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Private clubs or public parks

May 22nd, 2006 (Visited 4868 times) Tags:

I was reading this article about aSmallWorld, the country-club-like social networking service, and it sparked some thoughts about exclusivity.

An environment like aSmallWorld is a a private club, but not one like most of the other social networking services, which use exclusivity mostly as a way to seem cool but in fact want to invite in as many folks as possible. No, in aSmallWorld, they mean it when they say they don’t want you as a member. It’s populated by celebrities and the rich.

There aren’t any MMOs like this, but there sure are ones that are private. Exclusivity comes in many flavors.

Of course, the idea of a country club social networking system carries with it all sorts of stigmas. It conjures up classism, and in fact one nickname for aSmallWorld is “Snobster.” When your members say things like this, it’s hard to avoid that characterization:

“If I’m trying to find someone to look after my purebred Samoyeds while I’m in St. Tropez, I’m not going to ask some naked Burning Man hula-hooper on Tribe.net.”

No doubt part of the reason this rankles is because the Internet seems like such a democratizing force; after all, even Joi Ito’s World of Warcraft guild has been termed “the new golf” despite the fact that it includes people from all walks of life. The stories we prefer to toss around involve stuff like Robin Williams playing MMOs incognito, Freddie Prinze Jr buying a character, and that sort of thing.

And yet, we see uberguilds quite cheerfully choosing a different sort of elitism, requiring people to fill out applications in order to join. After all, very high level raiding is basically a team sport, so it’s completely unsurprising that those who take it very seriously want only the best “athletes” on their team. Reading over the requirements is kinda like reading the list of gear someone needs to own in order to come on a challenging rock climbing expedition or something. Is this very different from the elitism practiced by the aSmallWorlders?

It is important to note that we are a raiding guild so you must be ready to leave an experience group anytime a raid is announced. Hiding with anonymous will not be tolerated. The guild is not responsible for helping you get your epic or complete any other quests, although we do this at times if there is no raid planned.

Please note date and mob of raids you attend, for the rare case you are forgotten on the raid logs. If you have friends or rl friends in guild tell us.

Timezone: CJ is a European guild so you need to know most of the guild activity will be between 7pm CET (1pm EST) to around midnight CET (6pm EST). Be sure your online times match these times.

Attitude: We ask full loyality from our members as well as from future members. So please leave your old guild before you apply to CJ. Also applying to multiple guilds simultaneously does not seem appropriate. You either want to join us with your full heart, or you can stay away.

One last general requirement is the ability to listen to criticism and learn from it. We will help you learn to play to be an effective member of CJ…

Application Requirements
Gear: This is not a huge issue normally. Having shown effort in trying to get better gearwise is a plus though as it shows interest in progressing yourself. You need some form of permanent Enduring Breath, See invisible and Invisibility items. You also need a rightclick buff item that works in both indoor and outdoor zones .

Flags: At the end of your application period, you must have Tipt flag for KT flag to be considered for guilding.

Expansions: You must own all current EQ expansions.

Level and AAs: You need the requirements listed below for each class. If you are not required to be lvl 70 and you are not lvl 70 must gain one level during the application time. If you are level 70 must get atleast 4 AAs during app time plus you must have any requirements in AA abilities listed with your class [on the website].”

A huge driver in modern MMORPG culture is “playing with the people you already know,” which is another form of exclusionary thinking. As we have seen the concept of guild mobility from game to game flower, we’ve also seen the rise of heavily self-referential cultures that carry with them the vestiges of past games, and which are largely centered around maintaining a given group’s social identity. Is this very different from the notion that jetsetting rich folks would like to hang around with the friends they’ve made at their parties in St. Tropez?

And then, of course, there’s the environments that are heavily targeted. We’re seeing battles over inclusion and exclusion in mySpace that are fundamentally over moral ownership of the space: does mySpace belong to the kids, who will naturally use it for things like making fun of teachers, or does it belong to everyone, in which case the kids are at risk and the space needs to be more tightly policed?

