New Eyes

I recently tweeted a picture of my twin seven year old sons, S and L, playing EVE together.

My son S is a true geek at heart. He loves Star Wars, space ships, minecraft, computers, tablets, etc with an enthusiasm that is one part adorable and one part infuriating. "Yes, son, I know you wish X-Wings were real, you've told me a thousand times!"

He's been wishing he could play EVE for a while but I've told him no on account of needing a lot of ability to read the menu commands at the very least. But this year in grade 2 he and his brother have become very proficient readers and I decided to let him take the plunge. His twin, L, of course wanted in on the action as well. So with my close supervision, I helped them make some test characters on free trial accounts until letting them make more permanent characters on a couple of my accounts. Their favourite part of character creation was making the butts jiggle... they are 7 after all.

Soon they were in game and killing rats and looting wrecks ("Is this thing rare, dad!?" and "Can I use this dad?!"), mining asteroids ("Look at all the ore I got! I'm going to reprocess it for lots of tritanium and then sell 59 of it!" followed by "Oh yeah? I'm selling two nocxium and I'll get more money because its more rare!"), and buying new ships after I gave them a little seed money, L went with the trusty Punisher while S decided to mine all the things with a new Venture. Look out mineral cartels.

L, aka Julia Cak

S, aka Rose Alina

S planning his future conquests

Its been quite the ride guiding them through the experience of learning EVE and appreciating some things (god, it does look beautiful) and still frustrated by some things (like the map, even the Beta one, still so unintuitive). Their joy is infectious however, and makes me appreciate the game again.

I plan to keep them on my accounts and make use of the plex-for-second-skill-queue feature for one child, while simply stopping training on my alt for the other child as I don't need that alt to get anything more at the moment.

If you are in the Chaven area in Domain, wave at Julia Cak or Rose Alina if you see them, they are probably mining or ratting and having fun.