This is the fascinating start of an amazing trend -- happenings in massive alternate realities are becoming newsworthy in their own right (because the complexity, scale, realism, immersiveness, and mass-participation of these simulations). RPO is well on its way to becoming real.
What start? I've been reading these crazy stories about EVE Online since at least 2006. And before that there was interesting stuff happening in Ultima Online, e.g. the assassination of Lord British.
But so far Eve Online is the only game delivering this. All other games are IMHO too much dedicated to be a game, to support such trends, or simply not successful enough.
Maybe Star Citizen will one day become a second one?
I like to think about Eve vs. other MMOs as in Eve is an unsupervised sandbox without any adults where all the kids from neighborhood come to play and other MMOs are more like going to a theme park with your parents.
It's amazing how much time and effort some people are willing to spend on make-believe. At least in pro sports and entertainment there's big money on the line.
(Don't get me wrong. I admire cleverness, devotion, and capacity to organize. And this event demonstrates all three on the part of those who made it happen. But you'd think they could turn these skills toward more useful ends.)
A lot of milennials are eschewing running the rat race working 9-5 jobs to be in debt, rent, and not own anything their entire life for gaming. Once inequality reaches a certain point, everyone either checks out or revolts.
I don’t know that it’s the start, supposedly reputable news sources such as the BBC have been reporting on what happened on Twitter as if it was news for years
