ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why EVE Online players engage in the dark play of theft, betrayal, and treachery. In the dark, hyper-capitalistic, and dystopian game of EVE Online, trust is a valuable commodity. Unlike the vast majority of other modern massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) that design out the possibility for dark play involving theft, treachery, malfeasance, and betrayal, CCP Games has designed for it, at a massive and unparalleled scale. Based on twenty-two interviews with a wide variety of EVE Online players, the author argues players who engage in dark play are playing a form of player-versus-player (PvP) combat in which social skills rather than game skills such as accuracy, speed, or game knowledge are the domain of competition. The chapter also contributes to understand scamming and stealing as play, rather than an anti-social transgression, through demonstrating how it is situated as a legitimate domain of competition in the multiplayer game.
