Whenever Eve Online is brought up in discussion, be it in the gaming press or wider mainstream, inevitably the conversation revolves around a handful of topics: the enormous space battles, the intrigues and heists, or its depth and complexity. What is hardly discussed, even within the Eve community itself, is the significant gender gap in the game. In 2013, David Reid (then-Chief Marketing Officer for CCP) confirmed to Destructoid that 96% of the player population was male. CCP’s Ned Coker reaffirmed the gender gap in an email from February, stating that women make up just 4.3% of the player population.
In that same article, CCP’s VP of Business Development and then-Senior Producer Andie Nordgren (popularly known as CCP Seagull, now the Executive Producer of Eve Online) both made statements to the effect that the science-fiction domain is a primarily male-dominated one. In a game with such a severe population imbalance and developers who are fine with that fact, how does a woman get by and enjoy not just the game, but the community as well?
To answer this question I set out to interview two women who have engaged in the Eve community at a high level – as both players and public figures.
MYNXEE
Few names in Eve Online are as well-respected as that of Mynxee. A former chair of the Council of Stellar Management (Eve’s player-elected advisory board), a feared pirate, and now a noted explorer and pacifist, Mynxee continues to cut a particularly bright path through the stars of New Eden. She began playing the game in 2007, after a dalliance with Magic the Gathering Online.
“I used to play tabletop roleplaying games with a group of friends every weekend,” she explains. “But life happened and we all sort of lost touch. I played Magic the Gathering Online but that wasn’t very good, and I was missing my gaming fix. So I Googled ‘sci-fi games’ and Eve was right there.” She possessed zero experience with MMOs, but the world of Eve Online intrigued her – so she downloaded it and hopped right in on her ‘shitty dialup internet’ and ‘horrid little laptop’. “It still ran fine though. It was beautiful even then.”
She began in Eve Online like many others did in her time – grinding through the old tutorial and wandering through the universe until someone reached out to her. That player introduced Mynxee to her first player-run corporation, and that’s where she got her first exposure to the men of Eve. “In those days it was common to get on comms, say ‘Hi everyone’, and there would be this dead silence for a few seconds. Then there would be an enormous ‘OMG girl on the internet!’ reaction.” She says this with a laugh, one seasoned by a long experience with this sort of thing. She never really took offense to this reaction, though, and her most common reaction was to sarcastically wonder if they’d never seen a girl before. “Eve is like a mancave. No one expects a girl to be there.”
After a little over a year spent in high-security space, with a variety of corporations, Mynxee moved on – both geographically and philosophically. “I had met a few women on comms here and there. I was active on Twitter and I did kind of get sick of the boy’s club, fraternity bullshit.” She wanted to make a new corporation, and not just in name. She wanted to create a safe place for women players of Eve to congregate, as well as blow things up. “I thought a women-only pirate corporation would be cool. Like an all-girls motorcycle club.” And so, Mynxee’s corporation Hellcats was born and she started her career as a pirate.
In Eve, it isn’t unusual to receive hate mail from victims if you’re in the pirate business. I was, for a long time, and have received all manner of insults and threats from players – up to and including death. For a pirate, this type of reaction from someone whom you’ve just bested is pretty commonplace. But for Mynxee, there was always a slightly more concerning undertone to the hate.
“I never really got regular hate mail,” Mynxee says. Most of the mail she received was never directly from the people she hunted – and most of it carried a misogynistic tone. “It always had to have that ‘you’re not as bad as you think you are, bitch’ kinda thing in it.” Despite this, she carried on, and in time her Twitter presence and her blog became quite popular in the Eve community.
At the same time, low-security space (where most piracy took place) was in dire need of attention from CCP, and a new Council of Stellar Management election was on the horizon. Mynxee decided to run. “I thought the CSM concept was super cool, I had a very naive idea of what it would be like to be on it and what it was all about. I floated the idea, got a lot of enthusiasm from friends and lowsec in general.” It would end up being a decision that resulted in the worst year of her life. “It was pretty bad. It was an amazingly difficult job for something you did for no money…there were huge delays in communication, huge lacks of response, and a few people trying to troll the process.”
This was just before the infamous Summer of Rage, the release of Eve Online’s Incarna expansion and a perceived turn towards nickle-and-dime monetization that upset the entire player base and resulted in the first drop in overall subscriber numbers in the history of the game. Coming out of that experience, Mynxee was tired and frustrated, so she did what all Eve players eventually do – she quit once her term on the CSM was finished.