One of the most interesting virtual world designs I’ve ever seen was Castle Infinity, designed for kids. It made a point of nifty little exclusion tactics: there were levels you could not go into, but that you could see other players entering and leaving — it made you want to advance and get in there. It’s the old velvet rope effect.

We’ve seen similar effects in virtual worlds for a long time. I remember working carefully over a profile for a character I intended to play on Armageddon, a game that enforced roleplay very strictly despite being a DIKU. If you didn’t craft your character carefully, enough, you weren’t allowed in.

Only one living character per player is allowed at a time. If you attempt to circumvent this rule by making multiple accounts, you will be banned for a month after the first occurrence, and banned permanently after the second.

Characters are created via the main game menu, and will be reviewed by staff members generally within 24 hours and approved or rejected. Grounds for rejection may include: lack of congruence with the game world, failure to approve connections with existing clans with the appropriate staff member, typos and grammatical errors that are at variance with the overall writing guidelines, lack of the proper keywords, insufficient background, etc.

In some ways, this is the same as an elite raiding guild, only selecting for different characteristics. Experts only need apply. Similar characteristics to the GAT City approach were also seen in entire worlds, such as the many many muds run solely for friends to hang out in.

Right now, the way world select their exclusion rules is primarily via market segmentation. In other words, we’re not really seeing the same sort of exclusion as in all the above examples. But it’s clearly something that people want. Likely, the biggest reason why we haven’t seen it is that the worlds are currently not int he players’ hands, but in the hands of businesses. As soon as that changes, we’ll instead see a zillion worlds designed to serve as private clubs rather than public parks.

Now, I’ve commented before that homogeny can be dangerous for a variety of reasons. And really, to me the fascinating thing about seeing all of these groups out there with their own special rules for who is or isn’t an appropriate member is the variety of it all.

In the real world, those folks who are in aSmallWorld are not only jetsetters who zip between Manhattan, Milan and Madrid. They are also often businesspeople, collectors of stamps, musicians, athletes, fans of science fiction, and people who occasionally maybe even clean their own toilet. Nobody can be summarized by just one label, and nobody belongs to just one group. One of the biggest failings in our current guild designs is that we only allow people to be members of one organization; similarly, one of the biggest failings in current world designs is is that we seem to expect that people be happy living in only one virtual world.

In the end, people like visiting both clubs and parks, and for different reasons. Neither metaphor is going to go away. Clubs offer comfort, and parks offer challenge. What’s unusual is monomania, which is likely why so many folks bounce off of the raiding guilds that demand so much time commitment — and off of the high level games that demand so much time commitment.

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Private clubs or public parks? on Raph Koster - MMOz wrote on May 23rd, 2006 at 6:42 am:

[...] Private clubs or public parks? on Raph Koster Private clubs or public parks? on Raph Koster Quote: [...]

Faith wrote on May 23rd, 2006 at 10:02 am:

[...] Comments [...]

RPGnet: RPGnet MegaNews Page: Online Game Blogs wrote on May 23rd, 2006 at 7:13 pm:

