Two days in the wild and wonky world of EVE Online .
EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online science fiction role-playing game.
It's been around since 2003, and boasts more than 500,000 subscribers.
Even within the complicated world of MMORPGs, EVE is known as incredibly wonkish.
The game boasts a real, shockingly complicated economy and trading system, and is well known for its highly-evolved grand-scale political strategy, complete with diplomacy and espionage. One of the American diplomats killed in Benghazi, Sean Smith, was an avid EVE player and diplomat.
Basically, the game revolves around garnering enough currency (ISK) to build bigger and better spaceships.
This is a comparison of ship sizes from many different sci-fi worlds. The two I've marked are from EVE.
Dirk Loechel / Via dirkloechel.deviantart.com
You can earn ISK through time-consuming missions and resource-gathering.
Or you can buy it with real money. Right now a "PLEX" of 600 million ISK costs about $18 USD.