Barbarians at the Imperium Gates: Organizational Culture and Change in EVE Online

Barbarians at the Imperium Gates: Organizational Culture and Change in EVE Online

Nick Webber, Oskar Milik

Abstract

This article looks at organizational culture and identity of different organisations in EVE Online, using a combination of critical historical and ethnographic approaches. We argue that it is helpful to understand major organizations in EVE as analogous to early polities, in terms of the ways in which claims to leadership and power are demonstrated (for example through the writing of history). Yet, as we show, these organizations have strong cultures which demonstrate resilience and a resistance to top-down cultural change, meaning that the successful implementation of such change is governed by rank-and-file members rather than their leadership. We propose that the cultural (rather than political or social) nature of this resilience is centrally important in understanding how organizations in EVE function. This unity of practices and understanding allows EVE’s major organizations to suffer huge losses to their position and prestige, and yet remain viable communities and potentially resurgent powers. This seems to challenge the ‘social network’-type descriptions often used to explain the persistent groups seen in many online games.

Keywords

EVE Online; culture; identity; Goonswarm; TEST; history; organisational culture

Full Text: PDF  [Archive.org-Backup]


DOI: https://doi.org/10.4101/jvwr.v10i3.7257

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.