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Changes Through Time of the Gaming Guild
By Ravenhawk | October 25, 2006
My early days of gaming guilds took place of Battle.net with the old Starcraft and Diablo guilds. Those were different days for would-be organizers of online guilds. Creating a guild consisted merely of creating a cool acronym and plastering it on the beginning of your name. That was the easy part. Next you had to find others willing to join your cause, wear your acronym, and help your spread of chaos. Or order, depending on what you felt you were spreading.
It was both a much more simple and amazingly complicated world back then. If you wanted to be taken seriously at all, you had to throw together a website. And so within geocities and other such horrendous wysiwyg web hosts, websites popped up for all kinds of organizations. The website held a few purposes, besides listing the group’s rules, etc. The most important was listing the members. As B-net had no sort of friend list function, you had to have somewhere where you could list everyone’s names and keep in contact. Else your guild (Or clan as we called them on bnet) would be rather short lived. While bnet had clan channels which you could create, and it was standard practice to create a bot to hold the channel for you, until your guild was larger, most members wouldn’t want to hang out in the empty channel, waiting around. Once you’d established an out of game manner of contact, and had recruited yourself a nice member base, thats when the fun began. Besides having easy access to playing companions, guilds also gave access to rather fun tests of skill in the form of tournaments both within the guild and between guilds.
The real achievement of the “really good” guilds, at least the one I always strived for, was creating a group that held a sense of community and kinship between its members. They were the ones that not only were the most fun to take part in, as its members were friends as well as allies in battle, but also they were the longest living.
These days it seems there is less of a requirement to have that outside base of operations to be a gaming group. Perhaps those in the strategy realm still do so, I’ve gotten out of that genre for the most part, but those in the action/RPG genre such as Diablo represented, no longer really need it. Newer games are realizing that people like to group together. Because of this, they are implementing guild systems of their own, within the game. It allows easier tracking of members, and you no longer need the outside source just to coordinate play times. While handy for play, the in-game communication doesn’t provide the same sense of community that the out of game site building did. Perhaps is the permanence of a forum that places it above, but few other ways of internet communication are as good for creating a community. Provided your members post.
I know I’m probably crossing genres too much, comparing my early guild experience on blizzard games to my current on various mmorpgs. A closer comparison may be that to the players of Ultima Online, in its early days. Exactly when those days were, I’m actually ignorant. All I know is that my interest in online gaming was a little too late to take part in the wonders of that world. Perhaps someday I could interview someone who played back then, in comparison to the current guild world.
I would find it interesting. Whether anyone else would is a question I will leave to time.
Until next time, comrades.
Tags: MMORPGS, Games, Guilds
