I Watched Ten Game Developers Get Demolished by an MMA Champ
By Dr. Eleanor Vance | Published on January 01, 0001
In nine years of covering video games and the people who play them, I have seen some egregious displays of machismo, but it’s never gotten to the stage where men have literally ripped their shirts off and wrestled each other to the ground. On Friday, though, I witnessed game developers from EVE Online studio CCP fight a reigning Icelandic mixed pay69 slot ดาวน์โหลด martial arts champion in front of an auditorium full of baying internet spaceship enthusiasts. There is no real reason for this fight to be happening, ufa888 except that CCP’s offices are next to the Icelandic capital Reykjavik’s MMA gym and its employees are a) famously insane and b) famously male. There is, I am fairly confident, no community in video games more male-dominated than EVE Online’s. Last time I managed to get a stat out of them, it was 97 per cent male, where other MMOs enjoy a fairly even gender split. The reasons for this are difficult to determine, both for CCP and for me; EVE is unashamedly hard sci-fi, centred on lovingly designed spaceships mining asteroids and shooting each other out of the sky, but girls love sci-fi. Just ask the Star Wars or Firefly fan communities. Personally I think it has more to do with EVE’s unwelcoming nature. It doesn’t just keep women out, it’s intimidating to every new player. EVE is cutthroat. Its long, involved history is built around huge wars and large-scale betrayals, people dicking each other over to their own ends. It is a game of wars, between spaceships and between minds. People will use whatever they can against you. I’ve spoken to plenty of EVE’s female players, many of whom are very powerful. It takes a lot of fortitude to make it in that world. If there is one thing more wholly and ostentatiously masculine than the EVE community, it’s probably topless men fighting in a ring. Ten men are lined up to fight Gunnar Nelson, who is evidently something of an Icelandic hero and undefeated MMA fighter. He is a beast of a man, bearded and tightly muscled; he circles his opponents like an aggressive silverback, arms out in front of him, dangling menacingly. He enters the ring as a live band sings some kind of Icelandic soft rock, followed by a team of hulking men in hoodies. Most of the CCP contenders, too, are bearded and muscular. They enter topless to death metal, parading through the aisles of cheering spectators, posturing and roaring. The men behind me are screaming things at the tops of their voices in the tangle of consonants that makes up the Icelandic language. At this point, I think that this may possibly be the most Nordic thing ever to have happened. This is far from the first strange experience I’ve had at EVE Fanfest, CCP’s annual real-world gathering of EVE Online players in Reykjavik. The first year I was here, in this very auditorium, I observed quietly as a room full of EVE players stood up and cheered an image of a floating rock that was rotating slowly on the big screen, for reasons I could not understand. I have met the most powerful people in the EVE universe and seen the crowd part before them here, perfectly ordinary people temporarily elevated to rock-star status in the real world for one weekend a year (not all of them take well to it). I have bummed cigarettes from spaceship pilots who have shown me their alliance tattoos. Attempts have been made to recruit me as an in-game spy; I’ve been promised a share of some nebulous power and influence in return, told I’d be great at it because of the fact that I have a vagina and almost nobody else in the EVE universe does. As the fighting begins, I’m feeling apprehensive. I know quite a bit about CCP as a company, EVE Online and its unusual fanbase, but I know literally nothing whatsoever about MMA, so I’m concerned that they’re going to get absolutely destroyed. I don’t want to watch EVE’s concept artist or someone get carried out on a stretcher, twitching and covered in blood. But what they’re doing here isn’t the bloodsports I had
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