image kindly stolen from rockpapershotgun.com

I’m interested in systems like these because the game I’m working on is based on a similar mechanic. Winning is not a matter of killing more enemies, conquering more territory, or being the last man standing. Instead, it’s a matter of accumulating a larger portion of the map’s finite resources before the end of the round.

As mentioned, this will of course entail grim battling and digi-death. I’m not at all trying to do away with that. But I see some really interesting possibilities in a competition for resources rather than a straight match-up of who’s mightier on the battlefield.

Of course, nearly all games revolve around limited resources in one way or another. Eve Online has resource limitations woven deeply into its gameplay, in many ways. But there seem to be few games that make themselves explicitly and directly about collecting more stuff than the next guy. Of course, there’s probably some whole genre that I once knew about but just can’t bring to mind at the moment, so help me out: If you can think of some, I’d love to hear about them below.

I’ve written plenty about Eve in the past, so I won’t go into too much detail here about the game itself. What’s remarkable to me is how the game’s narrative, the “story” of one’s time in Eve, is driven more by the dynamics among players and corporations than by the mechanics of gameplay itself.

I was going to write that the narrative is driven “as much” by personal dynamics as by gameplay, but on reflection, that just isn’t true. In Eve, the game mechanics — the intricate systems of paper beating rock beating scissors beating paper — seem designed to drive people into either conflict or cooperation. You could play the game without ever interacting meaningfully with another player (this would be difficult, in fact), but it would be a boring slog. There is no “solo” game in Eve: even when you’re alone in space, the environment and the economy and almost all the other aspects of the game are affected by what other people are doing, to a much greater extent than in most other MMOs.

That’s one of the reasons that many Eve players become so strongly connected to the people they fly with in the game. The closest analogy that’s occurred to me is to a hardcore but amateur softball or soccer team. The results of your efforts are meaningful only within the confines of the softball league (its own virtual world), and yet are no less meaningful for that. And the relationships that form there are those fed by the experience of striving together for a common goal — just as they are in Eve (and many other contexts). Nearly the only difference is that softball players tend to be in the same physical place much more often than gamers. They may occasionally get more exercise as well…