[...] Gaia OnlineSocial networking services are looking closely at the world of MMOs for cues, and some of the first things they pick up on is avatars. Gaia Online is one I just registered for today, to check it out. It’s very very anime. You get a big-head kawaii avatar, and you can buy clothes with gold. I [...] Games for ChangeGames for Change has opened early registration. I’m going to be in New York right at the same time, doing a panel thing for Harper’s, but I haven’t thought about going or not. Hmm. Private clubs or public parksI was reading this article about aSmallWorld, the country-club-like social networking service, and it sparked some thoughts about exclusivity. An environment like aSmallWorld is a a private club, but not one like most of the other social networking services, which use exclusivity mostly as a way to seem cool but in fact want to invite in [...] The Sunday Poem: Caledonian Creation MythI was in a mythological mood, at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. Hence the title. And yeah, it’s a poem about sex. Sorry. At least it’s sex in the cosmic, way-the-world-turns sense, the ocean-and-earth sense. Caledonian Creation Myth It begins, a courtship Like others, earth and wave Meeting on the strands And sand, a wet periphery, an Intersection. He laps [...] What I’ve read latelyRainbows End by Vernor Vinge is “a novel of the near future.” It’s also conveniently set in San Diego, in the vicinity of UCSD. It’s ostensibly about an old poet who is cured of Alzheimer’s and has to retake high school, but it’s really about the near future of security in a ubicomp world where [...] The journey is the reward is a f—–g lieThat’s my friend Bridget holding a cartoon I scribbled years ago at a MUD-Dev conference. She’s hung onto it all these years and still brings it to gatherings, even though it is getting a bit worse for wear. The caption reads, “The journey is the reward” is a fucking lie. (People would rather have the princess). You [...] The new book: A Grammar of GameplayNow that it’s on Amazon, I suppose that I need to actually write it. This is the follow-on to A Theory of Fun for Game Design, of course, and it’s called A Grammar of Gameplay: How Games Work. It’s intended as a companion, of course, but also as an amalgam of all the thoughts on game [...] Entropia Universe vs. TerraNovaOh, the drama. Uru returnsCNet has an article on how GameTap is going to bring Uru Live back. Certainly unexpected… I assumne it will have a serious impact on the Uru communities in There, for example. ( vote for this news ) [...]

MMOG Nation wrote on May 23rd, 2006 at 8:42 pm:

and Alan suggests that something slightly more complicated might be in order. I wholeheartedly agree. There was a long discussion about player trust at Raph’s site a few months ago, so I won’t open up that can of worms again, and he is evenskirting the edge of this topic today over on his site.* He ends the series of articles on a cliffhanger, with ways to make players feel a part of a community and an exploration of a ‘trust model’ still unfinished. Here

Buying golf clubs wrote on May 25th, 2006 at 2:00 am:

Original post:Private clubs or public parks by at Google Blog Search: buying golf clubs

WEIRD - General Any Topic wrote on August 9th, 2006 at 10:30 pm:

[...] A huge driver in modern MMORPG culture is “playing with the people you already know,” which is another form of exclusionary thinking. As we have seen the concept of guild mobility from game to game flower, we’ve also seen the rise of heavily self-referential cultures that carry with them the vestiges of past games, and which are largely centered around maintaining a given group’s social identity. Is this very different from the notion that jetsetting rich folks would like to hang around with the friends they’ve made at their parties in St. Tropez? Link: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/05/22…-public-parks/ __________________ [...]

Chas said on May 22nd, 2006 at 1:28 pm:

One of the biggest failings in our current guild designs is that we only allow people to be members of one organization;

Oh, how I’d love to see more multi-guild organizations possible. I imagine, many will clamor about divided loyalties and such, but the current guild entity seems so… artificial and constraining. We’ll see the guild rules of “only one guild” much like, when same-server alts became common, guilds had “no alt” rules.

similarly, one of the biggest failings in current world designs is is that we seem to expect that people be happy living in only one virtual world.

There are many ways where developers fail to support this in our design goals. Game designers are getting better at avoiding design models that assume players are always available 24/7… now they’ll have to take into account that an “average player’s” 16-24 hours online may be divided across 2-3 games and god knows how many alts.

Expectations on guilds and even player-run cities will have to adapt. SWG & EQ2 “rent” is based on real-world weekly timescale, not my time in-game, so the more casual a player is, the more cost-prohibitive these game activities become…

Not to mention the effort in developing a true sense of community bond.
If I have 3 games and 4 alts per game, played evenly, then my 24 hours of weekly play are divided into 2 hours per week per character. A SWG “metropolis” of 100 characters would seem all but abandoned most of the week if everybody’s play was similarly divided, even before inactive accounts are included.

