Influences part 2

­Another big influence was EVE online, a space based MMO and a wonderful game!

A few of us played while in grad school, EVE is a very intensive game, what we considered a pretty hard core experience. I could easily see spending 6-8 hours a day playing that game if you got into it. If you have that kind of time please go play, you’ll have a blast!

But as busy students we started to realize that we didn’t have that kind of time to play games, especially when most of our hours were spent making our own. However one of the nice things about EVE is that travel takes A LOT of time. It was easy for us to fly around space, play the game, and then fly off somewhere else and leave a single ear bud in our headphones while we got back to work in another window on the computer.

When our trip had ended an hour or so later we would be notified by a friendly voice in our ear.

This was one of the first influences for what we eventually call sporadic play (although it took a while for us to realize that’s what we were experimenting with).