Help us capture a day of life in New Eden and store it for eternity!
This spring The Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the most distinguished modern museums of art and design, will be putting on an exhibition of interactive design in the museum's Philip Johnson Galleries. Working with gaming magazine KillScreen, the MoMA identified 14 games considered exemplar in terms of interaction design, ranging from the original Soviet version of Tetris, The Sims, Sim City, Myst, Portal, Dwarf Fortress to EVE.
You can read more about this effort in this blog post on the MoMA website.
More games are to follow, it‘s easy to start asking „why isn‘t game X there?“. But hey, they listed EVE Online, so that‘s good enough for us!
Anyway, the MoMA is a big museum full of very interesting things, ranging from Van Gogh‘s Starry Night, Apple‘s original IPod and Andy Warhol‘s Campbell's Soup Can pictures. They cover all sorts of art and design. The exhibition is focused on interactive design, and as we understand it, EVE‘s vast and complex single-shard universe of endless intrigue, player empowerment and emergence is what caught their fancy.
Explaining EVE in 2-3 minutes is hard
Showing a game as complex as EVE in a museum filled with other important exhibits, through which 3.5 million people pass every year, comes with its challenges. How can we tell the full story of EVE, and explain its depth and complexity in 2-3 minutes? That is how long the average attendee spends at each exhibit. Rather than having a PC simply running EVE somewhere in the corner with a keyboard and mouse and risk the untrained audience spending their time angrily trying to open the door in the captain‘s quarters or being serial suicide ganked in Jita, we decided on a more linear presentation. We‘ve decided to take one day of life in New Eden, capture it, distill it and try to present it as best as we can in a 5-10 minute video sequence that would play across two large screens. The video will be a combination of in-game recordings made by us, complex infographics, and most importantly, gameplay videos recorded by you, the inhabitants of New Eden.
Sunday – December 9th is the date
So we call on you. Let‘s make Sunday, December 9th the most interesting day in the history of New Eden and capture it to be archived forever in the nuclear-apocalypse-proof vaults of the MoMA. Our infographics will display market activity, NPC kills, player kills, jumps and all those metrics that explain how vibrant and alive our world is. The player captured gameplay videos will give it a human face. Whatever you are doing that night, whether it is running plexes, hauling ore, hunting with a small gang in losec, or fighting in a large fleet engagement, we ask that you record it, both video and sound and chatter, upload it and allow us to celebrate it in a montage of New Eden awesomeness. Perhaps this is the perfect opportunity to run that massive fleet op you‘ve been planning.
Note that we will not promote or use videos of EULA violating behavior, blatant obscenity or other behavior which may be entertaining to you, but doesn‘t necessarily help paint this image of the universe of New Eden we want to communicate. Not that it‘s all to be sugar coated, pink and fluffy--but you get the idea.
How can I capture video of my gameplay?
You need to record, preferably at full screen or maximized windowed HD 1080p or whatever your maximum screen resolution is. If your capture frame rate is under 20fps, consider reducing the screen size / resolution.
Only capture what is interesting. 30 minutes of ship spinning or trying on different fitting configurations is less interesting. What would you like people to see of EVE? What do you think is interesting?
Browsing dubious websites on the in game browser is not considered interesting for this exhibition, although you may find it profoundly interesting and make personal discoveries doing so.
The Neocom needs to be visible, with autohide set to off, so that the audience and our editing team can see the clock. This allows us to show your video in conjunction with other videos or infographics set at the same time.
Upload to YouTube and send link to CCP Archivist
Upload your video at full resolution to YouTube. You will have to upload to your own account, there is no official CCP or EVE account for this. Use your own account and if you don’t have one, feel free to make one.
Once you have recorded footage, send the URL to us in an EVEmail to CCP Archivist. Just send the URL and no other text. We will use automated methods to collect them, so there may possibly be no human that will see the text you write.
There is no guarantee that what you will capture will make it into the final presentation, but if it has interesting action or beautiful camerawork, is in high resolution with good frame rate, odds are that it will be there for millions to see!
What kind of hardware do I need?
You need a fast PC, a good graphics card, lots of hard disk space and some software that‘s capable of capturing your gameplay. If you all you have is a 5 year old laptop then you are all out of luck and probably not capable of recording a video stream to your 4000 RPM fragmented hard drive. Not to sound arrogant towards inferior hardware, of course.
What software should I use?
There are a number of applications out there, here are three common ones:
Fraps ( most popular within CCP )
Debut Video Capture Software:
//www.nchsoftware.com/capture/index.html
CamStudio ( freeware )
Dxtory
Evil corporate legal jargon:
By sending the URL to CCP you are giving CCP a license to use your material and forfeiting copyright, so CCP is in no way obliged to compensate you for using the video in the exhibit.
Will there be a way to see the exhibit without going to New York?
We can‘t answer that question just yet. Our core focus is preparing an engaging exhibit for the museum, but we will be investing technical work into building cool looking infographics that is likely to result in new methods to present information about the world of New Eden and down the road find its way to our website or into the game.
But is it art?
Well, it‘s design at least. We will leave it to armchair philosophers to decide if the universe of EVE Online, the efforts and interactions of you, the players and the pretty pictures that accompany it are art.
EVE is you
It may sound corny, but at the end of the day, New Eden and EVE Online is you. It's the actions and efforts of you, the players, that make it so unlike anything else out there. Through the good times and the bad times, the force that has shaped and defined EVE is the passion of its playerbase. We are endlessly grateful for it, and hope that you will participate in this effort to celebrate that fact, and tell the world about it.
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