Already in City of Heroes, the 75-character Supergroup limit and 12-character-per-server alt capability tends to make most supergroups appear abandoned- with barely enough available to make an 8-man team at peak hours. I’ve avoided using the free trial to Auto Assault simply because my time is spread thin enough as it is.

MikeRozak said on May 22nd, 2006 at 2:01 pm:

Conversely, I tend to look at WoW and ilk as McDonalds… food that’s cheap, edible, and tasteless (offensive to no-one).

I expect that many small virtual worlds (in the future) will become the equivalent of fancy (and exclusive) nuveau(sp?) cuisine restaurants… They may be by-invitation-only. They’ll have expensive monthly fees. They’ll offer high-quality service, such as high GM-to-player ratios. And their content won’t appeal to the masses.

Jim said on May 22nd, 2006 at 7:00 pm:

I’m currently putting together a game on the Multiverse platform that will include both a Guild (your professional association / class; there can be multiple Guilds for a given skillset) and a League (a more traditional player association, with no constraints aside from the standard co-opting recruitment style). These groups will also have attributes that can be collectively boosted.

We’ll see how that works out.

—

The natural metric of exclusion is accessibility.

I think that the primary difference between aSmallWorld’s style of exclusion and most uberguilds’ style of exclusion is the mobility aspect. Anyone with maybe 12 hours a week to spare for the better part of a year can develop a character that could join an uber-guild. I’ve been in uberguilds; I’ll probably never be in aSmallWorld, even if I tried.

Damien Neil said on May 22nd, 2006 at 8:03 pm:

A Tale in the Desert is a very nice example of how membership in multiple guilds can strengthen the social fabric of a game. ATITD has no limit on how many guilds a character may be a member of; correspondingly, almost all players are in at least three or four guilds, and many are in well over a dozen.

A “guild” in such a context becomes a chat channel and shared communal space. Almost all people have a “home” guild, which fills the traditional role of a MMO guild. In addition, however, there are guilds created to coordinate projects, guilds for people pursuing a particular activity, and regional guilds. There’s a guild for women, and a guild for francophones.

Compare to a game like WoW, where people regularly face the question of whether they should stay in the family guild that contains their friends, or move to a raid guild that can further their ambitions. This is an area where the traditional model is deeply limiting.

On another topic, I’m amazed that City of Heros doesn’t include more support for decoupling the player from the character. The global chat handles (added after I stopped playing) do seem to offer some support for this, but it seems very much bolted onto the side of the core game. In a game where extensive use of alts is so appealing, the social systems (guilds, chat, friends lists) should all reference players, not characters.

Jim said on May 22nd, 2006 at 8:58 pm:

Damien, what differentiates an ATITD guild from a chat channel?

Matt Mihaly said on May 22nd, 2006 at 9:49 pm:

Mike Rozak wrote:

I expect that many small virtual worlds (in the future) will become the equivalent of fancy (and exclusive) nuveau(sp?) cuisine restaurants… They may be by-invitation-only. They’ll have expensive monthly fees. They’ll offer high-quality service, such as high GM-to-player ratios. And their content won’t appeal to the masses.

In the future? You’re describing MMOs that have existed for a long time! For instance, all of those features (including the expensive monthly fees) apply to Gemstone and DragonRealms (existing since 1987 and 1996 respectively).

Of course, there are also MMOs with a subset of those features, including invitation-only and ones requiring an application before you play.

–matt

Damien Neil said on May 22nd, 2006 at 10:07 pm:

An ATITD guild has the following components:

- A chat channel.

- Visible membership status. (If you pull up someone’s info window, you can see all their guilds.)

- Permissions. Much of ATITD revolves around player-constructable buildings. Buildings may be owned by either people or guilds. Use of a building can be restricted to the owner, to members of the owning guild, or to owners of the owning guild with a certain rank. So, for example, a guild might have chests which can be accessed by any member or chests that can only be accessed by guild officers. If a group of people get together to build a very expensive building, they might construct a guild to manage access permissions for that building.

