The Wild World of MMOG Guilds
I am a part of a group within my company called the Virtual Universe Community (VUC), and from time to time I lend a hand with scripting and providing feedback to our corporate virtual world development efforts. Recently, a discussion arose around social groups within Virtual Worlds, so I thought I’d do a bit of digging on the subject.
As an avid gamer myself, I have had quite a bit of exposure to the concept of Guilds. Guilds is a generic term that defines a virtual social network of individuals that come together to enhance the social aspects of the virtual world they are in. Just about every virtual world I have had exposure to has this concept built-in. In fact, the concept of Guilds has been a part of online gaming since the beginning. I can speak from first-hand experience of leading and participating in guilds during the time back in the mid 90′s when I played Meridian 59 rather extensively.
Guilds were something of a necessity since early games like M59 were Player-vs-Player only and the easiest way to survive and advance was to join a social organization so that you could watch each others backs. However, over time, as the concept of Player vs. Environment (PvE) became just as important as PvP game play, Guilds started executing Raids on in-game entities that normally were never supposed to be challenged as a way to enhance their gaming experience. Developers caught on quickly and started adding “Raid” content to challenge the more organized Guilds.
Today, Raiding is often accepted as the next challenge tier after achieving the highest level in the game. Unfortunately many game developers lose sight of the fact that often it is very difficult to bring together enough people to experience the end-game content, and many games therefore lack content that the casual player has access to.
Aside from Guilds being a means to an end with respect to MMOG’s, Guilds often display very interesting social dynamics, depending on their goals and the make up of their population. In a way, the longevity of a Guild in a Virtual World is often a point of pride to gamers, and boasting that a particular Guild that you happen to belong to has survived so many months or years is often seen as another facet of the game itself.
In the article, “The Life and Death of Online Gaming Communities: A Look at Guilds in World of Warcraft,” the authors take a very interesting look at how these social organizations are structured, why they survive or fail, and what kind of guilds are successful. If your interested in reading about it, you can
skip most of the scientific jargon and jump right to the meat of the
discussion which starts around page 7 (or page 845 if you use the
numbering at the bottom of the page).
In my experience, the best Guilds are the casual raiding guilds, but these guilds are also the hardest to maintain. The membership must be of like-mind, and generally tends to be older (often between the ages of 25-40), and this very characteristic derives from the fact that individuals at that age tend to have less free-time on their hands, but also there is a desire to do more in a shorter period of time when events do occur.
On the other hand, according to the article above, the more successful guilds tend to be the hard-core raiding guilds since they tend to be a small number of players that are all very focused on one thing: Raiding. These Guilds really could care less about any other kind of content, and they tend to be very good at functioning as a team. The organization of such Guilds are also very militaristic, and this serves them well by allowing the members to focus on their specializations and performing the strategies set out by the chain-of-command. In this fashion, they are able to achieve their goals quickly and with a sense of satisfaction.
It would be very interesting if a follow-up article were done to discern some real demographics about the people behind the avatars, but I doubt this would be possible.
Guilds are interesting, and if you’ve participated in Virtual Worlds at all (let alone MMOG’s) then you would probably find the research article amusing and perhaps even fascinating. If you haven’t had the opportunity to particpate first-hand, the article is still interesting from a psychological perspective as I’m sure it says something about the human condition and how we would interact if human physical contact is factored out.
