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The attraction for the tech industry, especially gaming, has grown exponentially from the 1980s and still goes on. In the early days, we used to walk to the nearest newsstands and buy the latest issue of our favourite magazine; nowadays gamers visit Reddit and other forums on a daily basis, discussing about the most powerful armor of the game they are currently playing or asking how to build the perfect spaceship. Whether it's purposely done or made just out of pure passion, players meet data every time they press start.
EVE Online
EVE Online is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), a game where around 231,000 players meet every day, playing the role they picked for their own space avatar. EVE was born nineteen years ago, in 2003, and is considered a milestone among open worlds set in space. This video game even falls under the sandbox label, a peculiar genre: players are provided with the starting tools (a spaceship) and an explorable world, with little or no indications on how to move within the world or storyline-wise. It is up to each player to decide where to go and what kind of career to pursue. Anyone who likes exploration will surely have some fun; there are nearly 8000 explorable star systems within the game world. There are also those who prefer to look for criminals and become bounty hunters. Last but not least, those who love science and decide to study the stars in search of black holes and wormholes.
Just out of curiosity: EVE Online runs on a single shard, a rarity for MMORPGs. This means that all active players (around 8 millions) could potentially meet on the same server.
Eve Online User Interface
A galactic economy
What sets EVE Online apart from other popular MMORPGs is the game economy. In EVE Online, fitting your ship is the core of the gameplay: there are dozens of different ships, hundreds of materials and modules to manufacture, the possibilities are basically endless. The huge number of products on sale as well as the vastness of the game map set in motion an unprecedented economic movement within a game, never seen anywhere else. There are players travelling for hours through the solar systems to find a bargain and resell the goods at the other side of the galaxy. Some pilots have become haulers: there are literally space truckers taking only care of rare goods transportation! Now, imagine browsing an e-commerce service online in search of the best price for a specific product. It needs time, patience and research. Over the years, many players found themselves working with databases full of data and information on prices, cheaper markets, where to find contraband goods and much more.
Microsoft Excel collaboration
It is no coincidence if this video game has been ironically nicknamed “spreadsheets in space”. Therefore, taking care of so much data has often required Excel, the most popular spreadsheet tool. For those who choose to pursue a trader career, you need to be aware of the exchanges between the various solar systems, most requested products, warehouses stock, everything is useful to plan your strategy. Thanks to Excel, or other spreadsheet tools, players have developed market strategies similar to those that occur in the real economy.
By popular demand from the community, nineteen years after Eve Online release, Microsoft announces an agreement with CCP Games, the video game developer, confirming an official Excel integration into the game: players will be able to upload data directly to the spreadsheet without leaving the game. An unusual but interesting collaboration, an icing on the cake which officially crowns a partnership between players and Microsoft that lasted almost twenty years.
Gaming for everyone
The gaming experience has been able to adapt to the needs of the market and user requests over the years. Whether it's mobile, online or console gaming, the video game market is constantly growing and it is estimated that it could reach a market value of around $240 billion in 2026. Furthermore:
- People between 18 and 34 years represent 38% of global players.
- About 14.1 billion mobile games were downloaded in Q1 2021.
- Approximately there are 3 billion gamers in the world.
Furthermore, the rise of the gaming industry increases not only the demand for game developers but also data specialists'.
Don't live the future as a sidekick... be a superhero! Discover Geeks Academy’s training offer in Gaming & Metaverse and AI & Big Data:
Play-to-Learn with Data is an in-depth series about the surprising relationship between the world of data and video games. Below a comprehensive list of the cases we have been talking about:
Sources:
https://mmostats.com/game/eve-online
https://kotaku.com/eve-online-microsoft-excel-ccp-games-spreadsheets-space-1848892808
https://www.eveonline.com/eve-academy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EVE_Online