This is, I think, not so different from guilds in more traditional games. In fact, ATITD guilds have a bit more associated with them than WoW guilds–which really consist of nothing more than a list of players, a chat channel, and a visible tag. You could remove the entire guild system from WoW with few technical effects–players could still use chat channels to communicate, and could manage guild memberships offline. The social effects would be more significant, since the game-supported guild system encourages a certain social structure even where it does not demand it.

MikeRozak said on May 22nd, 2006 at 10:16 pm:

Matt Mihaly:

Sorry. I know text MUDs have beeen doing this for a long time, and failed to think when writing. I should have written “graphical MMORPG” instead of “virtual world’. Several MMORPGs probably aren’t far from this model already. Wish sounded like it was an attempt at high GM-to-player ratio since GMs were supposed to provide real-time content. ATITD certainly isn’t standard fare. Nor is second life (not that I’m saying it and WOW are the only MMORPGs out there… )

damijin said on May 22nd, 2006 at 10:18 pm:

This problem can’t be solved by allowing people to list themselves under multiple labels. Guilds exist as your primary label… I think of it in terms of your nationality in the real world. Dieter is German, Jean Pierre is French, and I am American. This doesn’t say *much* about our personalities (aside from stereotypes) exactly as a guild doesn’t. Guild’s also lend themselves well to this comparison because they are often the flags under which our virtual wars (or mere non-violent rivalries) are waged.

So… I would consider them “nations” instead of clubs.

Inside of your nation you have people with those different qualities. You have the students, husbands, travelers, rocket scientists, etc. These qualities inside of the nation will bring together tiny cliques (tiny, because the nation is not very large). Cliques tend to be just large enough to form a functioning hunting party or gank group, or something entertaining. If you cannot find a clique inside your nation, it’s time to renounce your citizenship and look for a new one.

I suppose the more interesting study, to me, is on how these cliques (similar to “clubs” I suppose) inside of nations, can tear apart and cause strain on the nation due to exclusion of other members of the nation.

(NOTE: I am a Lineage 2 player so my ideas may be crazy and off-beat to you WoW freaks.)

To Mike: I think you’re spot-on, and those games will always have a much stronger appeal in my opinion. Niche games are niche because only a certain type of people like them. If you fit in that type, you will find yourself surrounded by like-minded people, and in an environment you truly enjoy. On the downside (or maybe upside?) the emergence of niche games is great for someone who joins a new guild for every new game, but terrible for guilds who are trying to move around with the same core members. You can’t throw a WoW guild into Pirates of the Burning Sea and expect everyone to be happy. Likewise, if you form a guild in a niche game you may find it difficult to move to ANY other game (be it niche or otherwise).

Rik said on May 22nd, 2006 at 10:32 pm:

If that’s not a $64,000 question! What differentiates any guild from a chat channel? The real answer is that it’s a guild if that’s what the players think it is. In ATITD this is aided by the fact guilds can own buildings, items and land. Some guilds are more social, others more task driven. Guilds could even drift from one use to another. Most people would have a “traditional” guild, one with people you would think of as friends that you say “hi” to everyday (Or “Greetings” as the case may be) and it probably owned at least all the common buildings, more if it’s members did not have major camps of their own. You might also join an Art guild, all about helping members pass Art tests (a family of quests about building things that others thought had merit) Such a guild would probably have a gallery of artwork, and would probably be filled with chat when a new test was released, then calm down. You might join a guild that is all about building one giant buildings, like a pyramid or a oil well, the sort of project that would take 50 people 4 weeks to complete. After it’s done, people tend not to leave, the guild itself providing a reminder of a “journey completed”. These chat windows might be quiet for weeks until some topic comes up that everyone wants to talk about. (Instead of a ATITD example, let’s just say something like Blizzard banning someone for promoting their guild as gay-friendly). Conversely, when another project is needed someone might think of their old allies and bring the guild back to life. Trade guilds exist, either with a central store (in which case all trades should be with the store and not each other) or without (in which case it really is just a chat window, everyman for himself.) Because guilds can share property it’s common to see 3 people guilds, which can lead to a growing circle or guilds, the small ones cozy and fun, the larger ones brash and demanding and sometimes impersonal. This is ignoring the many inventive ideas that people had for guilds, such as all Christian, all TSO “rejects” (their word, not mine), all female, all Soccer fans, in-game dating service, the list goes on. Did I mention an all new telling starts in a few days?

