Tranquility. I’ve always puzzled at the name of EVE Online’s single server. It’s an ironic moniker to lend to a world where hundreds of thousands of players jockey for resources, scheme, spy, and blow each other up. On that one server, wars wage in perpetuity. Scammers ply their trade outside crowded space stations. Fortunes are made and lost amid the bustle of a full-fledged economy. None of it feels particularly tranquil.

And yet, Carl Sagan once noted that from space, Earth–for all its chaos–is nothing but a pale blue dot. So it goes with EVE: step far enough back from CCP’s sci-fi massively multiplayer online game, and a picture of tranquility begins to emerge. Ten years of steady growth. The recent release of a 20th free expansion, Rubicon. Throughout all, consistency of vi…