Up in Reykjavik, Iceland, nine players of Eve Online, created by the Icelandic company CCP, met under rather unusual circumstances, as reported in the NY Times.

The company wanted to solicit opinion from its customers/players, the real people behind the role-playing avatars. So, it put a call out for people to vote nine representatives to the Council of Stellar Management - essentially, a well-conceived focus group - and flew them out on the company dime to Iceland. The Council prepared for this precedent-setting meeting by soliciting opinion from their in-game counterparts as to what improvements needed to be made to Eve Online and to report on the major concerns of players.

Sound far-fetched? Picking the reps turned out to be quite an exercise in democracy, according to an interview in the article. Says the Times:

“There have been a whole lot of aspects that were very much like real life in terms of the electioneering process,” said the committee’s chairman and leading vote-winner, Andrew Cruse, a 39-year-old technical writer from West Sussex, England, who is known in-game as the character Jade Constantine. “It was about saying you are listening to the voters’ concerns, being able to make presentations, managing and balancing various interest groups and presenting your ideas in an imaginative, attractive package.”

The article also cites the significant differences between American and European attitudes towards the council, which is also interesting because it pointed to the Western slant of the 200,000-odd players of Eve. But the nine reps (jokingly referred to as the ‘chieftains of the Internet’) came from all corners of the politically complex game, which made for interesting RL interactions.

In the end, according to the article, it seemed the meeting might pay off for the players, and CCP is planning to meet with the Council every six months:

More broadly, however, what seemed most surprising was how seriously the deliberations were taken by both the players and the company. While in some cases CCP explained that changes in game systems were simply impossible, in others the company seemed willing to carry out the players’ suggestions.