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[Havohej]

"Anti-villain" is an incredibly apt description.

[Veiki]

The Veikitamo internship program and Veikitamo biomass recycling programs were both fantastic while they simultaneously lasted.

Anyway, I always thought villainy was about the creation of perspective. You know, where others might see them as evil due to their actions but where they themselves operate by their own well defined ideology/motives/beliefs/worldview, that they themselves don't see what they do as evil at all.

Most of the villainy I see in Eve though just seems more like varied forms of cries for attention.

Eh. A lot depends on what you count as "villainy"; I think most Eve characters are pretty compromised, morally-- and therefore exactly the sort of villain you're pointing to. Nearly everybody's a mass-murderer (or an arms dealer selling to mass-murderers).

I agree, and it's why most of the, "Outright," villains people try to portray come off as rather gauche to me given the setting and audience. The only reaction my characters can have to their usual one-man-corp propaganda of the deeds for attention is essentially some variation of, "Okay, cool story bro."

It's pretty obvious to me most of it is just an attempt at vaudeville-style notoriety and attention.

Given what most capsuleers do on a daily basis, they're likely already seen as a varied shade of evil from the perspective of the rest of humanity and complicit in some already immoral behaviour as a matter of course. To try and be outright evil or villainous on top of that usually reads like people trying far too hard, and pushes things into the realm of parody like they're in Spinal Tap and need to push the dial to 11 for Super Extreme Total Evil.

[Pieter Tuulinen]

You didn't in the first place.

That was all Veiki.

Des literally did do one of the interns. Ended up marrying said intern, too.

[Silver Night]

How and why I play the bad guy is largely defined (as with many things in Eve) by what I'm trying to do as a bad guy. From cheerfully piratical Khanid to Sansha propagandist to someone who simply sees the world in terms of Us/Them rather than good/evil they all have different goals, and I get different things out of RPing them.

As I think Naup mentioned, one neat thing is that it very easily creates interaction: There is a natural space for adversaries when you volunteer to play the bad guy to their good guy!

I'd also suggest that 'Bad Guy' in terms of alignment and goals is very different from 'Bad Guy' in terms of being someone people want to interact with IC (not that there can't be overlap). You can have terrible goals and do terrible things and still be welcome (if warily) in many social circles IC (and while I think some would argue that this is a flaw - people overlooking how their character would 'really' act in favor of having the RP - I think that it is reasonable to assume that given the things even nominally 'good' podders do there might be a certain insulation between actions that people take and social consequences).

Honestly, I usually have the most fun when playing a character doing things that are pretty clearly evil!