Making Science Fiction Real: Neoliberalism, Real-Life and Esports in Eve Online

Making Science Fiction Real: Neoliberalism, Real-Life and Esports in Eve Online

Mark Richard Johnson, Robert Mejia

EVE Online: Goonswarm Federation Propaganda

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that EVE Online is a fruitful site for exploring how the representational and political-economic elements of science fiction intersect to exert a sociocultural and political-economic force on the shape and nature of the future-present. EVE has been oft heralded for its economic and sociocultural complexity, and for employing a free market ethos and ethics in its game world. However, we by contrast seek not to consider how EVE reflects our contemporary world, but rather how our contemporary neoliberal milieu reflects EVE. We explore how EVE works to make its world of neoliberal markets and borderline anarcho-capitalism manifest through the political economic and sociocultural assemblages mobilized beyond the game. We explore the deep intertwining of  behaviors of players both within and outside of the game, demonstrating that EVE promotes neoliberal  activity in its players, encourages these behaviors outside the game, and that players who have found success in the real world of neoliberal capitalism are those best-positioned for success in the time-demanding and resource-demanding world of EVE. This thereby sets up a reciprocal ideological determination between the real and virtual worlds of EVE players, whereby each reinforces the other. We lastly consider the “Alliance Tournament” event, which romanticizes conflict and competition, and argue that it serves as a crucial site for deploying a further set of similar rhetorical resources. The paper therefore offers an understanding of the sociocultural and political-economic pressure exerted on the “physical” world by the intersection of EVE’s representational and material elements, and what these show us about the real-world ideological power of science fictional worlds.

Keywords

EVE Online; esports; metagaming; neoliberalism; competition; science fiction; imaginaries; teleology; Walter Benjmain; capitalism, streaming; science fiction; magic circle

Full Text: PDF [Archive.org-Link]

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4101/jvwr.v10i3.7256

About the Journal

The full website for the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research can be found at: http://jvwresearch.org

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research Vol 10, No 3 (2017): EVE Online

Licence: CC_BY_NC_ND_US

This special issue in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research highlights the ways that EVE scholarship has matured. A sub-discipline within a sub-discipline, writing about EVE no longer focuses just on what makes this particular MMOG so different to the more mainstream online games and virtual worlds, but now describes in fascinating depth the elements of this virtual world that have taken 15 years of play to develop. As guest editors, we are excited to share this collection as these five articles exemplify the contributions that EVE Online scholarship will continue to make long into the future.