EVE Online and God

I started playing EVE Online because my company sold some high-end hardware to CCP -- the Icelandic game developer. We did a good job in increasing their game's performance quite a bit. Anyway, that's kind of beside the point. The game is a massively-multiplayer space economic and combat simulation. Tons of people pay in this fake futuristic world where you mine asteroids, fight pirates, join corporations and trade across the galaxy. It’s very in-depth.

They stopped by our offices for a visit since they went to attend the Austin Gaming Convention and we were "on the way". They gave us a little spiel on why their game is great and showed us some nice looking graphics that showcased why their game was different. (Which it is, by the way).

While talking to the CEO of the company I asked him if they had to adjust the rules of the game very much. I have played in a couple of these massively online games and everyone I have been on has constantly tweaked the rules to keep the game balanced and fun. EVE is about 3 years old now so I was wondering if the amount of rules tweaks were constant, or diminishing. I was just curious.

His answer kind of adjusted my world philosophy a bit. I'm paraphrasing here, so remember that, but he said something like this:

"I empathize with Old Testament God. When we started making our world, we couldn't just adjust the rules to make fixes, we had to go into the game world and destroy things that were breaking the rules. Essentially we smote the 'sinners'. Now, after more of our rules are in place and it is harder to unbalance the game, we can get away with making minor tweaks here and there to fix things. We still do the same amount of small tweaks, but we don't manifest our vengeance in game form often anymore."

I love things that may give me insight to the way the universe works. Looking at the Judeo/Christian religion, the fall of man seems like it was the only mistake. Or at least that is the only one that was really spelled out in the Bible. It could be likely that there were still all sorts of problems in the world, and maybe the fall of mankind was just the biggest. It just took God a lot of time get things to the state where he could tweak things subtlety. It could explain the difference in God now and God then. More divine vengeance and miracles then, more subtle unnoticeables now.