Virtual world social networks seem to lack this redundancy. Newbies have many casual contacts, but once they join a guild, those links die and their daily interactions often become limited to their guildmates. A guild will hurry this along by making the guild self-sufficient - ensuring the guild has whatever craftsmen and services a member might need. From a designer's perspective, this is oddly precarious - if disaster befalls that guild, the likelihood the player will stick around will depend on how many links outside of the guild he has.
Designers need to encourage more weak links outside of their guild. Some have tried experiments here, including multiple guild affiliations, allowing guilds to ally to create more robust safety nets, not allowing guilds to provide all services, or creating class-specific chat channels to create a sense of non-guild affiliation.
Challenge #5: Guild Centric Gameplay
An old adage in Texas politics says, "Dance with the one that brung ya." It refers to the need for politicians to remember who got them there - and is usually a sly nod to the campaign contributors that bought thousand dollar plates at fundraisers.
The unique promise of MMOGs has always been persistence and "massive" numbers of people. These ideas are "the one that brung ya" for the genre, the notion that captures the imagination of hundreds of thousands of players. Guilds stand at the crossroads of these two thoughts, and as such we should be designing games where guilds are the major actors in the play.
Instead, the industry has been backpedalling from "massively multiplayer games" that really embrace being massive. Instead, we're making games built around small squads of 6 to 8 players. Competitors making non-subscription games such as Battlefield 2 are creating better small-scale gameplay and surpassing our paltry squad size limitations to boot. In this light, "massive" becomes a chat room with geography that charges a monthly fee.
Virtual world designers need to embrace what makes MMOGs unique - persistence and "massive" crowds. There's an MMOG revolution coming in the future, and it will center on guild-focused gameplay. What that means is unknown. Shadowbane's city building and sieging showed one possible path. Hopefully, more experiments in this direction are yet to come.
The Next Generation of Guilds
It's very easy to forget how simple a guild is - it's a list of players with a chat room. But it is also very deep. A guild is the cornerstone of player assembly in a virtual world, but it has one core limitation: Unlike real-life player associations, online groups are limited by what the code can or can't do. Designers must lend a hand.
It's easy to make a system that gathers people. The challenge is doing it well - gathering people of like interests and ensuring you have a culture where new players are actively recruited. The challenge is empowering the guildmaster, and ensuring both the guild and the player can handle a catastrophic guild event. The challenge is to make guilds central to the gameplay to breathe new life in the genre.
Solving these challenges will take time, and the results won't be perfect - new challenges will undoubtedly arise. But they do have the potential to take these games to the "next level," making your online communities more robust, more interesting, and more focused on the "massive" in massively multiplayer gameplay.
Damion Schubert has been designing virtual worlds games for almost a decade. He currently works at Wolfpack Studios on an unannounced project, and runs a game design blog called Zen of Design.
