And Now for Something Completely Different . . .

This post will be a break from my attack on a) the Obama administration and the secular government for trying to co-opt or destroy the Catholic Church and b) Catholic bishops for having done such a miserable job of teaching and defending the faith for the last 50 years (including 2012). Instead, I’m going to talk about video gaming.

I’ve been an on-line gamer since a little before graduate school, i.e., mid-1980s. I bet you didn’t even know there were online games in the 1980s, right? But there were. My MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) for the last five years or so has been City of Heroes, to which I was introduced by one of my parish priests (There! A Catholic connection!) who’s also a gamer. (In fact, when at a daily Mass he would occasionally opt for a moment of silence instead of a homily, I would sometimes harbor the unworthy thought that he might have stayed up too late gaming the night before.)

At any rate, I’m about the most serious gamer that I know. The frightening thing is that there are gamers out there who make me look like someone who doesn’t even know how to operate a computer. I shudder to think of the time, money, and emotional resources that these people must put into their gaming. I just found an example, in fact, that has prompted this blog entry.

Three or four years ago I briefly played EVE Online, an MMORPG that’s about building empires in space. It’s beyond doubt the most elaborate MMORPG there is, or certainly the most elaborate one I’ve ever heard of. You pilot a starship around the galaxy doing a number of things: mining, trading, building and selling ships and the equipment for them, hunting pirates (or being a pirate), being a bounty hunter, and occasionally getting in fights or even fleet battles, the latter sometimes involving literally hundreds of people. The last time I checked, there were about five thousand (yes, five THOUSAND) different solar systems in the game, each one with a unique look as far as I could tell (I doubt that anyone has ever visited all of them). And each system, each starship, each space station, is absolute eye candy, and the major reason why I played. It was glorious just to fly around looking at stuff. (You can get an idea of what it looks lile from the game's website.)

EVE’s in-game economy is amazingly intricate (the game client has a built-in calculator, if that gives you any idea), and it sometimes takes months or years to amass a sizeable amount of in-game money, so it’s a huge time investment. It’s also one of the most cut-throat games I’ve ever encountered. Imagine laboring for months of real-life time to afford a mining ship, only to have some suicidal idiot in England or Iceland decide to kami-kaze into it just for giggles. That’s the main reason I quit playing the game.

But just to show you how serious these players are, take a look at the following. In EVE, corporations are groups of players who associate for various reasons, anything from running a mining/trading empire to serving as a group of interstellar pirates or Mafiosi. What we have here is a list of membership requirements of a corporation that I just randomly picked out of a hat. There’s a lot of lingo in it, but despite this I hope you get the general idea:

Requirements for applicants:

• No trial accounts unless you are a RL friend of an established member of this corp.

• You Have Minimum 10 Million Skill Points in PvP Relevant Skills. You will be asked for a limited API to verify you have these skills.

• You are a team player that likes good fun and a relaxed atmosphere

• You are mature and have level headed attitude whatever your age.

• You are looking for a team of experienced PvPers to fly with and/or learn from

• You have TeamSpeak, a Mic, and use it

• You like to participate in Roam's and CTAs

• You own and regularly fly T2 combat ships or T2 fitted T1 combat ships

• You are self-sufficient and are not looking for handouts

• You don’t sit around waiting for something to happen, you look for the action and get involved.

• You avoid senseless losses. We do not tolerate 'stupid losses'. If you don't know what this means, you might not fit in with us.

• As a corp we expect participation when your online. If your a PvPer you had best be in a fleet when there is one up. You had better be making kills and showing off your skills.

• Applicants to the corp need to have a proven track record in pvp. Please have links to killboards ready and API ready for recruitment officers to review. Under certain circumstances we may consider people with lower sp, who demonstrate qualities which we deem could be used to good effect in our corp.

• While everyone helps each other in [this corporation] and will not see other members without ships etc to fight with, you will be required to be self sufficient, joining the corp means you want to PvP and have the means to fund this.

• We are an 0.0 based corp and expect all members to be based from wherever the corp is operating from at any given time, this is a must unless you are specifically doing something for the corp in empire, obviously we all have to go to empire sometimes to shop/make money etc, but the majority of your time in game will be spent in 0.0 participating in any corp/alliance ops.

Imagine—membership requirements for a group in a game, for Pete’s sake. And not just requirements—you have to submit references to the corporation’s recruitment officers (i.e., those things about API and killboards).

The thing that made me want to post this is that this corporation bills itself as “a casual corporation” with “a relaxed atmosphere.” If that’s the case, can you imagine what getting into a hardcore corporation, and staying in it, must be like? Why would anyone want to do that for a game when that’s what people have to deal with in real life? I game to get away from this kind of stuff, not to do it.

Simply amazing.