A Day With Mittens

Alex Gianturco has become one of the most popular figures in modern e-sports. After a mediocre rookie year in Starcraft II’s silver league, he realized that he enjoys mining for minerals, but needed a safe place to develop his strategy. The rest, as they say, is history.

Following his stunning debut in the epic space saga known as “EVE Online”, Mittens became the dictator of an industrial power located along the remote galactic periphery. In a previous article, we learned that Mr. Mittens runs his entire empire by himself, with a small army of bots. Today, I have been invited to shadow the Mitter, as he wages endless war.

I arrive at a quiet and modest home, which obscures the small garage where he resides. His mother graciously allows us her parlor, and we briefly sit to discuss EVE. It is only 5:00 am, and Mitt is quite anxious to log into his accounts. However, he takes a few precious moments to answer my questions. In particular, I wish to understand his philosophy that EVE can be compared to real-world geopolitics.

Mitties explains, “What I have done, is comparable to, say, militarizing North Korea. My homeland [referred to as the Delve, in EVE parlance] is an economic backwater with little strategic significance, but through sheer force of will I have convinced the Great Powers of the galaxy to take me seriously. On several occasions, I have orchestrated terrorist attacks in the galaxy’s financial district [Jita], and I am constantly threatening to drown imperial Amarr in a lake of fire. The beauty of EVE, is that so much gameplay occurs away from the keyboard. Players think about me while commuting to work, getting fired from their jobs, and watching television with their aggressive ex-girlfriends. I can’t win the game through mere gameplay, but I can at least threaten to win, by claiming to have already won.”

We step into the dimly lit garage, where a wall of computer monitors display a dizzying array of spaceships, whirling through asteroid belts as their lasers bite into raw ore. The sun is just peeking over the horizon, as Mitters perches atop a stool, teetering precariously as one of the legs has become rather loose. He begin his shift by checking up on a vast fleet of Rorquals, ensuring that their scripts have not derailed overnight. “These are the bread and butter of my empire. I probably spend around two hours per day, ensuring that everything is flowing smoothly, and… oh, see, that’s what happens…” Mitts points to a pod which is bumping up against an asteroid, “That one is still trying to mine. I’m not sure why that keeps happening, sometimes they get blown up and my script forgets to give them a new ship.”

Mitty begins to pull up endless reams of text: “This is all the correspondence my alliance generated last night. I like to compare this to Allied intelligence operations during the Second World War, when radio traffic was spoofed to simulate non-existent armies. It’s important that everybody in Goonswarm continues to shit talk each other, even when I am asleep, or else the developers would notice something amiss.”

He spends several hours writing back and forth, in local chat and EVEmail, before posting streams of diatribe into Reddit and the EVE forums. “Everything has to appear as if it were natural, so I can’t simply have my goons be normal human beings, because a normal person would never ever ever play this game. I need to make them appear incredibly immature and socially inept, like involuntary celibates who live in their mother’s…” His voice trails off, before he continues, “These are supposed to be real people, who enjoy mining, and frankly they have nothing else to do with their sad, lonely lives. They must never appear too refined nor sophisticated.”

Shortly after noon, Mittibittimuffins becomes heavily engaged in a massive space battle. The screens are filled with purple and red dots, and he tabs back and forth endlessly pressing the worn nub of an F1 key, “I know this guy. We used to get along back in the day, but after I showed him how to multibox, he just went and started his own alliance. At first, he was just trying it out of curiosity, as a test, but then he stuck with it… You know, I actually heard he died a while back, but the scripts are still running.”

At some point, it is clear the battle is over, although there is no clear winner, “I don’t know; local crashed again, this generally happens. I’m trying to run a mock war here, on a server which hasn’t been upgraded in over a decade. Once again, I use the analogy of North Korea. It’s like driving a bunch of cardboard tanks through your capital, but the street lights start flickering, and everybody knows that skyscraper is empty inside, and those stores only have plastic fruit, and then the lead tank runs out of fuel and everything literally falls apart. However, the people love it; of course they do. It’s no longer about reality…” He flourishes dramatically, “This is spectacle!”

He frowns, reviewing an application to Karmafleet, “I’m am new player. I feel more on but like to learn too play. Need safer quite null home for grow. I been loyal true so fight for you@!” He laughs with a hint of bitter regret. “What? Bullshit! EVE hasn’t had a new player in years.”

The rest of the day, Mittime devotes to his “main”, which is the character he uses for more serious gameplay. “I’ve been actually trying to play the game for real, without using any bots at all. James only has this one Retriever, which doesn’t pull in as much ore as the Rorqual fleet, but it produces just enough that he can manufacture tier one destroyers. He hauls these to Jita, and sells them to people who, I guess they hunt miners or something. I don’t know. I don’t even care. It’s just business to me. If I can sell enough of these, I should be able to solo plex my account, which is a goal I’ve had for quite a while. Fuck, they are ganking me with my own ships again…”

It’s growing dark, and the setting sun’s purple rays filter through gaps in the siding. Mitsly is quiet, staring blankly into the abyss. The computer monitors flicker rapidly, as station trade bots scroll through millions of buy and sell orders. “Today was a good day,” he smiles awkwardly, “It gets so lonely playing this game all by myself, it’s nice just to share it all with someone every now and then.”

Indeed, as they say in EVE, the best ship is friendship.