The God of EVE Online, Hilmar Petursson

Hilmar Petursson, CEO of Crowd Control Productions (CCP), is, at first sight, an imposing presence. Whether this was due to his physique or my own nervousness, I’m not sure. We met outside the auditorium after his address on the first day of the conference and he immediately put me at ease with his quick smile and gentle humour.

During his address he talked about the history of EVE and some of the, thankfully few, problems that were encountered along the way. We were also given a sneak preview of some of the graphical and gameplay improvements that were planned for the future of EVE. I did try to get pictures of these but the unsteadiness of my hand produced pictures that were blurry and indistinct, sorry. If you play the game though, you’ll be able to see these improvements for yourself soon enough.

EVE Online is probably the most grown up and complex of any of the MMO’s with a dynamic, player driven economy, political intrigue, and war of a scale and depth unseen in any other MMO. War in EVE is not simply fighting PvP battles until there is a winner, it involves all the espionage, logistics, strategy and diplomacy that war does in the real world. One example, given by Hilmar during his presentation on the Monday, from the early months of the game sounds like a complete reflection of the cold war.

It turned out, in the first few months of EVE that players of different nationalities were banding together in specific areas of space. The Scandinavians in one area, next to the Russians (who had hacked the game so they could chat in Cyrillic script, and no-one else could understand them). The Americans were across the other side of the galaxy and the French were in between The Scandinavians and Americans. All arranged around the pocket of neutral territory known as Empire Space. Now here’s how it went: The Russians were highly organised and powerful in battle and were attacking the Scandinavians. By rights they should have wiped them out fairly quickly but things descended into a war of attrition lasting for a couple of months. This was because the Americans, whilst protesting their neutrality, were ploughing their considerable production capabilities into supplying the Scandinavians with ships and material. Through some audacious espionage, the Russians figured this out and hired the French to cut off the supply lines from the Americans to the Scandinavians. The Scandinavians quickly folded and the Russians were victorious. Involved in all this was a combination of political manoeuvring, subterfuge and economics which wasn’t built into the software, having evolved out of the way people played the game. This was even before alot of the mechanics for alliances and other political shenanigans was built into the game. Maybe it lacks something in the re-telling and Hilmar did have a nice map to demonstrate on but even at this early stage in the games evolution it was apparent that here was something slightly different from your run of the mill MMO.

Before joining CCP as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) in 2000 and heading the monumental task of engineering EVE’s peristent world technology and 3D engine, Hilmar served as CTO of SmartVR, a spin off of OZ.com based on their multi user virtual reality technology. He was appointed CEO of CCP in 2004 and has overseen the companies explosive growth in technical ability and size. CCP today has offices on three continents, a continually growing subscriber base for EVE Online and another MMO entering development after their merger with White Wolf Games.

And so we come to the interview, I was quite nervous and made this clear to Hilmar form the outset

Me: You said during your talk that you go into the game and interact with the players anonymously, What do you get from that?

Hilmar: Its no fun if they know its you. Initially when I started to do it, the first time was in September 2003, about 4 months after the launch of the game. It happened that I was on paternity leave and found that I had some time to play. I thought I’d spent all this time making this game, it was time I played it. I thought I knew how the game was so I played it for like 2 weeksn on my own, during this time I got alot of recruitment requests from people wanting me to join their corp. After a while I thought I might as well join one. A whole dimension of new options opened up to me, things that I really didn’t expect from having made the game. By participating with people, setting a goal, doing relatively mundane things within the game, but then being glorified by the context within which they were done. We were quite a small corporation and we wanted to put everyone in a battleship and we were mingin together to do that. Its a wonderfully participatory thing which really surprised me, and I gained from that two months of playing with those guys alot of insights which I wouldn’t have got without participating with them in the game.We have encouraged our people to play the game anonymously, keeping a separation between what they do professionally and what they do within the game, to gain these kinds of insights because they’re so important in allowing us to decide what to do for the furtherment of the game.

Me: The population of EVE is set to match and exceed that of Iceland, would you consider petitioning the UN to recognise EVE as a virtual nation?

Hilmar: (Laughing) I would consider it but I don’t know if they would accept. But who knows? We’re at the cutting edge of something new. Maybe if we have enough infrastructure, organisation, and player involvement in the governance it starts to be a voice to listen to, “What do the people of EVE think about this?”