Damien Neil said on May 22nd, 2006 at 10:34 pm:

CoH guilds top out at 75 characters. That’s not much of a nation, is it?

Rik said on May 22nd, 2006 at 11:00 pm:

Already in City of Heroes, the 75-character Supergroup limit and 12-character-per-server alt capability tends to make most supergroups appear abandoned- with barely enough available to make an 8-man team at peak hours

This comment reminded me how it seems that World of Warcraft guilds are designed to fail. Take 10 level 10 players, maybe they played something else, maybe RL friends, maybe they met here, probably a little bit of all of the above. They form a guild, Rockets in Pockets. All the good names are taken. Two weeks later, some are level 20 and some are level 30, easy to do there. The higher levels can help the lower levels, the lower levels are pretty much just a drain game-wise. Fun-wise they can be an important part of the comunity, and someone to say “Ding” in front of, but game wise, just a drain. The game widens, soon the highest leveled guy breaks off to join another guild, one that’s allready hit the cap of 60. Finally some of the Rockets get close to the cap, only to find out that nothing can be done in teams of 5, all the good gear takes 40 man (or at least that’s the perception) and no one does 40 man pick-up-groups. So they can either wait for the guild to grow to the size that it can do 40 man level 60 missions, or they can quit. I can allready tell you that the guild will never be able to do 40 man missions on a regular basis, it’s not that organized, does not want to boss people around in a game. Some of the few will pick that up and quit to join those raiding guilds. When they do, those that are left behind will run around like Chicken Little. The guild might shatter right there. Now that the members are either guildless or in a raid guild, let’s point out that raid guilds set up their own controls, normally thru a point system, a website, a guild forums, a list of rules 2 miles long, a teamspeak server or two, all of which let the raid guilds compete with each other, but these are tools they found or developed, not the ones Blizzard handed out. There is no incentive to stay in the guild that got you to 60, and little incentive for the large guilds to help you get to 60. The guilds that stay together do it despite the tools, not because of them.

Morgan said on May 22nd, 2006 at 11:28 pm:

The "formal association of people with similar interests" is called a guild. Synonymous terms include "club", "social club", "society", "gild", "lodge", and "order". The practice of the private association is antique, extending throughout the Hellenistic, Roman, and Egyptian worlds. I don’t think the formality, complexity, and completeness of the private association has ever been comprehensively simulated for interactive entertainment. Games feature simplified "guilds" that would be more accurately described as mere chatrooms and buddy lists.

Damien Neil said on May 22nd, 2006 at 11:32 pm:

Exactly, Rik. I’m certain that many of the people reading this blog have seen this process happen a number of times; I know I have.

Now imagine a simple change to a system which allows people to be in multiple guilds: Ten people, RL friends, start the game. They form a guild, chat with each other, tell each other DING! when they level up. Eventually some of them start hitting level 60. One of the 60s meets up with some raiders while doing instances, and gets an invite to their guild. So he joins it, while remaining in his old one. Now his RL friends get to hear about his exciting adventures in the land of raiding, and he still gets to tell his friends GRATS! when they DING!. The various social ties each player holds exist in concert, rather than pulling communities apart.

