A Commonplace Book

There aren’t many times when I can claim to be ahead of the curve on new music. I don’t think I started listening to New York dance-rock until years after it broke. I just started listening to LCD Soundsystem some 6 months after Sound of Silver came out. And even my fondness for Daft Punk, dating back to 8th or 9th grade, is going to have to be counted a fluke unless people start rediscovering the genius of Rabbit In The Moon and Future Sound of London too.

With this in mind, I was amazed to learn in the past year that Andrew Bird is a widely respected independent musician, since he was the first artist I ever saw in concert. I was 14.

I suppose it might be less impressively hip that I was there to see Squirrel Nut Zippers (this was at the height of the Gap-inspired commercial swing revival) and that I was there with my mother (I was 14). But I was impressed enough with his performance as an opener for the opener that I walked away from The Electric Factory with a copy of Thrills.

Since then the Squirrel Nut Zippers have dissolved and faded into obscurity while Bird has ascended as a respected musician in his own right. Unfortunately, Armchair Apocrypha didn’t rate nearly as high as I expected it to on the end-of-year lists I have read. Even so I am excited to have rediscovered him after so many years, and I look forward to catching him in concert the next time he comes through New York. I’ll probably even go with my mother just for old times’ sake.

I hope that title doesn’t sound too harsh, because I really do love EvE Online for everything that it is supposed to be, and I’m happy that it’s received a fair amount of good press recently.

In theory, EvE is incredible. It is a delicately designed vision of anarcho-capitalism gone beautifully haywire. Where some MMOs put you on a rigorous treadmill to “victory,” the EvE universe simply exists as a playground in which to pursue your dreams of militaristic world domination. Possibly your dreams of economic domination. Or maybe just your dreams of ruining everyone else’s dreams. Any path you choose, if you’re smart and careful and just a touch lucky then you will no doubt rise to the top.

The basic elements of gameplay are implemented by the developers: shoot, fly, mine, etc. But the much larger games of political maneuvering, power leveraging, and corporate espionage are all creations of the 200,000-some players themselves. The galaxy created by CCP might be a cold and harsh environment by design, but its inhabitants have certainly done nothing to warm it up. Put more succinctly, EvE is “Icelandic with Calvinist overtones.”

So if everything about the design and execution of the EvE Online universe is so perfect, why do I not like playing it? Because of my sophomore year political science class, War, Peace & Strategy.

Our professor introduced the “tooth-to-tail ratio” for militaries, which is the ratio of combat troops to support personnel. And in their dogged pursuit of absolute realism, CCP (EvE’s developers) has recreated roughly the same tooth-to-tail ratio of the US military, somewhere between 1:5 and 1:10.

In the military this works fairly well because the division of labor results, for the most part, in 1 combat soldier working regular job hours alongside between 7 or 8 support soldiers working the same hours. In EvE, however, the division of labor, while present, is not nearly as clearcut. There are no 7 or 8 players providing materiel for every 1 ship flying in combat. Instead, every player engaged in 1 hour of combat will fly several times that number of hours mining ore, transporting weapons and ammunition, and attending to all of the other myriad little tasks that war entails.

More complex corporations will effect a more organized infrastructure to streamline production and transportation operations, and the two corps I flew with in the short time I played EvE did pay attention to those necessities. In a quick reflection on my time, however, I found that far too much was spent in preparation for play and not in play itself.

I’m employed for around 60 hours a week right now; I don’t need another job that occupies an additional 5 hours of my time for every hour I want to entertain myself. I certainly don’t knock anyone who does play EvE, but I’d be hard pressed to recommend it to anyone who didn’t harbor a perversely strong desire to feel a sense of dominion over a population the size of Samoa or Vanuatu without actually killing anyone.

Some Thanksgivings have the potential to end very badly:

Mine, fortunately, went quite well:

Full set of pictures from the turkey, stuffing, and pie extravaganza is here.