Clan (computer gaming)
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In computer and video gaming, a clan or guild is a group of players who regularly play together in a particular (or various different) multiplayer games. These range from groups of a few friends to 1000-person organizations, with a broad range of structures, goals and members. Numerous clans exist for nearly every online game available today, notably in first-person shooters, massively multiplayer games, role-playing games, and strategy games.
Player organizations probably emerged in the earliest networked multiplayer computer games that brought together disparate groups of players, such as players in a MUD from two rival universities. The first turn-based or RPG clans were the player guilds in the first graphical MMORPG, Neverwinter Nights, which ran on AOL from 1991 through 1997. The first real-time game clans as we recognize them today were formed in 1996, around games such as Quake, Descent, and the Netmech multiplayer expansion pack for the PC game MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat.
Starting with small groups, referring to themselves as guilds or clans, these organizations typically involved gamers playing one particular game. Around 2000, it seems that several of the larger groups formed themselves into multi-game organizations, allowing gamers to play with the same people in many different games.
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[edit] Clans by structure
[edit] Small social groups
Most gamers organize themselves into small groups of like-minded players in order to play together and socialize. Typically, these groups start suddenly, contain a handful of members, focus on a single game and have a short life span. There are literally hundreds to thousands of these clans or guilds in each online game.
[edit] Single-game groups
There are also many larger, longer-lasting groups devoted to a single game. Examples can be found in every long-lasting online game, in particular, role-playing games, which have a strong social element.
[edit] Communities
Some gamers are organized less formally in communities, which may also contain clans or guilds. Often these communities include websites generating a fair amount of news and active forums to give the members their sense of community. It is not uncommon for a community to be based on more than one game.
[edit] Online Gaming Groups
Finally, there are a number of more persistent and more organized groups that field players in a variety of games. These groups share some of the characteristics of the single-game groups and communities. These are known as Online Gaming Groups (or OGG for short).
[edit] E-Sports teams
E-Sports clans are organizations created solely for competition. They are often small in size but their size is also usually determined by how many players they need to meet numbers for competing regularly. Social interaction and friendship is often a requirement for the stability of these teams but it is not the main purpose for the organization, this means that many of these teams are short lived but those who do not fall apart due to social conflicts tend to last for a long time and stay together should they change to a newer game. E-Sports teams also often have a tendency to form larger multi-game OGGs.
[edit] Why Gamers join clans
Joining a clan places one within a social network which provides access to resources, knowledge, and help needed to accomplish many game related goals. In addition, banding together with like-minded players seems to fulfill a human desire for social interaction. Taken together, these two factors can vastly enhance the gameplay experience of many players.
Clan members often use a variety of methods to collaborate, communicate and improve their gameplay.
[edit] Internet
A website is often the central focus for publicising upcoming activities such as training sessions or official matches in leagues. It will also be used for sharing tips and tactics, jokes, and general discussion topics. This all helps people to get to know each other and build team spirit (yet conversely can also cause personality clashes).
[edit] Voice communication
Being able to talk to your team during a match and change tactics instantly gives an obvious advantage, but it is also widely used for chatting outside of competitive play. Several applications are available on free download that enable users to talk to each other via their pc microphone/headsets. TeamSpeak and Ventrilo are in common use, both require a small central server, either rented from a hosting company or hosted on someone's computer or server. Other voice chat services include Yahoo, MSN, AIM, and Google Talk. Clans tend to not use these programs because of the excessive amount of RAM that is required to run both the game and the VoIP applications. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak use less RAM, which makes it easier to run the game.
[edit] Messaging
Instant messaging by utilities such as MS Instant Messenger, or Xfire, allow gamers to write simple text messages to each other providing both have the utility and have set up an account on the system. Many games actually provide simple in-game messaging facilities. A player can send a message visible to everyone on a server, or this can be restricted to just the player's team. Such features sadly lend themselves to abuse. The less savoury or immature players use it as a method to be obnoxious or disruptive (see note below regarding spamming and trolling).
[edit] Proof of skill
Some clans only recruit skilled players and will only recruit players who they think can help their clan win matches. It is common for a prospective clan member to be asked to prove their skill in a game, by taking a series of tests against current clan members in a private server.
[edit] Teamwork
Particularly in role playing games, gamers will form guilds or clans for the sole purpose of assisting each other. These clans are primarily involved in tradeskills, with one or more members specialized in one or two tradeskills, such as mining or smithing. These clans provide their members with good weapons and armor, often at little or no cost.
[edit] Clans by game genre
[edit] Clans (Squads) in first-person shooters
These games initially only offered "deathmatch" play, where gameplay is focused solely on killing the characters of the other players. The popularity of clans and team-based versions of deathmatch led to the design of objective-based team games such as capture the flag.
Due to the relatively unorganized structure of first-person shooter games the players tend to take on the organization themselves. This has led to the genre generating a large number of websites to help organize these gaming communities as well as the vast number of different styles of clans in these games. Some clans are large and have loose associations with each other and may only play on public servers with each other for social reasons. At the other end of the spectrum other clans may prefer to keep a small, tight team of players and concentrate on playing competitively against other clans in arranged matches and possibly in leagues. While the clan itself provides the social element in larger clans, the social aspect for the smaller, more competitive clans comes more from interaction with other clans.
