While some reject the entire premise as an abomination, others are purposefully building games both in and for the agentic era.
But none are as well-placed as Fenris Creations (formerly CCP Games), which is pouring over two decades of hard-won experience running EVE Online into its new blockchain-enabled space survival MMOG, EVE Frontier, which itself has been in development since 2021.
This is an excellent example of a company ‘skating to where the puck is going to be’, although CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson was well-positioned to make that prediction.
“When I met up with Demis [Hassabis] in early 2017, we were fabulating about what would be the ultimate boss of all games,” he recalls of his discussion with Google DeepMind’s co-founder. At the time, DeepMind was developing its game-playing AI systems, moving from Go toward StarCraft II.
Nine years on, the premise of that conversation has become stark reality, with the capabilities of AI agents making global headlines, while the discussion of their alignment (or lack of) is couched in existential terms.
And EVE Online, as ‘the ultimate boss of all games’, is already playing its part, with an offline private version of the game being used by DeepMind to test its agents, particularly in terms of how to build long-term memory and carry out continual learning, within partial information environments.
“EVE is not a game you win. It’s more like a life you live with complex social dynamics. It’s not very easy to play even for the smartest humans,” Hilmar says, adding that he thinks any agent playing it as well as the best human players could be considered to have passed a test defining artificial general intelligence (AGI).
But it’s in shaping the behavior and alignment of agents that he thinks EVE has real potential.
“EVE is probably the best approximation to test and train agent properties in the broad topic of alignment other than doing it in the real world, which we’re now seeing is not a great concept,” he says.
He also argues that, contrary to its reputation and the occasional headline, EVE rewards trust and honesty over the long term. Those qualities emerge from players’ dependence on one another, rather than an explicit morality system programmed by its developers.
“One way of thinking about it is that agents need to develop a sense of morality,” he says. He also sees the game as a way to test agents’ resistance to manipulation by humans.
So far, so highfalutin. What about EVE Frontier?
For it is where these deep thoughts about AI agents become game design.
As with all persistent online games, the gray market in currency, items and accounts has been a key issue for EVE Online. Real-money trading will remain prohibited under its EULA, with penalties for violations.
As a blockchain-enabled game, however, it’s all change for EVE Frontier, which will have an economic system enabling players (and agents) to buy and sell in-game assets for real-world value.
This will come with its own set of issues, but allowing players to do something many of them have been doing for years is one goal. Equally importantly, it has enabled designers to embed these real-world costs into the fabric of the EVE Frontier universe and link them back into its wider economy.
So while EVE Online allows players to run multiple accounts simultaneously, at the cost of an Omega subscription for each (nominally $20 a month), in EVE Frontier, every action consumes fuel. This is a resource created in-game, with more advanced ships requiring more complex fuels.
“There has to be boundaries to agency. If people can multiply themselves endlessly, with no cost to them, then obviously they would run amok,” Hilmar explains, also highlighting the risk that agents enable sybil attacks on a new scale.
In this way, he believes, fuel will provide an appropriate cost to make gaming skills and alliance-building more important than simply multiplying accounts.
Of course, EVE Online is best known for its complex social frameworks, but, as well as this, EVE Frontier will provide a very different gameplay experience, as the fuel mechanism combines with a universe in which precise location is key.
As Hilmar explains, EVE Frontier’s combination of high-fidelity physics and data asymmetry means players will have to carefully maneuver their spaceships, potentially using local features such as asteroids or debris to shield them from environmental threats such as heat and cold, as well as various enemy types.
One nice corollary is that even highly capable and expensive AI systems struggle to match human performance in these situations, although this may change as the technology develops.
But those consequences remain some ways off. In the meantime, EVE Frontier has just started its seventh three-month test cycle, at the end of which the universe will be wiped, and a new version will be made available.
Hilmar suggests the testing process could continue for another few cycles, although he has not committed to a timetable. The eventual move from Sui testnet to mainnet will be a key milestone toward the game’s formal launch.
Only then will we see how well Fenris has distilled its learnings from EVE Online and its research with DeepMind into a game that allows AI agents to expand what players can do while remaining subject to the costs and constraints that sustain the game’s economy.
EVE Frontier is currently running a free trial. Permanent Founders Access starts from $40.