The Slavery In Eve Online

What one game’s design reveals about capitalism

If you’ve never played the massive, player-driven space opera Eve Online, then you are missing out on one of the biggest microcosms of laissez-faire capitalism that exists on the Internet. This 16-year-plus game is set in a fictional future where humanity has settled a distant star-cluster (referred to in-game as New Eden). Every interaction in the game is player-driven, including its market-based economy.

The fact that slavery is featured so prominently at the core of this game’s economy and lore leads to some murky philosophical questions about the nature of capitalism in general. In looking at Eve Online, we can interrogate our current economic system scaled up to galactic proportions, and what that means for our present.

A Virtual History of Slavery

Something that must be stressed is that when we say that all interactions are player-driven, we do mean all of them. As one passionate fan described in their Eve Online fan fiction:

You want to sell scrap metal? You better hope that someone wants that scrap metal.

You want to buy a new ship because your last ship got reduced to dust by Amarr battleship’s famous laser broadside? You better hope that someone is manufacturing them.