EVE Online's universe consists of 350,000 active subscribers piloting customizable space craft around 7,500 solar systems. Putting that many people in space with lasers might sound like an open horizon to awesome, but the players who hang out there created a fully functional free market economy that ends up feeling more like space accountancy. The ad may look like this ...

... but it doesn't tell you that you have to pay for those lasers. To do that, a lot of game play involves your screen looking more like this ...

As with the real-world economy, making a profit in the world of EVE Online is easier if you form corporations. While many spend years working together for mutual gain, others behave a lot like corporations do in the real world. Or at least how they would if they operated in a universe where murder is legal.

For instance, the Guiding Hand Social Club assassinates people for profit and steals their stuff for bonuses. In one instance, they were hired to destroy "Mirial," the CEO of Ubiqua Seraph corporation. While many EVE Online players literally grind rocks for hours to make a profit, the GHSC use the assignment to show everyone what Ocean's Eleven would have been like if it took place in the Star Wars universe. No one has had so much more fun than everyone else playing a game since Michael Jackson suggested Junior Twister.

First, they got jobs with the target corporation and worked their way up the ranks. The primary assassin became second in command of the entire firm because the background checks for imaginary space pilots aren't very good.

Then, after a year of real-time play, they struck harder than Keyser Soze in that one flashback scene where he's played by Fabio. They killed Mirial, emptied the corp's accounts and hangars, stole everything that wasn't bolted down and blew up everything that was, then killed Mirial again because EVE is specifically programmed to let you kill people twice. The first time gives you all the XP and valuable wreckage, but allows the murdered player to escape in a pod. The second does nothing but shout, "Screw You!" with murder (which is admittedly the best way to do that).

Mirial was in a Navy Apocalypse at the time, which is basically EVE Online's equivalent of the Death Star.

They scooped up the virtually vacuum-frozen corpse for delivery to a client who had paid the equivalent of 500 real dollars for the hit. Which pales next to the $16,500 (again, real-world money) worth of items destroyed or stolen in the raid. Also, holy shit, people are paying to assassinate hated video game characters now.

In 2005, Blizzard added a new boss with a hit-point draining spell that effected anyone standing directly next to him. Since stepping to the boss meant you were probably about to die anyway, they saw no harm in making the spell contagious. The only explanation is that Blizzard had never been on the Internet, and therefore had no clue that basic humanity transforms from "Don't share this poop-filled video with anyone because it's horrible" to "THIS IS ABSOLUTELY HORRIFIC I MUST SHARE IT WITH AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE!" Players soon worked out how to teleport the plague out of the dungeon and into the real (fake) world. An MMORPG pandemic was born.

The hit-points it took away were enough to instantly-kill low level players, so high-level players immediately started teleporting around the map as much as possible. Because if there's one thing World of Warcraft players hate more than people who don't play, it's people who do play but not as much as them. The Breakfast Hen has more respect for its young than online gaming culture, and it's an imaginary bird which lays eggs directly onto a frying pan.

The plague killed new players, old players; it even infected non-player characters who couldn't get sick but acted as carriers -- so talking to an innkeeper about killing 10 wolves could infect and kill you. But after your 20th "Lo, noble warrior, kill exactly 10 pests for me like an OCD Orkin man," that was probably a relief.

It was also revealing: In a game where people can be heroic knights or masterful mages, many leaped at the chance to become Terrorist Tyhpoid Mary. A small Taliban like force of plague-carriers actively fought Blizzard while hiding in the mountains, breaking quarantines and even incubating the plague through server-purges by infecting their own virtual pets then re-infecting themselves. They forced Blizzard into hard server resets, nuking and reinstalling their entire world. It was douchebaggery on measurable scientific and national security scales: Real-life scientists and bioterrorism experts now study it as a case example. Presumably before drinking themselves into unconsciousness when they realize they're protecting a species that commits bio-terror in order to destroy worlds they hang out in for fun.

It forced the three top guilds to co-operate, which makes herding cats look easier than getting Bollywood extras to move in step. It was Sesame Street by way of Lord of the Rings, specifically the end of the third movie, since for over three hours, 180 players turned themselves into a Sisyphean Zerg horde. Resurrecting each other faster than the monster could kill them, they put in Herculean feats of teamwork that cruelly mocked the concept of "fun." They fought like warrior poets, they fought like Scotsmen and eventually ground the boss down to 22 percent health -- at which point Sony turned the whole thing off and acted like it was the players' fault. So if you're wondering how they can keep the PlayStation Network off for a week and act like that's fine, it's because they've been practicing.

They took their ball and went home, where their ball was a giant harbinger of doom and the focus of the entire game.

Showing less regard for their users than an Iron Maiden, they released a rubbish (and later disproven) excuse about how Kerafyrm's programming had been distracted by an NPC -- and you'll notice how even their own excuse is based on their incompetence -- before simply apologizing and resetting the entire event, telling players to try again. It was like Lucy tricking Charlie Brown if Lucy was making millions of dollars making Charlie Brown miss, and if it took three man-weeks to run up to the football.