Matt Mihaly said on May 22nd, 2006 at 11:35 pm:

You guys might be interested in how our MMOs do multiple organizational memberships. I’ll use Achaea as the example as I am most familiar with it. Players can belong to:

* Great House
* City-state
* Religious Order
* Clan

City-states control territory, provide many services (like building housing subdivisions, defending the city by allocating and setting up guard patrols, regulating the commodity market, regulating and setting tax rates on shops, etc etc.). They are the most important organizations in the game, are not able to generally be created by players, have admin-set “cultural charters” (in that they are seeded as having particular ideologies, though players may later change them. The charters have remarkable cultural momentum though) and just generally are sort of your ‘nation.’ There are six of them in Achaea.

Great Houses and may be organized in various ways (dictatorships, triumverates, democracies with various options like limited terms, no repeat officeholders, etc). They are more narrowly focused in terms of culture than city-states, but they exert significant control over city-states. The three most influential Great Houses in each city-state get to appoint members to the city council (consisting of seven people), who effectively control the city through appointment of the bureacracy (Minster of War, Minister of the Treasury, that kind of thing). There are 26 or so Great Houses in Achaea.

The Orders are religious Orders, dedicated to individual Gods, roleplayed by staff members. They vary in their importance, but some have become powerful enough (like Twilight, the God of Darkness) that they spawned a McCarthy-esque movement in the city-state governments. Everyone was suspected of secretly being a “Twilighter” and thus having loyalties other than that which they publicly professed. They have a tangible presence in the game as well via the establishment of shrines, which serve as focal points for a variety of powers that affect all Order enemies simultaneously who are in a particular range of a shrine. Orders can attack each other shrines, strengthen their own, etc.

Clans are catch-all organizations that are the equivalent of what WoW calls guilds. They’re reasonably easily formed by players, don’t always last, etc. They’re used for anything from special interest groups (a chess club, etc) to sub-organizations within another type of organization (most city-states have multiple clans attached to them used for things like the leadership structure, for the players pledged to defend the city, for those helping the novices in the city, etc).

Players can belong to one Great House, one city-state, one Order, and up to 10 or 12 clans (and they can purchase extra clan slots).

Just FYI as an example of how more elaborate organizational structures might be designed.

chabuhi said on May 23rd, 2006 at 6:27 am:

Matt - I’ve played Achaea on occasion (my char keeps getting deleted because I don’t play for a long time). Anyway, I am terribly graphics-centric, I’m afraid, when it comes to games these days. I grew up playing text adventures and such, but unfortunately I have been spoiled by the Age of Eye Candy.

In any case, I found Achaea to be incredibly immersive and fun to play even though it’s entirely text-based. The execution is spectacular, imo. However, the MOST appealing element for me was(is) the different groups and affiliations and how they influence the world. Player-control has quite an impact on your playing experience.

Not to advertise your game too much here, but I think the big MMO’s could take a serious lesson from you on how community features can be successfully implemented.

Abalieno said on May 23rd, 2006 at 7:34 am:

Hmm, I don’t think the discussion can really be abstracted. It depends a lot on the functionalities of the guilds in the game, the type of game and so on.

In Eve-Online the corporations often require you to send a screenshot of your log-in page so that they can be sure you don’t have characters in rival corportations. It makes sense in a competitive game.

At the same time you can join different chat channels that can also be “themed”.

WoW instead is quite focused and I don’t see how it could benefit from multiple guilds. You have general channels to communicate with other people and create groups, as you have your guild, more or less organized, that functions to group friends or more dedicated activities like raids, loot distribution and so on. Even here there isn’t a necessity to add more complexity.

In FFXI you have the linkshells and I believe you can have multiple ones, but only one equipped at the same time.

The organization Matt describes here above is more directly dependent on the function on the gameplay. The factions in a PvP game are already on that level and we have plenty of examples even in the classic mmorpgs.

But the most important point is that using multiple guilds is pretty much useless till you don’t remove even all the other barriers between the players.

