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 | 7 Comments »
Registering Trademarks for Guild Names?
By Ravenhawk | April 29, 2007
I was hopping about the internet as I worked on my gaming group’s website when I discovered This article
Basically, this guild named The Syndicate who’s been playing for a little over ten years (started on UO now play WoW) got a trademark on their name and claims because of this that no other gaming groups can use the word “Syndicate” in their name.
My first reaction to the beginning of the article was excitement. It sounds cool, right? Getting a trademark on your name makes you sound so much more “professional.” The bullying of other groups though, especially over such a generic and completely uncreative name, is just sad though. My curiosity was sparked, and I went to investigate the website of this “Syndicate”
What I found was probably THE most stuck up egotistical gaming group website I’ve ever been to. And that is saying something, considering how full of themselves a lot of Guild Masters tend to be in autocratic guilds. Now, I admit of course that by size their guild is impressive. And the whole convention thing is pretty awesome, but if you read the website just about every page says the same three things over and over. “We are a community not a gaming guild!” “We have lots of game developers in our guild!” “We beta!”
All I’d like to say is; Please stop laying it on so thick?
It might just be because I heard the song yesterday as the DJ before me on the radio finished up with it on their show. But I was greatly reminded of Gaston from Beauty and Beast. Way to have a disney ego.
To come back from the tanget: I see nothing wrong with getting a trademark on a name, but you have to be intelligent enough to remember that your trademark does not apply to dictionary words. Trying to say you control the word Syndicate is like trying to copyright the word “Clan” and saying no other gaming groups can use it.
Tags: MMORPGS, Games, Guilds, The Syndicate, Trademarks
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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
Topics: MMORPGS, Games | No Comments »