One of the MMOs I'm most curious about, but that I freely admit I will probably never ever ever play in a thousand years, is Eve Online. This sci-fi MMO from Iceland is a fascinating social experiment that I'm content to read about instead of experience.

Enter British writer Jim Rossignol, who plays Eve so the rest of us don't have to. His latest dispatch, where he gives an overview of the political structure of the Eve Online universe, is a fascinating read. It's like the crawl before a Star Wars movie: the aftermath of the wars between the Goons and Band of Brothers, the Band's uneasy détente with RedSwarm, the fiercely independent Star Faction, and the Council of Stellar Management trying to stand apart from and above it all.

You simply can't make this stuff up. And you don't have to, because Eve players do it for you. As Rossignol notes:

This wasn't a game about banding together to defeat monster X, it was about banding together to defeat other players. And why do this? For the riches. Players plus resources, plus more players, equals conflict. That's the basic mathematics that powers EVE Online. And it's been working for over five years now.

Rossignol suggests this model isn't possible in an MMO splintered across several different servers, but he's only partly right. This model isn't possible on this scale. Eve is unique for taking place entirely on a single server. Therefore, anyone who plays the game is invested in the political structure. World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and the upcoming Warhammer Online, for instance, exist across multiple servers, as multiple parallel universes, each identical but entirely separate to accommodate their thousands upon thousands of simultaneous users. In this sense, the tiny Eve benefits from its own relative lack of popularity.