I recently finished Empires of EVE: A History of the Great Wars of EVE Online by Andrew Groen. It’s a fun book exploring the history of the politics and warfare of one of the longest running online games in history.

At some point like 15 years ago, I actually tried to give Eve Online a shot. My bad college laptop just wasn’t good enough to play the game, so I had to give it up. I thought the concept for the game was super cool and was bummed out when I couldn’t continue.

Andrew’s book isn’t perfect. The book was very clearly a labor of love instead of the perfectly written/edited book, and that’s honestly quite okay with me! As someone who played an MMO extensively in the early 2000s, the ins and outs of the battles that took place and stories behind them spoke to me.

Learning about the structure of Eve Online with the various guilds being corporations, and how they had to run themselves as an independent economy interlinked with the larger Eve economy AND as a war machine. Add in all of the message boards propaganda 🤌. It’s beautiful.

One of the things that kind of disturbed me was learning about the lengths of spy craft and sabotage that these corporations would go through to try and come out on top. Honestly though, should anything surprise you with corporations?

I played Star Wars Galaxies for years, and I was absolutely obsessed with that game. To this day, I haven’t had a gaming experience that has come close to highs that I reached in that game. I was part of a guild called Pax Imperius who were Empire-adjacent. We were on a role playing server and engaged in some serious PVP combat. It was so much fun.

Reading about the planned raids brought back so many fun memories of hopping across various planets via spaceports to attack a Rebel guild’s base. The difference being that our raids took a couple of hours while the Eve raids were taking days, weeks, and months! That’s insane to me.

Like I said, the book isn’t perfect, but I had a great time reading it.