Information about Clan (computer Gaming)

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 games range from groups of a few friends to 1000-person organizations, with a broad range of structures, goals and members. The lifespan of a clan also varies considerably, from a few weeks or months to several years. 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 .

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. Some MMORPG guilds claim hundreds of members (or more), and some guilds have even obtained registered trademarks for their names.^[1]

Clans by structure

Small social groups

Most gamers organize themselves into small group of people in order to play with each other and socialize after playing the game. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 groups. or cal

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.

Competition

Some clans focus on competition and may arrange recruitment, scrimmages and training sessions to reach their goals. For example, some clans only recruit skilled 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. Some teams will also only recruit players who have a proven history with other successful teams, in order to prevent cheaters from joining their team.

Trivia Clans

Trivia clans are a growing population of clans with bots to host trivia competitions and keep score. Some clans even give out prizes such as cd-keys or moderator positions. Trivia in clans is a good way to challenge each other, attract members, and entertain visitors to the channel.

Division of Labor

Gamers form guilds or clans in order to assist each other. Some members may focus on supporting roles, while others focus on more direct action. In role playing games, members could focus on trade skills, such as mining or blacksmithing, to be able to provide their members with good weapons and armor at little or no cost. Similarly, a player could establish themselves as a sniper, a medic or some other specific role, knowing that their clan mates would fill complementary roles with little discussion.

Communication

Clan members often use a variety of methods to collaborate, communicate and improve their gameplay.

Internet

A website is often the central focus for publicizing 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 may also cause personality clashes.

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 computer, using a microphone or headset. 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. GameStreet Talk is slowly gaining in popularity partly because it does not require a small central server to host. 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.

Messaging

Instant messaging by utilities such as MS Instant Messenger, Xfire, or GameStreet Talk 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).

Clans by game genre

Clans 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. Some clans may even "war" with each other, using their members for surprise "attacks" on the other clan's servers. 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.

Realism Units

Realism units are clans that play only in "realistic" games. Most units model themselves on military units and typically play games like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, , Armed Assault, Battlefield 2, and Americas Army. They often have rules and standing orders - for example, they may restrict use of a certain weapon or vehicle to members of certain ranks within the unit or require members to ask the highest ranking member for permission to use it.

Clans in strategy games

Most popular multiplayer strategy games such as Warcraft III and Command & 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 organizing 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.

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'). , 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. In the superhero based game City of Heroes, they are called supergroups, and are similar in structure to comic book hero organizations like the X-Men. 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.

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.

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 or MMORPG games and are referred to as realism units.

Clan Identification

In most games, players show they are a member of a clan by using a unique tag which takes the form of a prefix or suffix "tag". Tags are often enclosed in brackets or symbols and colored differently if the game allows it. For example, in a name like "=DOE=John", "=DOE=" is the clan tag and "John" 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, "John!!" with "John" being the player's name and "!!" being the clan's tag. In many clans, there is also a suffix, which would include your clan rank or status. For example, if John was ranked clan leader, his name might be something like =DOE=John=CL=. The first and most common clan tag is simply a three letter acronym between two square brackets such as "[DOE]". A clans tag is typically another variation of keyboard or character map alphanumerical combinations, however.

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. The game City of Heroes goes even farther. A player can switch between their entire regular costume colors and the 'Supergroup's' costume colors. It can also be refined to not apply at all or to only apply a certain areas.

References

Further reading

• Harvesting the Hive:How online games drive innovation article from Esther Dyson's EDventure, see section "Beyond collaboration:Group to group interaction".
• Computer Games and the Military: Two Views article from National Defense University's Defence Horizons, see section on "The Social Ecology of Games" by J.C. Herz.
• Youth in Transition:The Challenge of Generational change in Asia proceedings of the 15th Biennial Association of Asian Social Science Research Councils released by UNESCO Bangkok, see section 16 "Youth culture in online game worlds: Emergence of cyber lifestyles in Korean society" by Sang-Min Whang, Department of Psychology Yonsei University.