Long live the guild! While watching the documentary on MMORPG’s in class last week this was said multiple times. At the time I really didn’t understand what constituted a guild in the World of Warcraft game. According to the official WoW website, “A guild is a group of players that join together for companionship, adventure, economic gain and more.” These guilds are user made and the article “From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft” focuses on how these guilds function within the game.
I have had very little personal exposure to Wow. I did have friends in high school that would play the game nonstop. They tried to teach me about the game but I remember very little about it. I always thought that it was a game with no true purpose where you just went and killed everything in sight. I knew that some people used the game as a forum for other things but I guess I didn’t realize how many people were doing that.
To enhance game play some players choose to join some type of guild. I was really surprised to learn that 60% of guilds are formed purely for social reasons. I was also surprised to learn that in smaller social guilds “the social interactions were extensions of real-world social bonds”.
I also had no idea that there were different types of guilds. The article named four: social guild, player-vs-player guild, raiding guild, and role-play guilds. They all have different structures and different way of playing the same game.
The more I read about it I started to wonder how you would go about joining a guild on the game. With a social guild you can get a group of friends in the game or not and just make a guild. What about the other types? The official WoW website offers a guide on picking a guild but I found some other sites that I thought were interesting. RecruitGamers.com has a specialized website to help WoW players join guilds. I also found classifieds on craigslist for WoW guilds. Overall, this whole gaming universe (I don’t know if world is even large enough a word anymore) is far more complex then I first thought it was going to be.
Wow…craigslists posting for guilds?
It should be noted that my usage of “wow” above was supposed to represent surprise and not an acronym for world of warcraft. ^.^