I spoke a little bit about a video game a few days ago, and was curious about why that environment seemed so well suited for learning. I take another look at that idea today, looking at one particular aspect of the game.

Internet Spaceships are the nastiest sort of spaceships. The term "Internet Spaceships" is used in EVE Online as a suggestion to lighten up and take it easy. It's just a game. They're just internet spaceships, you aren't landing a Mars Mission.

The fact is, people intentionally auger in on the brutal, punishing parts of this game. They revel in the messy guts of the math and take a special glee in analysing every facet of a situation. They take it seriously. And, unpleasant as it may be, the reason that they take it seriously is because of the ability to make someone else suffer.

I've seen Grad students in the game, running sociology experiments focusing on trust. I've also seen players pretending to be grad students running sociology experiments on trust, trying to scam as much ISK (space-money!) out of their fellow players as they possibly can (It's an entertaining little scam). Likewise, I've seen groups of pirates build elaborate traps, lure gullible miners out to remote low-security systems, lead them on for weeks, before finally tearing into them when the picking is ripe. I've then seen those miners come back a half year later with a gang of fifty new friends and run those pirates clear off the server, humiliating them so badly that they've deleted their accounts. Internet spaceships are fueled on tears, so they say.

People clearly like the opportunity to one-up their peers. It gives them a feeling of superiority and competence, after all. EVE certainly does appeal to the hyper-competitive like that. There's got to be more to it than this, though. World of Warcraft can be extremely competitive; the end-game in WoW is essentially nothing but player-versus-player mayhem. WoW, however, doesn't have nearly as much to learn - it's just a question of hours banked into the game. What is it that EVE does which gives players such an incentive to learn?

Some point form facts about EVE:

EVE provides incremental rewards for learning something new. Learning how to set up a planetary mining base will net you a new income stream, helping you to afford ammunition or that shiny new capacitor booster. Learning how to *maximize* your planetary operations for efficiency will provide you so much space-money that you can basically afford whatever you want, The deeper your understanding, the more you can exploit it to your benefit.

EVE provides little in the way of structured learning environments. Beyond the introductory tutorials, which teach you how to fly your ship, shoot things, and travel through jump gates from system to system, there really isn't much. Particularly, the training tutorials only introduce you to the basic categories of topics. They give you a taste, then leave the rest up to you. Learning is encouraged in other ways.

EVE does have player-driven learning initiatives. One of the most reputable corporations in EVE is the University of EVE (Stock ticker EVE-U). This is a group of about 50 veterans who have decided that they enjoy teaching new pilots how to *really* play the game. The corp generally has a few thousand members at any one time, mostly students. These students pay fees as a proportion of their income, which is helped by the U's constant efforts to keep their students learning. All of the major alliances run their own training corps as well, which tend to be a lot more cut-throat and brutal, but are excellent places to learn how to squeeze every drop out of the game.

EVE is merciless in punishing someone who doesn't learn, but never makes them quit. EVE is primarily about consequences. In other MMOs, when your character dies you lose a little experience or may have to suffer under a minor penalty for a few minutes, but otherwise you're fine. In EVE, you lose that spaceship you spent a month saving for, plus all the cybernetic perks you've plugged into your character. It's not unheard of to lose billions of space-bucks, representing weeks of effort, when you die. Losing hurts. But even after that, there's always the carrot - learn where you went wrong and adapt to it, and you will be rewarded.

Rewards scale with risks, and risk is mitigated by learning. Similar to above. The best mining locations, exploration sites, and rat nests are to be found in the most dangerous areas of space. These areas are actually dangerous precisely because they're valuable. You've got every pirate and territory-hungry corp watching you, waiting for you to find a big score for them to steal from you. Learning in this environment is important. If you can learn enough to mitigate those risks - find out when the Russian's downtime is, find out when Goonswarm is going to be on operation somewhere else and not watching their borders - your risk decreases, so your net profit probabilities go up.



So is learning fueled by tears, too? My first guess is that getting to one-up the other guy (and avoid being one down'd) is a powerful incentive to learn. Trial by fire, indeed.

I'm not sure how much of this can be leveraged out of a game like EVE and into the real world of education - it's not particularly moral to create a learning environment that has emotional distress as an explicit goal (Though, I've met grad students - maybe that is an explicit goal?). This said, social stressors are some of the most powerful motivations we've got. People live and die for the opinions of others - even just what we think are the opinions of others. Is there some way to connect these two? Without being a jerk?