On Tuesday evening, over 2,000 EVE Online players gathered to celebrate Chappy78 Chapman's 42nd birthday by gathering into two massive armadas and blasting each other to smithereens. Representatives from every major player alliance in EVE showed up (along with a few developers from CCP Games), many sporting their biggest, most expensive ships to sacrifice in the mock battle. Billions of ISK, the in-game currency, was destroyed just for the fun of it.

The allure of EVE Online has never been found in its style or sheen or thrilling gameplay. Ask CCP Games CEO Hilmar Petursson what keeps the 16 year-old MMO going, and he will only ever give you one answer: the community. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz at Reboot Develop earlier this month, Petursson attempted to communicate the experience of making and maintaining EVE Online to running a city.

At 5 AM, Gigx received a phone call that would change his life. Minutes earlier, a text message had come through but the 32-year-old Serbian had slept through the beep. The phone call woke him up. It was Nammcek, one of Gigx's subordinates from his EVE Online corporation, Balkan Mafia. He was panicking. "The Judge is transferring all of our citadels," he said. "He's taking everything." "So I went from bed—I was still so sleepy—and sat at my PC," Gigx tells me. "I couldn't believe what was happening."

If you enjoy navigating distant galaxies, leading intergalactic alliances and fighting space pirates, you might want to take on another challenge: discovering real planets. The space-based online game EVE Online, which bills itself as “the world’s largest living work of science fiction”, is delving into science fact by asking players to help search for planets outside our solar system. Details of the citizen science challenge, which is part of an initiative called Project Discovery, emerged at the game’s annual Fanfest event in Reykjavik, Iceland, last week.

EVE Online’s historian reflects on the largest war ever fought on the Internet. By Robinson Meyer.

In spaces between the relentless mercantilism of high-sec and the dynastic feuds of null-sec lies the vast swathe of low security systems; the tattered fringe of order slowly unwoven by the ruthless chaos of lawless space. While a large portion of EVE Online's pilots avoid these systems like the plague, they have, like any region in EVE, evolved a society of their own. Helicity Boson wasn't like other pilots. He was, from his first days, forged in the conflict of pirate space.