Xbox

Shortly after getting my EVE Online account set up, I got emails from a couple of EVE corporation recruiters soliciting for members. I was interested in talking with them because major activities in EVE Online — things like building space stations and fighting wars of any real scale — are only practically available to good-sized groups of players. A single individual can’t earn enough money or be in enough places at one time to accomplish….

Having some extra money to spend can make people do interesting things. There I was, with a pile of cash in the bank from my newfound career salvaging, with no particular widget I wanted to buy. Believe me, that’s not a situation I’ve found myself in very often. I could now buy Minmatar frigates by the half dozen, and with the single exception of a Rifter, replace them all with about half an hour’s work. Surely, there must be some fun in this somewhere….

Some people are born entrepreneurs. They see opportunities to make money and build business where others don’t. They will spend their money, sometimes down to the last nickel, in the belief that they will make it all back, plus a tidy fortune on top of it all. I’m not one of them. In real life, risking what little extra money I have for the chance to make more feels like some people’s description of skydiving: “Why would I jump out of a perfectly good….

Got a little money in my wallet now. No, I won’t be owning the solar system in six months, but I am about ready to upgrade my ship again. Why, you ask? Well, it seems like the thing to do in most games: Work my way up to bigger and better. More skills. More guns. More stuff. Yep, that sounds like me, alright. This time, I’ll make the move from a little frigate to a not-quite-so-small destroyer called a Thrasher. I can put seven guns and a rocket….

The workaday world isn’t all that glamorous for most of us, is it? Even so, with the right frame of mind, it can be satisfying. And to the extent that a virtual universe models a world, the same thing is true. While in the stages of working toward a particular goal, depending on the distance of the goal, things can get repetitious. Boredom can set in if you let your state of mind get away from you. Of course, I would never let that happen….