiet corner in the back room where the DJ was playing The Sisters of Mercy’s “Temple of Love.” Singing along quietly to myself it struck me – I had been here before. Sure, the smoke was cloves back then and not a smoke machine and I had more hair and a penchant for mascara, but otherwise this was pretty much a normal day for me a decade and a half ago.

And that’s why didn’t I stay longer. For some visitors to The Succubus, last night was a brief, tantalising glimpse at a deliciously dark and bizarre lifestyle. For me it was ages 19 through 23, and then 27 through 29.

While work continues on the eagerly anticipated Walking in Stations update for EVE Online that will introduce avatars to the mix (recently renamed Incarna), EVE’s 11th free update will be the newly announced Dominion. Dominion is all about the end game, or as CCP puts it, “Dominion is all about ownership-how you conquer and hold space, how you hold sway over fellow capsuleers and how you wage war against any who stand in your way. How do you make a name for yourself in a universe of 300,000 other players?”

The update will feature a more dynamic alliance combat system, allowing for more tactical strategy to be utilised in combat, a direct result of player feedback on the current state of the game.

Dominion will also bring enhanced social networking features to EVE Online to help foster social interaction, epic pirate mission arcs (arrrrr!), and more updates to the graphics engine, doing for planets what Apocrypha did for asteroids.

CCP promises to reveal much more about the expansion in the coming months. For now, keep your eyes on the official EVE Online: Dominion website.

DUST 514 takes the prize for most intriguing hybrid—console FPS/RTS/MMO that performs in the persistent EVE Online universe. Here, the CCP Games CEO explains the concept more, including the fundamental difference in EVE and Dust characters.

Hilmar Pétursson drew a familiar analogy—EVE Online players are the air force; DUST 514 players are the (wait for it) marines. Space marines! Pétursson went on to say that while EVE inhabitants are “different people”, focused on operating spacecraft. A character in DUST “would rather run around, blow shit up. That is his skill.”

You see, EVE players talk like this and DUST 514 players talk like this.

Pétursson says the game have persistency elements of its own, as well as ones from the EVE universe. He made no announcement or hint of when this will be available, other than CCP’s been working on it for three years.

More DUST 514 Info Revealed in Video Interview with CCP Games CEO [Massively]

EBank, the institution in question, was also hit by a naked fraud scheme earlier this year, in which an embezzler stole 200bn kredits and resold it all for real world cash. The episode caused an actual run on the virtual bank. Now its new chairman has admitted the bank’s rampant mismanagement without following rules, safeguards and controls, has led to a 380 billion ISK shortfall.

The bank’s board of directors report that it faces a deficit of about 1.2 trillion ISK, which increases about 12 billion ISK a month. According to the bank chief, “withdrawals will be allowed once the bank achieves a maintainable equity status of 90% (1.8t currently); they will be stopped again should that fall below 80%.”

See? Aren’t MMOs fun? You can escape from the global economic collapse to roleplay manage— a galactic economic collapse!

Virtual Bank in EVE Freezes Accounts Due to Deficit [Ars Technica]

Perhaps developer CCP hasn’t made it perfectly clear how big a part you could play in the universe of EVE Online. Perhaps this new video will rectify that oversight.

This is an example of what could happen if you find yourself flying the sometimes friendly skies in EVE Online, CCP’s massively-multiplayer online space sim. I’ve never had an experience like this personally, having spent most of my time watching my ship auto-pilot itself from sector to sector, but I am sure if I got a chance to stop and saw a freighter being attacked by pirates I’d be far too surprised to do anything even remotely helpful.

I’ll get there eventually. Baby steps!

Few though have had to tell a story in a universe almost completely controlled by the gamers themselves, the very people most likely to read those novels.

That’s what confront the authors of Eve Online’s novelised fiction. And the way the deal with it can have some surprising consequences.

The virtual universe of online computer game Eve Online is a thriving, thrilling place of starship fights, rampant piracy, militant corporations and financial espionage.

The game’s hundreds of thousands of players assume the roles of characters who fill every need in the game, controlling miner, trader, pirate and CEO. More interesting, though, the players have almost total control over the lifeblood of the game: Its economy.

The result is a sometimes vicious environment of intrigue, racketeering and politics. And it’s up to the developer’s creative writing team to at times turn this unordered chaos into a living space opera. Two among the team have also used it to craft novels.

Tony Gonzales’ Eve Online: The Empyrean Age was released in 2008 and Hjalti Danielsson’s Eve Online: The Burning Life is due out this fall. And the authors took very different approaches to their work.

The Empyrean Age was used to tell the story of major events that took place in the game’s universe as part of an update released for the game at the same time.

“My task was to tell the story about how this great war comes to pass, describing what was happening behind the scenes, and the choices that leaders of nations faced before committing to such a grave undertaking,” Gonzales told Kotaku.

Gonzales said that early on publisher CCP Games decided not to include any of the many influential players or their character creations in the novel.

“Though tempting, the fact is that doing so would have been an unnecessary risky and thus inappropriate for the (game’s) first foray beyond gaming into the greater science fiction community.,” he said. “The main reason is because EVE Online has incredibly competitive gameplay. Player actions of a scale considered momentous enough to build a novel plot around tend to happen at a direct and often unpleasant cost to other players. ”

And the history of conflict, in both the real world and the fictional, always has at least two sides: The victor’s is the one most commonly told, he said.

So instead, The Empyrean Age took the “golden path.”

“We can, for example, speak of aggregate player actions in broad strokes.,” he said. “We just need to find a way to tell that story accurately and fairly, and more importantly establish that there’s an audience eager to read about it.”

Gonzeles’ The Empyrean Age used broad strokes to tell a game-changing story that launched a war between the game’s two main empires. But Danielsson’s The Burning Life strives to convey a sense of what it’s like to be a regular inhabitant in the universe of Eve Online

Danielsson said that to narrow the focus of the book he made lists of everything he wanted to use from the game and prioritised them.

“There was no way I could pick just one setting and one story to tell,” he told Kotaku. “Instead, I had my characters go on a journey through the EVE cluster, encountering people with very different backgrounds and attitudes along the way, and chronicling the life in all those places.”

And while Danielsson, like Gonzales, didn’t overtly use any player history or actions in his book, he said it’s hard to avoid.

“There is the lore that we create and the lore the players create, and a myriad of overlaps between the two,” he said. “There is a feed there, back and forth, that the novel plugs into. ”

Creating fiction in a fictional world not totally controlled by the author can have its challenges, Danielsson said.

“It’s immensely challenging,” he said. “A novel is static and can only reflect the game world at a certain specific point – and parts of EVE go through some pretty big changes at times, but it must nonetheless be timeless enough that it can be enjoyed a year later, three years later, and so on.”

With the emergent storytelling that naturally sprouts from games like Eve Online it begs the question, when will game-based novels write themselves?

“Novelising direct player actions would be almost exclusively historical and investigative reporting,” Gonzales points out. “In fact, a novel probably isn’t the best way to tell their story. But a dedicated history of player actions, especially if it included all the interesting externalities and accompanying social dynamics, might be a compelling tale on its own without any author-added role-playing elements to turn it into space opera. ”

“If we can prove that the audience for this is there, we’re definitely willing to pursue it.”

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.