Me: Your taking steps to develope that governance at the moment, with the election of an ombudsman by the players. Do you see CCP taking a more hands off approach and simply maintiaining the hardware and software, letting players dictate their own terms.

Hilmar: We very much want to have it like that, but its a very complex thing to do. You can’t just go and leave a vacuum, you have to engineer a replacement and give people structure. Democracy is an invention of mankind to decentralise government. People often forget how much of an invention democracy is, its something we’ve always lived with like breathing or walking. It is actually a very complex thing, minority protection, how to execute the voting so that elections are fair and balanced, how to make sure the politicians aren’t corrupt, how to give people power over them and them power over people. We’re doing our best to understand how to bring these things into EVE

Me: You mentioned there being a 10 year plan for EVE, are we now four years in or is that another 10 years?

Hilmar: Another 10 years.

Me: Where do you see EVE in 10 years time?

Hilmar: We have a buffet of options that we’d like to add to the game and we prioritise those in cooperation with the community and the response from the players. So its difficult to envision where it will be exactly, but I hope that we will add all these dimensions to it, the character aspect, flying over planets, and those type of things, so that its a much richer experience. So you can if you want stay in a station and operate a store, or solely focus on fighting. You have this much vaster set of options and more specialisations and create an even bigger social pyramid from having so many options.

Me: What do you think that CCP as a company has learned making EVE that you would know not to do the next time around?

Hilmar: That’s a difficult question because it sort of worked out for us. If you take a single thing and say “That was a bad thing” its difficult to understand the relationship that that thing had with the other things. So really we got a bit lucky, we were able to complete the game, sort of on time and sort of on budget, people wanted to play it and peole wanted to play it and its been growing since. We have a formula that works an I just want to do the exact same thing again. If you try to mess too much with it then you don’t really know whether thats a good or bad thing when you do it.

Me: They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, why is it that EVE doesn’t have as many copycats as something like World of Warcraft whose mechanics have been replicated across hundreds of games?

Hilmar: I think its just due to the scale. If you look at World of Warcraft, it has 9 million players, we have 200,000. You would say “World of Warcraft is obviously better,” but for us its more like different. People gravitate to that kind of success and try to replicate it, our success is a different one and its something that isn’t necessarily obvious to people. We claim that our success is for having created a social phenomenon which exceeds other attempts like that. Sure, it only has 200,000 people, but we think its important because we achieved doing this sort of sandbox approached virtual society. I think people who are jumping on the MMO bandwagon now are just doing it for profit, they look at the biggest game, the most profitable approach and they mimic that rather than mimicing something which isn’t as obvious a success just by virtue of the economics of it.

Me: Are there any plans for a North American Fanfest?

Hilmar: We have had fan created Fanfests, there was one in Las Vegas last year and there have been a few here in the UK. We would encourage our fans to do their own fanfest, we want to focus the Fanfest in Iceland being about visiting CCP in Iceland and I think if we were to create something else we would detract from the Icelandic Fanfest. So we’re more focussed on building up the Icelandic Fanfest and we will support community initiatives to plan gatherings in other countries. It may be a little different now because we have an office in the US, so its certainly easier to do than it was, but currently we have no plans to do it and would encourage people to organise their own.

Me: So instead of it being an EVE fanfest you would possibly see it being a WoD fanfest in America, seeing as that’s where the development of WoD is based?

Hilmar: Yes, they already have WoD gatherings in America due to the tabletop RPG, so its more like just merging with that. So we’ll see WoD fanfest in America, EVE in Iceland, though the Iceland event is more of a CCP event so there’ll be WoD elements in that as well. We definitely encourage people to organise their own gatherings and we’ll try to send people to visit them or materials to support them, as we have done in the past.
(Congratulations to CrazyKinux for winning the T-shirt with that last question.)

So that was my first ever interview, it was alot shorter than I thought it would be and I’ll remember that I could get nearly twice as many questions in the time allotted. After I’d asked all my questions we chatted about Scottish rats bringing down Iceland’s internet connection (which actually happened).
Thanks to Hilmar for taking the time to speak to me and Valerie (CCP’s PR and Comm’s director) for setting it all up.

For more information about CCP or EVE Online visit the links below.

• CCP
• EVE online

Tags: business, CCP, community, conference, Culture, EIF, EVE Online, future, innovation, MMO, multiplayer, Online, PC, Politics

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