Believable Narrative

In the home country of Mercedes and Porsche Baden-Würtemberg there was always the believe that everything the CDU was doing in the government was good and rightful. One of the richest parts of Germany always voted for stability to keep supporting industry since the end of World War II. Some said that there were black wallets, shady deals with public money and nepotism within the conservative government. There were also rumors about brutal policemen, but only against those young militants that were against nuclear power or other well-accepted projects, that one day may benefit the average Swabian. Since everything was running fine there was no reason to investigate those rumours even from the press.

One of these projects was a complete rebuilding of Stuttgart’s railhead called S21. Over 10 years this was planned and all public concerns were ignored. A rather small group protested against it as an old 250 year old park in the center of the city had to be removed. On the day of the tree felling work the companies were concerned about militant environmentalist and requested a large police force to remove any protesters. At the beginning around 50 protesters were cornered by several hundred armed policemen. A group of underage students, unrelated to the protest, came in range of the water cannon vehicles. Civilians that wanted to protect those kids from the pepper/ water mix were harmed as well. The police forces made no differentiation between protestors, students, pensioner, worker, academic or manager.

The most brutal police action in the last decade was an eyeopener for a large amount of people throughout the world in Baden-Würtemberg. People started to ask questions and query the authorities. The press started to investigate all those rumours. Under every rock they turned they just found another rumour which turned out to be the truth. For weeks and months there was no other topic in the newspapers and on TV. In the end during the following elections the old 50-year running conservative government was voted out. A glitch in the matrix led to a full collapse.

EVE is full of those events as well. A little bit of drama here, a raging CEO there. Back in 2010 when -A- was led by Manfred Sideous I heard plenty of rumors about what -A- was doing to bolster personal wallets and how they treated their pets. As leader of U’K, I never had any reason to believe those rumors as -A- diplomats and FC treated U’K well – we always offered content when they had downtime. A few days after Manny left -A- I was contacted by the new leader and after a short five minute talk I was shocked. I literally witnessed that at least one rumor was true and I could not believe it. I started looking around and asking questions, only finding answers that I did not like. Finally, I ended the long relationship between U’K and -A- as parts of the new ‘agreement’ violated EVE’s EULA.

Your EVE group will always share a common story, a believable narrative in which boundaries your mind will deny other entities’s stories. A three-man Tusker gatecamp that forces out the 200 pilots strong Stay Frosty corp, Mitten’s propaganda about deadzoning a N3 staging system, Shadoo’s smug posts about how not to headshot and random alliance’s morale evemails – they all have one thing in common: in their peer group every story is believable as long as it follows the groups’ narrative. One question remains though: is this narrative based on any facts? The larger the peer group, the larger the resistance to overcome the storyline by the leadership, as the number of actual witnesses of a story is normally very small. Alternatively, stories can be told that never happened. But even old and strong narratives can be broken: you just need to find the right crack in the armour.