Worlds Largest Virtual Universe Now Running For 10 Straight Years

The massively multiplayer game EVE Online is special in many ways -- it is possibly one of the biggest social experiments ever, and it is live and growing. The epic virtual universe is running persistently since exactly 10 years this month, which means that player characters "born" at the launch day in 2003 are turned 10 years old this May! Over one million man-years have been spent in developing and playing the virtual universe so far, according to this CCP keynote. And the Icelandic producing company CCP, fittingly standing for Crowd Control Productions, is dead serious when they say that "EVE Online will survive us all!"

While this is not guaranteed and is mostly a question of sustained commercial viability, there is no reason why a virtual world living on a super-computer could not exist for eternity to come. And so far the track record looks great: EVE Online is the only massively multiplayer game that is growing every single year since its creation and even set another new world record of the most concurrent players connected to a single game server on its 10th anniversary, May 6, 2013, with 65,303 simultaneously connected accounts from around the world. This is vastly superior to other MMOG's like Blizzard's World of Warcraft that can only sustain a few thousand concurrent players per server and puts CCP at the forefront of virtual world technology.

But not just the technology is exceptional, the philosophy of EVE Online is unique as well because it is quite anarchistic, compared to the moderated and curated protected games of other companies. Over half a million active players inhabit a galaxy with 7,500 star systems, containing several ten-thousand planets and moons. Everything goes in the turbo-capitalistic and completely player-driven economy, which is probably the largest and most dynamic virtual economy ever created and is under the oversight of a real economist who publishes quarterly reports and has an eye on the money supply, like a central bank, to prevent crises like run-away inflation.

The main objective of the game that plays 20,000 years in the future is war with internet spaceships, tactically controlled by (ingame) immortal 'capsuleers', and the resulting massive destruction of assets is of course what drives the economy. Planets, moons and giant asteroid belts need to be exploited and strip-mined to mass-produce internet spaceships that range from fighter sized frigates, over battlecruisers, to several kilometer long carriers.

CCP is delivering a constant stream of bi-annual free expansions (17 so far) to the game that add more content, functions and balancing tweaks -- but they also started to branch out to different genres recently. This week saw the release of the FPS (first-person shooter) DUST 514, a PlayStation 3 game which incredibly connects and runs on the same server as EVE Online -- a revolutionary and previously unthinkable step enabled by state-of-the-art technology that is now becoming available with ubiquitous 'cloud proven' server systems and broadband connectivity around the world.

The players in both games can interact with each other and fight for the same virtual planets, in what developers describe as just two of many possible interfaces that connect to the central and persistent virtual world of New Eden.

As if there is not enough going on already, CCP presented a secret internal project called EVR at the annual EVE Fanfest 2013 in April, which took place in Iceland's huge landmark concert hall and was sold out weeks in advance. It’s the tech demo of a space dogfighting game in the EVE Online universe that was developed exclusively for the yet unreleased full VR headset Oculus Rift and supports the Rift’s head-tracking feature. CCP is reportedly one of the earliest and biggest backers of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter campaign.

Now all this is a dream coming true for sci-fi fans, but it is also very interesting from a technological and scientific point of view. Several research papers argue that especially the troubled profession of economics and other social 'sciences', unable to test their theories under comparable and controlled conditions in the real-world, could finally find the needed experimental environment in large scale virtual worlds.

Regarding this in the context of a revamped game mechanic, Kristoffer Touborg, a lead game designer at CCP, mentioned to VG247 that, "I've been monitoring the bounty system really heavily, just because I'm interesting in it, I want to see where it's going and what people are doing with it. It's kind of like a really awesome social experiment."

But researchers will rely on the permission of the operators of such proprietary and closed world virtual universes, which have a truly complete picture of their users, even more so than for example Google has in the real-world.