CCP's Senior Producer Torfi Frans Olafsson granted us an interview request at GDC Austin to discuss EVE, disability access, and future expansions. After explaining what the AbleGamers website was about, he told me a little bit about the nearly one thousand players that play EVE with accessibility issues.

In fact, one member of the famed Council of Stellar Management (CSM) is disabled, and as a member of the CSM, he is a respected member of the games society. Out of EVE's 300,000 players, about 30,000 voted the members in.

However, "When we started out," Olafsson said, "we did not start out with accessibility in mind. The key consideration was network latency. We started designing EVE back in 2000, when it was common for people to have a second and a half ping. Especially with us living in Iceland, we are very familiar with trying to play network games on servers in different countries."

I completely understood what he meant, since I had played EVE during lag spikes, connection issues, or lag fests and it was horrible.  After commiserating on how speeds have changed, we moved on to the discussion of the HUD in which enemies show-up as bright red crosses. Luckily, for color-blind players, the colors can be changed and the icons are unique to the enemies. One of EVE's former programmers that worked on the UI was actually colorblind and had plenty to say about its former incarnation. There are also labels on the enemies to make it easier to tell them apart.

Also in EVE, the standard to controlling your ship consists of setting a way-point, warping to it, then either orbiting it or moving to it by double clicking in space. "The whole game design revolved around pointing and clicking." Olafsson said, "There was one player whose Dad actually wrote quite a few macros to allow him better accessibility." While you can change the key mapping, the UI cannot be changed, and CCP has no immediate plans to allow that.

On the other hand, EVE is not a FPS, it is a click-move-launch-wait game, and it is a game of patience, of knowing when to strike. This not only helps with accessibility, but also helps to build a tension that follows you throughout the game.

The game can be played in many ways, as well. You can be a pirate, holding players for a ransom, or a miner that makes money-digging ore out of asteroids. Alternatively, you can be a money mover, a market person, a trader: "We have one programmer that was an EVE player for years before joining us as a programmer." Olafsson explained, "And he hardly ever leaves the space station. He plays the market, pays his sub, but he never goes and blows stuff up, he just buys stuff and sells it."

Yes, EVE can be a game of nothing but numbers, if you want it to be.

EVE plans to add avatars

I was excited to ask about the further development of "Ambulation" because it will allow you to play as an actual avatar, walking through stations and meeting other gamers.  Recently, they changed the projects name to "Incarna," but the idea of allowing players to control an avatar has not changed.

Olafsson said the avatar controls: "Supports both point-and-click and driving. You can totally play by pointing and clicking as you would an RTS. We did that mostly to keep in line with the existing navigation paradigms in the game. Going into the station should just be a natural extension of how you play in space. Many people are asking why it is not out yet; since we have been working on it for years, but we just want to do it well. We want it to make sense. And as you know, designing an MMO within an MMO is a massive challenge."

I will be honest; I have always felt that the addition of avatars to EVE was a possible attempt at gaining more female players. Even more honestly, I felt a little bad for bringing up this theory, being that CCP has quite a few female employees and female players. In addition, how do you make something that is normally seen as not-so-female-friendly more appealing to female players?

While it is true that only 5 percent of EVE players are female, Olafsson is "not sure that adding avatars alone is enough to create a paradigm shift. But, we are hoping to attract a broader audience." I was happy to hear him say "broader audience", being that I had not considered that to mean players from other "normal" fantasy MMO's, of either sex.

We closed the interview with talk of the future, something that seems very bright for CCP and EVE Online. They seem to do things slowly and intently, which matches the pace of the combat in the game. They do not want to rush anything, and this approach has grown the game from a small unique niche game to a 300,000 strong society of pilots, traders and money-movers.

Moreover, the game works in many ways for disabled gamers. There are many that already play and that are very active in the games society, and the games click-to-do-almost-anything control scheme ensures that many more disabled players can conquer space as well.

Watch for an expansion called "Dominion" coming out in the winter. "It is about sovereignty, claiming solar systems," said Olafsson "kind of the "end game" of EVE online. Players lay claim to systems, there is massive logistics and infrastructure, and strategy. It is something that they do already, but we are changing the game-play. We are making it more cerebral and interesting."

I expressed that it sounds like this new expansion might make large groups of players more bullying than ever. Olafsson explained, "Truth be told, we don't know. It is interesting, whenever we make these large-scale changes to the games architecture, we expect tens of thousands of players to behave in a particular way, which they usually do not. But the intended effect is to support the growth of smaller alliances, and we kind of penalize larger alliances for claiming space and doing nothing with it. By making it more viable, more NPC's will spawn. You might pump money into it then harvest it."

Sounds exciting, doesn't it? A lot of what EVE and CCP are doing is exciting. They are building communities, and it looks like disabled players are, and can be, part of that community.

Olafsson closed out the interview by saying "What makes me excited is being the facilitator of this broad spectrum of people being able to communicate with friends within the game. It makes me incredibly happy when I see that happening."

Seems to me that it makes about 300,000 players happy too!

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