In the New York Times, journalist Seth Schiesel Take EVE Online for instance to points out the similarities in the political intricacies of EVE Online to those of the real world.

The kingdom is in crisis. After pledging to treat its citizens equally, the government stands accused of unfairly favoring one powerful, well-connected political faction. Many citizens have taken to open dissent, even revolt, and some are threatening to emigrate permanently.

A scene from the multiplayer Internet game Eve Online.
This specter of corruption has emerged most recently not in some post-colonial trouble spot but in the virtual nation of an Internet game called Eve Online (population 200,000) where aspiring star pilots fight over thousands of solar systems in a vast science-fiction universe every day.

So now, in a sociological twist, the company that makes Eve, CCP, based in Iceland (population 300,000), says it will tackle the problem the way a democracy would. In what appears to be a first, the company plans to hold elections so that players can select members of an oversight committee.

The company will then fly those players to Iceland regularly so they can audit CCPs operations and report back to their player-constituents. And taking cues from transitions to democracy in the developing world, CCP says it will call in election monitors from universities in Europe and the United States.

"Perception is reality, and if a substantial part of our community feels like we are biased, whether it is true or not, it is true to them," Hilmar Petursson, CCPs chief executive, said in a telephone interview. "Eve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation, and we have to address it like a nation being accused of corruption.

"A government cant just keep saying, ¡®We are not corrupt. No one will believe them. Instead you have to create transparency and robust institutions and oversight in order to maintain the confidence of the population."

That confidence has been badly shaken in recent months as many players have become convinced that CCP has rigged the game in favor of a mighty alliance of players called Band of Brothers.

"Once again it seems that several of your employees have been up to no good," members of a rival alliance called Goonswarm wrote in an open letter to CCP that was posted on the Internet over Memorial Day weekend. The letter detailed various allegations of misconduct, including a claim that a CCP developer had improperly infiltrated a Goonswarm group.

For nongamers and those whose gaming habit consists of a few rounds of Minesweeper during conference calls, it can be difficult to understand the emotional depth and commitment among players of so-called massively multiplayer online games, or M.M.O.s. Players of such games, who generally pay about ?15 a month for access, often spend thousands of hours over many years building their online personas, accumulating virtual power and wealth and often making friends with other players from all over the world.

The most famous and popular M.M.O. is the fantasy game World of Warcraft, which now has more than eight million subscribers. But there are factors that make Eve in some ways more intense than World of Warcraft or other M.M.O.s.

Most notable perhaps is that all 200,000 of Eves users occupy the same virtual galaxy. In most online games, including World of Warcraft, players are split up among dozens or even hundreds of copies of the game world, known as servers. Each server may have a total population of only 10,000 or 20,000 people, and at any moment perhaps only 5,000 players are actually online.

In Eve, however, there is only one game world, and there are routinely 30,000 people within it at one time. And while a serious World of Warcraft guild might have 50 members, major alliances in Eve have thousands of members.

Also contributing to Eves distinction is the management of its "reality": the games story line and politics are generated almost entirely by the players, not the game developers.

In Eve, for example, player alliances control vast expanses of digital real estate, including hundreds of planets. There are some areas that are safe for all players, known as Empire space, but much of the galaxy is called "0.0" space, which means that there is zero security or police presence there to protect players, as in many games.

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