The current coronavirus pandemic, and the extended lockdowns faced by communities across the globe, have left a lot of people with a lot of time to play a lot of games. Some are using that time to build capitalist empires, some are replicating real-life hangouts to facilitate virtual reunions with their much-missed friends, and others are using the time to spread a little bit of human kindness, in a bid to alleviate some of the stresses of isolation, in any way they can.
One such merry band of joy bringers is the East India Company Gaming, a close-knit group of Elite Dangerous players founded on “principles of tolerance and helping others”. Its members spend their time engaging in a broad array of activities across the galaxy, but their most notable endeavour is the delivery of rare and mineable commodities to help others mitigate the arduous grind of Engineer-based ship improvements.
It’s a trading service the group (whose name makes a certain thematic sense, given its alignment to Elite’s Empire faction) has been providing in exchange for select in-game resources since 2017 – but in the spirit of giving that’s been reflected across many gaming communities during the coronavirus outbreak, it’s currently waiving that fee.
Tutorial: Trade for Rare Commodities: East India Company Gaming Watch on YouTube
“It was one of our chairpersons, Icarus Smith, who first put forward the idea,” explains Mags, one of the group’s managers, over email. “We wanted to ‘give something back’ [after] all the panic-buying and displays of utter stupidity and selfishness we were seeing… I would say we were all shocked at the baseness of it all and the lack of care for other people on display… In a very small, in-game, way we wanted to make a gesture to the Elite community, to show that not everyone is like that, some people do things because they can and want to help other people.”