As a developer it becomes difficult to see games in the same way as gamers. The perfect example of this for me is EVE Online - the fantastically technical MMO. I’ve tried to play it many times - and like many others found it difficult to really get into; now this isn’t a criticism of the game, I guess it’s just not my play style. But what I do love is it’s technical magnificence....

Show me what you’ve got! EVE Online does something wonderful with its data, it doesn’t hide it away behind fancy graphics and menus; it puts it on display for the whole universe to see. Almost everything you see in many of EVE’s user interfaces is pulled from a database with IDs, put in a table for you to filter and analyze as you see fit. However, these IDs are not shown in the game, instead their name and description are used to identify items in a market search for example....