️‍EVE - Flexible Social Organisation at Scale

[Music] hello everyone thank you for joining our session this beautiful day um we had a lot of sessions previously about blockchain infrastructure uh but in this session we will be talking about little bit more tangible game so here we have our speaker hilar from CCP games and I'm your moderator Nathan from fact to mind um hilar why don't we just jump straight to the point here could you help um giving a brief introduction by yourself and uh what you are building yes thank you Nathan uh very happy to be here um we were here earlier this year uh always great to come to uh Abu Dhabi um so I mean I guess everyone by now knows that uh computer games have become kind of a big deal uh Revenue in computer games last year was $200 million estimated to be $300 million in the next 3 years already bigger than movies bigger than uh music bigger than both combined we are kind of uh beating every boss of other Industries as the decade progress uh and there are a few games uh which have been throughout the Journey of the industry and we are one of them uh with the sort of uh diffusion of the internet uh back in sort of 2000s there were uh about five games uh that came along and have been going all the while through uh the rise of games we are one of them um our game is a spaceship game about world domination uh that everyone sort of uh plays together uh we started our journey in Iceland I'm icelantic um and our first Target was to beat the nation of iseland in terms of GDP and population um and we achieved that uh a decade ago so uh um that's kind of our story so uh um given our the nature of our audience here the gaming industry can be a little esoteric right could you help explaining what sets uh CCP apart from uh from many other games so um our game um primarily focuses on everyone is playing the same game so when uh somebody's playing even online they're playing together at the same time with the whole world um and uh um and we even have a few Guinness World Records uh on that front we have the Guinness World Record for the biggest fight taking place in games we have the the world record of like the most amount of assets being destroyed in war in an online game and it's all centered around this fact that uh everyone plays the same exact game and when that happens uh the economy becomes materially different than when people are just playing a game alone or with a few thousand people which is often the case with games it's usually a few hundred to a few thousand peoples uh but in our game we have had about 20 million people playing this game over the past 20 years uh and that makes all the items in the game basically become like assets if you own a Spain station in on line you own a spaceship Etc uh it is in a way a digital asset of sorts um and uh throughout history ever since our game uh was released in 2003 people have been trading those assets whether it's allowed or not it's actually not allowed but it happens regardless so uh due to this we have been kind of forced to think deeply about economies how they function how they become sustainable Etc um so our game is probably most known for the fact that uh our economy has been running in a stable way for 20 years uh which is more than than we can say for most countries even uh speaking of economy uh you know evil line has been a very famous for having a like actual Economist running behind the scene right could you elaborate what's happening behind the scene yeah so in uh 2008 uh we hired a PhD economist uh to help us run the economy uh and that became world news like it was covered by BBC CNN gaming company hires an economist now almost all gaming companies have Economist and now we have a team of economists uh but we very uh quickly realized uh to make the game sustain over decades uh we need to in a way run it like a country so um U again this has become sort of uh the most known aspect of the game is how robust the economy is how stable it is how much has it been growing over decades Etc and we laid down those tracks uh pretty early so your team is essentially running a centeral bank in the virtual world right um I C I can only imagine how that job can be extra difficult when blockchain gets integrated to the game so please tell us when did you initially started to think about blockchain integration so uh we started to think about uh a blockchain um again very early I think our first sort of designs around using a blockchain were uh from 2015 uh we were thinking about using the Bitcoin blockchain it's a little known fact you can actually store more things than just Bitcoin values on the Bitcoin blockchain um but it was more like an academic curiosity but it was born from this fact that people that play the game they view the things in the game as theirs um I mean um now we have been running for 20 years some of the people uh playing game online were born after the game is released and obviously in 20 years also people pass away and we have gotten a few requests from Estates where people are inheriting their spaceships and Assets in even line to their children so then we were thinking okay it's we should probably think of a a more open way uh so that people can really transfer assets trade them Etc uh because there was no practical way to do it when we release the game now combined with Technology Innovation for blockchains and also legal Frameworks which are becoming more clear around the world it seems that we can really capture this idea of you can really own Assets in a game and you can transfer you can inherent you can trade you can sell and countries have a adopted legal Frameworks for that to be doable that is a bit clunky to do with games in the sort of legal classifications they exist to certainly in 2003 but now that crypto has plowed the way both from a technology standpoint and most importantly from a legal standpoint all of a sudden you can see a way where it can build a virtual world that over time becomes more like a nation among nations and since I come from the tiny country of Iceland um which is a country that has existed for a thousand years but still very small but it still exists um amongst all the other countries and it isn't like a farfetched idea today that you can build a virtual Nation like that especially as we see here in Abu Dhabi which has in effect created a virtual Nation with uh abui Global markets which is a virtual Nation within the nation so it isn't like um uh crazy idea that you could do that with a game so I guess um I love the term virtual word like virtual word is not virtual uh virt it's not going to be virtual anymore once people start to buy it right buy the idea so um tell us um I