Through the Tangents

EVE yet again becomes a chat room for everything except the game.

Recently all of us in “our” channel demonstrated how nerdy we all were. Starting at birdseed, we managed to progress through varying tangents about releasing birds on a fellow player, then killer birds with lasers on their heads on the same player after he made an off comment about one of the female players (nothing really bad mind you, just a play on something she said). Then I mentioned something about putting poison on their beaks that would only affect him. Shortly after that it turned to getting him addicted to the Spice. And Spice withdrawal and blue eyes. So began the discussion about Frank Herbert’s Dune and the entire saga. The female gamer said “The level of nerdiness in here pleases me. =) ”.

This is a good example of how people in computer mediated communication settings can progress through varying topics and subjects easily. This is a bit of evidence supporting hyperpersonalism, how people can develop online relationships that are more real and closer than face to face ones.

Rebellion Against Moderation

I hate to always talk about WuSE whenever I talk about EVE, but he is a most prominent character. This story begins in the default chat channel, which is monitored and moderated by the game publisher’s agents. As mentioned earlier, EVE has a more mature user base. A side effect of this is that EVE also has players who use more mature language (not that the use of mature language is any indication of maturity). Anyhow, WuSE made one too many off colored comments in the public channel, and the moderators threatened to disable his account. In response (and on a whim) he created his own private channel with the annotation “The REAL” placed in front of the default channel’s name. He proceeded to invite all the players from the default to his private (where there are no language restrictions), telling us he was “Rebelling against the Icelandic Overlords”. EVE is a game published by an Icelandic company, Crowd Control Productions.
This is just a good example of how people respond to pressure to conform, or to give up their right to speech (true it can be argued that the blatant use of foul language is offensive and hence not protected, but it goes deeper than that). Some people give in to it, while others rebel, and inspire others to follow (even if it is just to a private chat channel).