[E:D] Notification
"Early Morning Gaming" channel [EMG] returns
Published: 2025-01-19
The primary channel of this newsletter, YesXorNo, has spawned a few others during its few years. Many of these have fallen into disuse. This one, Early Morning Gaming (EMG), is about to receive a little attention.
While the main channel is about the real world and geopolitics, EMG is concerned with computer games, primarily on-line ones. Communities form around and across games and game types. These communities themselves can be, and often are, interesting in themselves. Western militaries have been recruiting from gaming communities for decades.
This post is to inform subscribers ahead of time that a few articles are going to be published on a game called "Elite: Dangerous". The string "[E:D]" will be prefixed in each article title so that those who are not interested can skip them.
To perhaps whet your appetite for this content, the following short videos are provided. They are best viewed in the highest resolution possible. [For example, download with yt-dlp as commonly recommended.]
This looks like a computer generated video, which it is. That which is not obvious to those who are unaware of 'Elite: Dangerous' is that this video was not created by programming moving images and setting lights and shading, but by players flying together in the game. The "camera" is the external view from another ship flying at the same time in the same place. A hundred odd people from wherever on Earth took time to log into the game and fly to the agreed planet with the ship type chosen for the event, so that the video could be recorded by one or more designated players using their ship's external camera.
The game models physics and astronomy. Flying around canyons is not easy. If you crash, your ship is destroyed (your player character is recreated back at the last star-port from which you departed).
The galaxy in which E:D is played is a 1:1 replica of our own Milky Way. It includes all of the stars known to astronomers and their planets. The game's version of the galaxy is populated with stars and planets within reasonable astronomical probability over known astronomical objects. All of the types of stars known can be found, from red and white dwarfs, to neutron stars and the super massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*.
Hypothetical lifeforms derived from science fiction occur on some planets and form a part of the exploratory part of the game, along with just traveling around the 100 000 lightyear wide galaxy with its 400 billion star systems.
Here's another video captured from in game play, highlighting the beauty within it, the game's rendering of its model of our galaxy.
Lastly, for the last 10 years the game has been developing/releasing the storyline behind an eventual war with an alien species, the Thargoids. Again, using in-game cockpit or external cameras, and capturing in-game audio, the long story is briefly summarized beautifully in:
These videos were produced by some of the many "content creators" which are part of the game's community of players.
The upcoming few articles in EMG do loosely relate to geopolitics, but their target audience is the E:D community. Game specific terminology is required.
Consider yourself notified. Have fun!
Sources
The three videos above are:
Elite Dangerous: Python MK2 Mass Fly-in; The Buur Pit; 2024-08-19
Elite Dangerous: The Beautiful Game; The Buur Pit; 2024-06-19
The Greatest In-Game Event You Never Knew Happened; indigo; 2025-01-10
One can support this work via Buy Me A Coffee.
Copyleft: CC0