know a social organization in the Evo line is really big can you tell us anything interesting about it interesting stories maybe yeah so um the game is uh it's basically a space war game about territory Conquest when you start the game you have a little spaceship you want to have a big one you want to own a solar system you want to own a constellation you want to own a constellation of constellations so to achieve this people very quickly figure out they should bond with other people playing the game and that starts by usually fing a corporation then the corporation join an alliance of all Corporation and the alliance join a coalition and if we take like one of the coalitions in even line it is the size of kind of the UK military the UK military is roughly 100,000 people so a big Coalition in neon line is like a a sort of a a sizeable country military and as you can well imagine organizing the UK military is no small feet um and there is a lot of infrastructure to do that that has literally been built over thousands of years um and if players have basically have to speedrun this in 20 years uh you can imagine to organize 100,000 people in war over digital assets and a wor World there is no small feat and uh and when you talk to uh the people um that do these things they often do complain about the fact that they can't really pay anyone everyone is basically doing this for fun and in a way almost like a charity a little bit like how National militaries work serious right yeah but it's all very serious so um and it's to a point there is a meme internet spaceship is serious business is what if players call this so you can imagine the infrastructure you need to organize this Warfare and planning a war in even line takes years grudges go on for decades so so it's kind of like a an element and in many ways if players have invented and our Guinness World Record is basically about this a massive fight that took years to plan build all the spaceships to conquer the territory Etc and and we believe that by making a blockchain version of this we will be able to kind of supercharge this infrastructure to the next stes and also a big part of what we're doing is allowing people to also help build the game because our team in Iceland is about 200 people that work on a on line um and uh it's not very practical to have a much bigger team on the devite but we already have around even online about 4,000 people which have built software so that's another way and a lot of the software is actually to organize the organizations of E online it's almost like it software for internet spaceship games so by leveraging that aspect of blockchains smart contracts to build further support we see that not only can we supercharge the idea by the asset ownership really being deeply belonging to the players but also give the players the opportunity to build on top of what we have built and then the sky is the limit uh for those who uh haven't played EV on line uh by any chance um the Warfare people are going crazy about it like there's actually a spy trying to disguise the other uh the opposite side to win the win the war so he Mar could you maybe to spice up the topic a little bit could you share maybe a couple happenings that you observed um of course like in all Warfare spycraft is a big part like um uh Wars are often won on information and having information and misinformation is a big part of waging Warfare uh this is a key part in a war in EV line like any War uh and there is an interesting aspect when a player in an organization in even line is found out to be a spy they're usually not rooted out but they're fat false information because as soon as you know you you have a spy but the Spy doesn't know they have been F found out it becomes a false information cont to it to your enemy um this also happened in spycraft in international Warfare um and and it's just interesting to see all these natural patterns emerge because even if the the world is virtual the human behavior is very real and uh these attacks are actually very highly engineered right cuz uh some players the players demography is actually very highly educated maybe like rich just like this crowd right yeah I can just imagine it's a it's a it's a human competition game that spans over decades the people that rise to the top in this game are Elite like uh when I show up to meetings with the players I'm super stressed not very stressed here not that you aren't Elite but you're not e players uh when you have been winning against uh hundreds of thousands to people over decades you are pretty smart believe me uh and often when I compare my little company to the E corporations they run I have a tiny little startup in Iceland they are ruling over tens of thousands of people in a military simulation I I have nothing on them so um given that the the you know War Warfare is already very intense we can only imagine the scene will get even more serious when they integrate blockchain how do you expect what's going to take out um yes um so when we announced that we were going to do this we were going to make an Eve online Style game on a blockchain everyone told us that just might be too much like the stakes could be just too high and um and this could be true uh but we believe it's worth the experiment and this is the next States for our game to make the the game even more real but it might just be too real so um if you want to come and help us figure that out then uh you can actually start in our founder access right now uh but uh but this is one of the concerns we have uh we might just have raised the stakes a little too much um so we are since we are trying to wrap up the session any uh last closing remark that you want to share with the audience um yeah so there's actually a big uh part of our game which is about fuel for spaceships part of how we have implemented the game is that everything in the in the game uses energy to exist um and uh and the energy is called crude matter and it's heavily inspired by crude oil so when we came here in February we went on a tour from Abu Dhabi Dubai and and uh and Saudi Arabia to learn from the best about how you m manage uh energy businesses uh we're heavily inspired by how that works on planet Earth and then we found on top of that that here in uh Abu Dhabi you're also implementing virtual Nations then we say okay we should come here more often not only uh are you experts in managing energy but also creating virtual Nations so um uh we're here again to learn even more as we built this out so um uh we might have more in common that meets the eye uh thank you for sharing your all your insights Mar and thank you all for listening our session today [Music]