Tide (Adam MacDonald) said on May 23rd, 2006 at 8:04 am:

It’s interesting isn’t it? Strong guilds and so-called exclusive portals are really concerned with only allowing like-minded people to subscribe basically only to guarantee a certain resource (MMO Raids: time; other portals: money, or say, accreditation, or license-holders, like for rare dog breeds). It really comes back to trust — you only want members who meet a certain criteria. If they meet those requirements, you can then trust them. But IMO what these folks are really looking for is self-help. They want to guarantee like-minded members for group-think, but also for consolation, cooperation and general sympathy. If you have self-doubts about your lifestyle, whether it’s healthy or ethical or meaningful, what better way to reconcile yourself than to spend time with people with the same interests or behaviors? I’m only half-kidding. Thanks.

Morgan said on May 23rd, 2006 at 2:29 pm:

Strong guilds and so-called exclusive portals are really concerned with only allowing like-minded people to subscribe basically only to guarantee a certain resource.

Right. Early sociohistorical research classified private associations by function, which led people to believe that these functions were mutually exclusive. Recent developments in the research of private associations throughout history now focus on membership and social roles, instead of function. The "raiding guild" is a phenomenon of a restrictive set of guild features (i.e., the private rendezvous to connect with those privy a la chat rooms and buddy lists) and partly a product of new communications technology.

Abalieno said on May 23rd, 2006 at 10:19 pm:

Actually the distinctive trait of a “raiding guild” is the fact that you go in the instance roughly always with the same guys. As opposed to pick up groups.

It’s just a matter of learning the coordination and concentrate the efforts (both in players’ experience and loot focus).

So mostly to have more control and stability. And a selective accessibility to that kind of endgame content.

I think it’s still all about the function.

Cat Rambo said on May 24th, 2006 at 12:58 pm:

Woah, an Armageddon mention. I’d love to hear your impressions of the game - I recently read your book on game design and have been recommending it to the staff over there. -Cat Rambo, aka Sanvean

Raph said on May 24th, 2006 at 4:49 pm:

It’s been way way wya too long since I played it for me to comment. Last I logged in was sometime in the mid 90s maybe.

Rik said on May 24th, 2006 at 7:28 pm:

WoW instead is quite focused and I don’t see how it could benefit from multiple guilds.

I thought we covered this. A friends guild, a 40 man raid guild, a PVP guild and for some a crafting/traiding cartle would be useful.

Prokofy Neva said on June 1st, 2006 at 6:57 pm:

What I hate most about gamey games is this rigid guild structure, this highfalutin meglomaniacal intensity about being available for the group, being able to be in “self-criticism circles” (”we’ll each you how to play”), be at this high level or have that wierd gear — it’s all horridly tiresome. It’s the Dark Ages. Since the Enlightenment, we’ve throw some of that out — except the hankering for it seems to resurge every now and then.

At least Matt gives us more of a range of group experiences, you can be nominally part of some Big Tent sort of arrangement or zoom in and define yourself by micro-differences.

Raph, I’d have to reject the idea that the plurality of particularities in these groups is a substitute for an open society, and for genuine pluralism. It’s merely a micro-brewed closed society. It also seems more important for the social worlds that some relatively neutral civic open space be kept available for people to move freely in, before they are snapped up by this or that sect or this or that Prim Diva or Game God.

Raph said on June 1st, 2006 at 8:09 pm:

Prokofy, there’s a fair amount of evidence that groups that size simply don’t engage in liberal democracy even when given the tools. There have been games where guilds did not have any particular game function or level requirements or gear requirements, and players made them up anyway. There have been games where the guilds were not held to any government structure whatsoever, and players chose to be in guilds run by strongmen rather than by the rule of votes. There have been games where players were free to organize the guild powers any way they chose, and they chose oligarchies, central committees, and dictatorships.

I know, because I ran these games, and despite trying to enable democratic approaches to things, the players weren’t buying.