Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games have leaped in popularity since the days of Everquest. What was once a very hardcore niche of gaming is now a very accessible, sometimes freely, and an open gaming environment. World of Warcraft in particular has gone to many lengths to make the game fun and easy such that almost anyone can play and reach the highest level in a relatively short amount of time. Within the game, players are free to form what are known as guilds, a collective of players that have their own chat channel (accessible by typing /g), tabard, name, and soon, banking space, among other benefits. I have played the game lightly over the course of a few years now and have been in numerous guilds. For the purposes of this assignment I will focus on my current guild and use it for my social network analysis.
It is interesting to consider whether this collective of video game players can be considered a community, or Gemeinschaft, as found in the Haythornwaite article or more pessimistically a society or pseudo community; a Gesellschaft. It is not only interesting, but important to analyze as it can help make clear whether or not it is healthy to spend time in a game as opposed to interacting with people in real life. This has been a hotly debated topic following numerous news articles of people devoting very large amounts of time to these “games”. SNA can help to determine what a guild really is by looking at what ties people together; the social networks within the guild, it's common ground, and its reciprocity.
A guild is made up of members (the actors) who can only be invited by a high standing member of the guild such as the leader or an officer. The actors are, by default, lightly tied together by the guild name. It is displayed prominently over a character for all others in the game to see. From their further ties are found such as being friends in real life with other members. Over time, however, many members of the guild eventually develop stronger ties as interaction frequency is quite high (for some people it is daily for hours). For others, such as myself, who rarely log on, these guild ties remain weak as my existence is not as noted due to my little interaction with the community. This is a direct function of the CMC nature of the guild. Since I do not exist in the game unless I am actively there, interaction frequency and time period are the primary bases to strengthening ties, unlike say a neighbour who would see me every day, whether planned or not.
Common ground also effects the community and is usually the driving force to creating guilds in the first place. There are many challenges in the game that require the effort of multiple people and thus this shared goal is more easily accomplished when one has a community to access. In addition, some people find common ground in being a very casual, laid back, and fun guild focused on socializing with a group of decent similarly minded people (this is usually handled by the application process to the guild). Finally within the guild we also have people closely located; not necessarily living together, but all come from Australia for example. These shared goals and focus, and common ground strengthen and enhance ties aside from the physical co-location or interaction frequency.
Finally reciprocity is very prevalent in my guild. Many times higher level players will help lower level players with quests or explain a dungeon to a new player, sometimes even going so far as to help pay in gold (the currency of the game) for items such as mounts or powerful equipment. Oftentimes people simply ask for help and many are quick to respond.
Through this analysis it seems very clear to label a guild as a community or Gemeinschaft. The guild consists of actors with strong ties, due to high interaction frequency over some set period of time with shared concerns and goals, where the actors help each other in accomplishing those goals and simply having a good time. It is important however to take a step back. My guild seems to be ideal to label a community however other guilds may not necessarily follow this pattern. Some guilds are formed by very powerful players for the sole reason of defeating the most difficult content, but not to socialize. Others devote unimaginable amounts of time to the game in order to accomplish specific goals in an almost machine like manner. While my guild could be labeled a community it is important to realize that the analysis was done on my individual guild. It would be worrisome to extend the community classification of guilds in general without a much broader analysis of many more guilds.
2 comments:
I think your discussion of MMO guilds in the context of social networks was a very interesting and relevant one. I expect topics like yours to become much more prevalent in the research of coming years, as MMO’s are now immensely popular both at home and abroad; a few days ago, I remember reading a headline somewhere that said there are now more active WOW players in the US than farmers. What I think separates guilds from other online communities and makes them very interesting is, as you point out, the virtual resource sharing of both money (gold) and items, which is an aspect of physically tangible communities, but not most CMC ones. Another parallel seems to be synchronous events, such as the funeral/massacre discussed by Professor Hancock in class, and more generally the teaming up of guild members to accomplish common tasks or just to help out one another.
"Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games have leaped in popularity since the days of Everquest."
I believe you misspelled Ultima Online. That being said, do you feel that WoW has been dumbed down at all since the earlier games, such as UO, EQ, AC, etc? The last time I played an MMORPG was 9 years ago, with UO, so I don't really understand why they are so much more popular now than they were before. Do you think that the game creators are better at creating a sense of community now than they were back then, and that this could be part of the reason why so many more people play for excessive hours? If this is true, what exactly is different about how they are creating communities today than what they were doing a decade ago? To me when I look at WoW compared to it's predecessors, it looks exactly the same, so I don't really understand what I am missing.
Post a Comment