OoC: Being Gunner

Savannah
Georgia - U.S.A

Gunner Stahl undocked his very first Ibis on November 10, 2004. 

While I had created a great many characters during the beta test and to this day still have a hisec alt that predates him, he was my first real character. The first "okay, I know what I'm doing now" toon.

I didn't know what I was doing. I had no clue that over a decade later I'd still be making skill plans and setting goals in some old online game for a character that I'd jokingly named after a minor villain from a mediocre Emilio Estevez movie. Yet here I am, ten plus years on, checking corp mails during the work day, staying on top of alliance activity via the killboards, shooting off a quick text to a fellow director about buying POS fuel before the weekly jump freighter op and tweaking ship fittings on my lunch break. Then I go home and play the game.

My Icelandic hockey hooligan space captain became a hobby. He's been on a thousand adventures with hundreds of corpmates over the years. He's been a miner, a hauler, a mission runner, a recruiter, a builder, a beggar, a pirate, an explorer, a mercenary, a lone wolf and a CEO. From carebear to carnage incarnate and everything in between. At this point, Gunner has a life; He has a story, and it continues every time I log him on.

In January of this year I undertook a brief stint with Signal Cartel, New Eden's "best darn exploration corporation" (an apt description, I highly recommend joining or setting to blue). I was hungry for something different, and the idea of turning a traditionally solo occupation into a more social experience was intriguing. Even their passive credo leads to some interesting theorycrafting and gameplay. It was a fantastic experience, and in having to look at the game in a different way than I ever had before I found the motivation to start putting together a story from what I was doing at the time.

The log was an idea I had some time ago; to write about what I did in the game that day from the perspective of the character doing it. I may have my reasons for doing things, but how does Gunner feel about it? He lives in this fantastic world, a political and economic machine constantly in motion, a small piece of it all-- and while I have my own excuses for blapping an ihub or watching a particular gate for hours on end, Gunner's motivations have little to do with game mechanics and dev blogs. It's all very real to him, and from that point of view a Sunday night bait POS bash in the name of 'content' turns into the high drama of one man doing his part to support his fleet and get them home safe. The simple act of refitting and renaming a ship becomes a somber moment of reflection on what it means to be a capsuleer and the psychological baggage that comes with such. Most of all, I think it helps impart some soul into the avatar.

The entries themselves are organic, much like the game. I don't log in thinking "I'm going to do something today and write about it" because it isn't something I can force. I takes a special combination of events and involved parties to advance Gunner's story, and that is not at all a predictable thing. An evening of ratting capped off with a random blackops scout kill isn't something I think Gunner would write about at the end of the day. But as it turned out, getting bored one afternoon and deciding to poke at the Drifters next door played nicely on his obsession with the ongoing mystery, something I feel he would want to record his thoughts on. 

I like to think of Gunner Stahl as a real character. He has his own motivations, his own worries, his own goals. With the exception of the last one, they differ greatly from my own. And I believe that it is in my treatment of him as less an in-game version of myself and more a protagonist in a book not guaranteed to have a happy ending that really makes me look forward to each and every undock. 

Because if there's one thing you can count on in New Eden, it's never knowing what will happen next.

This is Joseph Sherman, author of the Capsuleer's Logbook, signing off.

END TRANSMISSION