However, she inevitably did what all Eve players do when they quit: she came back. Just over a year ago, Mynxee returned to Eve Online and found a new way to play by embracing a basically pacifist playstyle, exploration without PVP. She formed the Signal Cartel corporation, partnered up with the Eve-Scout organization (which provides tools for wormholes and exploration), and set a new course in Eve.
All that said, though, how does she feel about the gender imbalance in Eve? “I don’t worry about it, really…I don’t think it needs to be addressed. I don’t think CCP need to put avatars in the game to attract girls. There will be some games and activities that will not appeal to women in general and that’s okay. I do think EVE deserves all the exposure it can get in the gaming community, and women should be shown to be capable of success in the game, to get that message out. But that’s kind of the extent of it.” As someone with a self-described ‘suck it up, honey’ attitude towards life, Mynxee’s answer to the ultimate question about gender imbalance is unsurprising – but her story serves as an example of exactly the kind of thing she believes should be understood by the larger gaming audience. Women can play Eve, and succeed at it, and have fun with it.
SINDEL PELLION
Parody and charity don’t often come along in one package, but in the case of Sindel Pellion, they do. Sindel joined Eve Online in 2011 and went on to become one of the more Eve Famous individuals in the game – first for her work adapting popular songs for the enjoyment of Eve players, and then for her work in spreading the wealth to all the new players of the game with her charity The Angel Project. As a player, she’s primarily spent life in nullsec – first with Test Alliance Please Ignore and then with Pandemic Legion, two of the most prominent organizations within Eve Online.
“I started playing Eve at the behest of the guy I was dating. Man, it feels weird saying this, but my first exposure was him promising to call me right back and then hearing nothing but radio silence for the next 5 hours.” Luckily, she understood her boyfriend’s obligations in Eve. “Instead of getting mad, I said “Show me.” We both played different MMOs and I thought a good way to get to know each other better would be to try each other’s games.”
Around a year after she began Eve Online, Sindel noticed that the Eve community on Twitter (primarily found under the #tweetfleet hashtag) began to throw around a lot of ideas for a song called “Pod Me Maybe”, a riff on “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. “I thought finishing the song, then recording and releasing it for them would be a cool way to get more involved with the community,” Sindel says, but she never got the chance – just before she could upload her song, another member of community delivered a parody called “Fight Us Maybe”.
Sindel scrapped that song, but didn’t stop with the idea. The next evening, she was in a fleet waiting to fight in the depths of null-security space when Maroon 5’s “Payphone” came on. In Sindel’s words: “Then the stars aligned, the heavens opened up, and “Titan” was born.” The parody launched Sindel into the stratosphere of popularity within the Eve community. “It was a lot of fun changing the words of popular songs and making them about Eve so I did another one, and I haven’t really stopped.” Of course, every hobby has its price, as Sindel soon learned. “Sadly, I can’t listen to the radio anymore without completely butchering the songs.”
This isn’t to suggest that she’s had an easy time of it. Sindel states that she, to this day, still runs into problems based on her gender within Eve. “Usually, it’s a momentary lapse in chatter on comms when they realize a woman is there… the last time it happened was two weeks ago when I joined a new comms for an incursion fleet. No big deal, just a pause in communication and the occasional stray comment about boobs.”
Occasionally, though, it does get abusive. She recounts a story of such abuse occurring while she was in Amarr, a popular market hub system in Eve, handing out ships for her charity: “A little over a year ago, I had a guy in Amarr local come at me for hours. He asked me whose dick I sucked to get into PL [Pandemic Legion]. He told me my kill stats were shit. He told me my songs were shit. He called me a whore over and over again.”
It is this sort of vitriol that Sindel thinks keeps women out of the game in the long term, in spite of what she perceives as CCP’s efforts to get more women playing. “I’m sure a lot of women do play, but once they come into contact with any large group of players, they’re turned off the game. Jabber, local, comms– they’re all filled with disgusting comments about race, gender, orientation. You have to have a pretty thick skin to ignore it.”
Despite the at-times overwhelming presence of bad behavior, Sindel sticks around, flying in fleets and handing out ships to the new arrivals in New Eden. “In the end, though, I found an incredible group of friends that I spend time with both in and out of Eve. I’ve never had a lot of friends before so it became very important for me to keep them. I’d go against any jerk on the internet to do that.”
Even for the most dedicated women playing Eve, then, it would appear to be an uphill struggle. New Eden is a dangerous place – a place of betrayal and theft and spying, a cold dark universe where losses matter and a simple misclick can cost a pilot everything they own – but for women playing it, the risk is not restricted to in-client activities. Each woman who decides to get involved with Eve faces a choice that the other 96% of the player base doesn’t – how to cope with misogyny while just trying to have fun.