Competition between clans is common but also takes many forms. Some clans have been known to be content with playing against each other on public servers, while others organize matches with other clans. Notably, some take this further and take part in leagues and tournaments. A lot of the time this is purely for fun but some of these leagues and tournaments have become fiercely competitive to the extent that practice and planning will become highly organized. This kind of competition is starting to be referred to as electronic sports (e-sports), though there are many other similar terms for this. E-sports can be purely amateur over the Internet or for large cash prizes on local area networks. This kind of competition also applies to other genres, particularly strategy games.
Many clans have their own private servers to play their game of choice on. These are most handy for holding practice matches against other clans and other forms of practice. Private servers are also convenient since they do not have problems that plague public servers, such as team killers and other behavior that is the gaming equivalent of the anti-social behavior when people have anonymity over the Internet such as spamming and trolling on message boards and chat rooms. As a side note, there are even clans who set up just to perpetuate this kind of abuse.
[edit] Clans in strategy games
Most popular multiplayer strategy games such as Warcraft III and Command and Conquer series' offer a matchmaking service to find matches provided by the publisher or developer of the game. Often these services have their own structures for organising clans. Some of these services offer tournaments and ladders for clans to compete on either directly clan versus clan or indirectly by giving clan members points for winning 1v1 or 2v2 games and adding that to clan totals.
[edit] Clans in RPGs
Clans also exist in other genres, where they often go by a different name and serve a purpose more suited to the game. Many online massively multiplayer and computer role-playing games tend to call them 'guilds' or invent their own term (for example Star Wars Galaxies calls them 'player associations'). Earth: 2025, a web browser-based game, formerly called them 'alliances', but switched to 'clans' as the word increased in popularity. In EVE Online, they go by 'corporations', who in turn join up to form larger 'alliances'; in this game, however, the default structure and organization of corporations is defined in more detail by the developers of the game than is common in most MMOs. Lastly, in Final Fantasy XI, such clans are called 'linkshells' and players of the game have the tendency and ability to be in more than one at once. Some MMORPG guilds claim hundreds of members (or more), and at least one guild has obtained a registered trademark for its name.[1]
There are few guild versus guild tournaments in online RPGs, although the number of games with guild versus guild combat is increasing. Guilds usually are a cooperative planning and play group in these games, sometimes paralleling the functions of medieval guilds. In Neverwinter Nights, where the first such guilds appeared, they declared their own quests and scheduled cooperative play. Sometimes in MMORPGs, guilds take on the role of vigilante groups or the mafia, protecting its members from other players and guilds. These guilds form in the most literal sense in games that feature player versus player combat.
EverQuest led to the birth of so-called überguilds, which are highly specialized guilds formed by the most dedicated players on the server for the purpose of defeating the games most difficult encounters and securing for its members all the newest and most powerful abilities and loot. These guilds typically have regimented and selective application procedures that may take into account not only the desirability of an applicant's virtual character and playing skill but also a recruit's time commitment and even, in some cases, computer hardware and bandwidth. They typically do not share strategies or admit non-members to their adventuring groups or "raids"; High-end EverQuest guilds invariably censor the in-game chat display when posting screenshots to avoid revealing sensitive information. Uberguilds often race to be the first to accomplish some particular task in the game; in the case of new items, such guilds often place their logo on screenshots of the item's properties in order to record their accomplishments. Most of these guilds, particularly in EverQuest and World of Warcraft, use an often-intricate variant of DKP to determine loot distribution.
[edit] Organization
The larger a clan gets the more hierarchical the organizational structure tends to become. Usually there is at least a clan leader, in small teams a clan leader may only be a team captain heading the team in game and initiating discussions to solve problems. In larger clans the leader is often responsible for the entirety of organizing the clan, with a number of basic members. If the clan expands, experienced members are usually promoted and are delegated various tasks such as recruiting, disciplining rule-breakers, member training, webpage maintenance, and others. Certain clans take this type of organization to a higher level where they emulate the structure (and sometimes name) of a military unit with specific ranks, positions, and groups. These clans are usually found in shooter games and are referred to as realism units.
In most games, players show the clan they belong to by using a unique tag which takes the form of a prefix or suffix tag. Tags are often enclosed in brackets or symbols and coloured differently if the game allows it. For example, in a name like "[EW]Bob", "[EW]" is the clan tag and "Bob" is the player's name. Some clans prefer to have a more subtle and arcane way of indicating membership, such as a simple marking in or around the name. For example, "Bob!!" with "Bob" being the player's name and "!!" being the clan's tag.
In MMORPGs and strategy games the game often features a separate mechanism used to identify the clan a player belongs to. For example in Dark Age of Camelot, the player's guild appears in full below the player's name. In games that allow players to customize their appearance (usually by picking the color of their attire), clan members might all share a similar look, or bear their clan's logo on their character's outfit. The MMORPG World of Warcraft introduced tabards, in which a guild master could customize a tabard to any look he wanted, and then guild members could buy one so they'd all be wearing guild colors.
[edit] References
- ^ "The Syndicate: World Class Guild," GuildCafe PlayerVox (March 27, 2007), http://www.guildcafe.com/Vox/04072-The-Syndicate.html
