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Government Forms and the Gaming Guild
By Ravenhawk | December 11, 2007
These days it is finally being seen as important by game developers to allow players to easily form groups. This is something that has been needed since the early online games, and I’m quite glad to see finally becoming a norm. However, I have personally found an issue with the forms of governance allowed by these groups. Most games only have one form of governance: Complete Autocracy.
For many games, this isn’t a problem and it is often the most efficient in order to get a particular action done. However, when a group gets to any reasonable size, a guild leader is going to, at the very least, require delegation of authority. Most of world understands that authocratic governments don’t work. So why is it that game designers feel that it is the only form of government that gamers need?
Now, to be fair, not all games have this great flaw.
Puzzles Pirates has a couple other forms of government, however, the implemented them in such a manner that you’re being sickeningly inefficient to get anything done unless you’re autocratic or have all your members with voting rights on a very regular basis.
Dream of Mirror Online has an interesting system for it’s guilds. In order to create the group you need 5 people over level 20 and like.. 40k. The person who creates the guild is the guild chairman and the others are the elders. Elders have the ability to recruit, etc. So far it’s pretty run-of-the-mill.
However, DOMO also allows you to create smaller, sub-guilds within your main guild. Then, you can set managers for these sub-guilds, which gives them complete control over the sub-guild. This allows not only delegation of power, but the setting up of specialized sub-groups within your guild. For instance, my friend’s guild is called Radical Dreamers. Within this guild he has a subguilds for the following activities: One for teaching new players the ropes of the game, one which runs guild events, one for PVP players, One for merchanting for the guild, and one for resource farming.
While still technically autocratic, the sub-guild system allows for some delegation of power, splitting the hold from the hands of one, to the hands of a small group.
I’m still waiting for a game which finds an efficient way to implement a democratic form of government for the guilds. If I work out exactly how I would see it working, I’ll of course post it here.
Posed Question to the Readers: What do you see as the ideal form of governing a gaming group?
Tags: Game Design, MMORPGS, Autocracy, Clans, Democracy, DOMO, Dream of Mirror Online, Games, Government, Guilds, Politics, Puzzle Pirates, PVP
Topics: Game Design, MMORPGS |
December 11th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
I could see a limited democratic government working, where only some people vote, or a autocracy by majority. And I could easily see a constitutional monarchy, where the guild founders has the main power, but the people can oust him or set limits to his power. Although after typing it out, a constitutional monarchy sounds a bit hard to implement
December 11th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Hard-coded implementation is the largest issue. It’s easier, no doubt, for the players to implement these things themselves, but if there is at least something hardcoded in, it would definitely help bring structure and hold the people to their own form of government.
December 11th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Yes, instead of just trusting the people to do what’s right, much like a capitalist society trusts corporations to do the right thing, there should be a code that makes such a system necessary.
December 12th, 2007 at 11:40 am
My thoughts exactly. =)
Once I’m through with finals and all that, I’ll put some work into plotting out exactly how I would implement it and put it up in another post.
February 4th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Speaking as a member of the Swords of Villanousity, an eight year old, democratic gaming guild, I have found that democracy is more than possible in gaming terms, however it both can be clunking and slow, requiring careful prodding to keep it moving and also can require a sort of “caretaker” to do so/sort out serious messes. Unfortunately by the very nature of that, you’re still bordering on having an autocracy, seeing as your caretaker would have to have absolute power, it would just be a question of whether they exercised it or not. Creating a pure governmental form of any kind is somewhat difficult because at the end of the day, it will always revolve around who has the passwords that control the guild and thereby leaves it open to abuse, reverting to autocracy.
February 6th, 2008 at 10:44 am
First I have to say, that I found your guild to be quite interesting. I spent a bit of time carousing about on the website. I used to play WoS years back and I still play a bit of GunZ. Good choices of games.
Anyway, getting back to the topic, you’ve hit the nail on the head there. In order for a democracy to be function you have to be able to hold people accountable for it, which opens things up to abuse… The problem I continually ran into was getting people to hold the right mindset; If the members fail to see the caretaker as just that and instead look to them for normal leadership, it makes it that much more difficult for the group to hold anything democratically.
February 23rd, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Heh, thanks. We do try to keep things nice and interesting, rather than being one of those typical “multi-game guilds” who’re just WoW and another random MMORPG.
Anyway, quite right. Unless there’s a big show of things and importance stressed on it all, members’ll just take one look at it and still think it’s just a facade. Though in essence you’re using one facade to detract from another.
I think the big trick is accessibility - make your caretaker(s) fairly inaccessible to the regular member (say, only really often being able to get a hold of them via e-mail) or if they are solicited at every turn, they simply have to make a big point that the first stop for anything is the actual guild leader and that until the guild leader is first contacted, they aren’t going to do anything about it. In comparison, your guild leader should be accessible to the mass and, even if they can’t do absolutely everything, should seem as if they are as far as any member needs to go for anything.
Otherwise you end up with what we had for a while where every member would bypass the actual leader and go straight to the caretakers for anything. Okay, it’s a lot of effort to get off of the ground and will require a lot of over-elaboracy on the verge of seeming stupid, but after the first few months, members should get into the swing of it and new members will just follow suit from the older ones.