Death’s real name is Mikhail Romanchenko, a Russian immigrant who owns a glass installation business in New York City. His nickname comes from playing Eve Online, a sci-fi video game. Players pay about $15 for a month’s worth of game time, during which they assume aliases; earn, save, and spend virtual money; and build spacecraft and band together to fight epic space battles. They also become part of a mythology that rivals anything depicted in Star Wars or Star Trek. “It’s part game and part soap opera and part shadow economy,” says Ted Brown, a video game designer and Eve aficionado. “There’s basically a whole virtual society that has emerged inside of Eve.”
During the peak of its power in 2010, the Legion of Death ruled roughly one-quarter of the Eve universe; each of Death’s 30,000 soldiers represented a person under his command, tapping away on his computer. To the winners go prime territory rich in trade and industry, while losers are pillaged and banished to lesser areas. “You don’t understand what it’s like to manage that many people,” Romanchenko reflects. “It’s not playing a game. It’s like having a second job.”
He and the others were in Iceland’s capital to meet with executives from CCP Games, the company that created Eve. The seven make up the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a group elected by other Eve players and flown by CCP to Iceland every six months or so to discuss how the game should evolve. It’s a kind of super-user focus group, but also a channel for players’ complaints. In 2011, when CCP rolled out some controversial changes, the company summoned the CSM members to Reykjavík for an emergency meeting in an effort to stem a user backlash. “At the time, I had been dating a girl for only three weeks and was terrified,” says Joshua Goldshlag (Eve name: Two Step), a 35-year-old CSM member and computer programmer from Massachusetts. “I certainly did not want to mention that I had been elected as an Internet space politician."
Released by CCP in 2003, Eve has cultivated the most loyal following of all the massively multiplayer games and turned into something of a controlled experiment in human nature and unfettered capitalism. It’s also the brightest spot in Iceland’s real-world economy. In the wake of the 2008 global credit crisis, as the country’s banking sector smoldered, CCP plotted its expansion and put the finishing touches on a new office. Last year it brought in about $65 million in revenue. The company employs close to 600 people, or 0.2 percent of Iceland’s population. (An equivalent U.S. company would have about 626,000 employees.) And unlike fishing, aluminum smelting, or Iceland’s other major industries, running a digital space empire does not deplete natural resources. About 500,000 people play Eve, more than live in Iceland; CCP employees never seem to tire of pointing that out, and other Icelanders note it with pride. In early March, New York’s Museum of Modern Art unveiled a video game installation that celebrates the artwork of about a dozen iconic titles. The exotic space cruisers of Eve were picked to sit alongside Pac-Man, Tetris, and The Sims.
by Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Photo: Courtesy CCP Games