Proving that the only reason the Internet still exists is because it's not possible to kill other people through computer screens, most people familiar with WoW culture sort of shrugged, and said, "Yeah, they sort of had it coming." The targets were holding their funeral on a PvP (Player-versus-Player) server. The victims could have mourned their friend somewhere besides the middle of the battle field, but instead, they mourned a real tragedy to demand special treatment. This was the closest the Internet gets to real war after all, and you don't see soldiers mourning their dead in the middle of the battle field.

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Actually, it turns out real-world soldiers even show more respect for the dead than WoW players. Yes, it was stupid of them to give out their location and advise people they wouldn't be ready to fight without first getting confirmation that everyone was on board with the ceasefire. Yes, they should have known that relying on mutual respect online is like relying on body armor made of beefsteak in a lion enclosure. But if the German and British soldiers managed to hold off on avenging real deaths for an entire week during WWI, we have a tough time siding with the guys who couldn't hold off for an hour in a fake online world.

Roving gangs of high-level players exterminated noobs the instant they arrived. It was the Jurassic Park of griefers, except velociraptors were more welcoming because their little hands can't type "FAG" on a keyboard. They used glitches to duplicate items and wrecked the game's economy, showing more hatred for newly arrived citizens and blatant disregard for financial logic than the Tea Party's right wing.

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When Mr. Garriot visited the cyberworld of violent murderers he'd created, it was a Dr. Moreauvian plan that yielded predictable results. First, his highly publicized appearance attracted every player in the game to one location, crashing the beta servers. The game was forced to turn off the automatic sentries dispatched to protect him. When Garriot logged back in he forgot to re-enable his invincibility option. User "Rainz" stole a fire field scroll (only possible because the guards were gone) and tried to come at the king. The attack was so randomly suicidal (Rainz had no idea the invincibility was gone) that Garriot's asbestos player-guards were already mocking the assassin over text chat, wondering how the assassin thought, "such a petty spell" could work on the invincible king -- seen right next to that text engulfed in flames.

When their king suddenly burned to death they reacted about as rationally as a combined "video gamer who's been proven wrong" and a "high-level warlock with access to demons" would by summoning hordes of monsters and massacring everyone at the castle. Without guards, the players were able to fight back, triggering a full-scale virtual riot which ended with admins teleporting entire groups of players into space, where the players survived approximately as well as real people from the Middle Ages would have survived in space.

So at least it was a successful beta test -- Garriott wanted to find out what MMORPG players were like, and they killed him just to see if they could.

Second Life is a complete virtual environment that compliments reality by helping people who are no good at the real world voluntarily remove themselves. One of the biggest figures in this world is millionaire Anshe Chung. Real-world teacher Ailin Graef created Anshe as a Second Life avatar, but as the avatar's virtual business grew she took "Anshe" as a real name and had to start acting like her in interviews. She's basically a William Gibson character escaped into a real (fake) world.

In an adorable misunderstanding of technology, CNET attempted to film a "live" interview in the virtual world, forgetting that the real studio audiences only behave because security can flatten them, and Second Life isn't TRON so that's not an option here. The interview had barely started when Anshe was bombarded with an army of flying disembodied penises.

Unfortunately, TV networks believe their own rubbish about being able to fight hackers in real time instead of just switching the system off and cursing, so she was left at the mercy of armies of cyber-cocks. She teleported out to escape what was rapidly becoming a Japanese cartoon, then revealed that she doesn't know how virtual worlds work either. Deciding not to return to the now secure CNET studio, she invited everyone into her own home server instead. There are men hopping back into minefields on one leg with better pattern recognition than that. The cockbardment immediately resumed with mind-bending meta-porn of her virtual body attacked by pictures of her real body photoshopped to hold a fake penis.

The horrible cock-mobile mindlessly pressing against fake women brought down her entire server, generated a lot of publicity for the event and gave TV executives the idea for Jersey Shore.

Player "Cally" won at EVE Online despite it being a massively multiplayer game with no victory condition. Other players earn ISK (game currency) by mining, completing quests or killing each other. Cally, on the other hand, simply asked for it. And it worked, and there was nothing they could do about it. Because while the other losers went into the economy as honest workers, or corporations, he realized he could go in as a bank.

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He spent months running the "EVE Intergalactic Bank (EIB)." This offered loans for start-up EVE corporations and miners who wanted to buy tools, with interest rates and repayment plans and yes, we're still talking about a game people apparently play for fun.

Cally certainly had fun: He fulfilled the secret fantasy of every bank manager in history, when one day, he walked in and just took all the money. All the money was 790 billion ISK, about $170,000 in real dollars, which he used to become the greatest video game villain of all time. He spent a huge chunk of the money to buy a ridiculously powerful warship, another chunk posting a huge bounty on his own head, then sailed off into space just daring people to kill him.

The ultimate dickery? He posted a 15-minute video bragging about how he got away with it, mocking his loyal employees at EIB, enemies who failed to stop him and the suckers who basically paid for a second job -- essentially paying for the right to have their money stolen. Understand: Cally is now officially smarter than every Bond villain put together, because he found a way to give an expository monologue without getting killed.

For more from Luke, see The 7 Most Elaborate Dick Moves in Online Gaming History and The 6 Most Spectacular Dick Moves in Online Gaming History.

Luke also tumbles and writes on his own site. If you like videogame shenanigans, you should check out Umbrella: The Most Wasteful Movie Corporation Ever and 7 games that gave you the best weapon right away.