An online gaming community

For this assignment I decided to look into an online gaming community that I’m part of. In World of Warcraft people can form “guilds” which are large groups of people that play together in order to do the tougher parts of the game that might require up to 25 people at the same time. I’ve been playing with the same group of people for about 2 years, though the guild has changed its name a couple of times and people have come and gone. The actors in this community are all online gamers. The guild consists of more than 100 individual members. The types of ties in this community are mostly weak ties considering that few people interact with one another in more ways than just playing together for a few hours. I have mostly weak ties with people in the guild since I don’t play the game as much, maybe 1-2 times a week as compared to what I used to play before. However, strong ties do exist, I know a couple of guys who I have talked to for about 2 years and I have also interacted with them via voice chat. The extended interaction with these players has developed into a friendship and I have become closer to these people than others in the guild. There is also a group of players in the guild that consists of the most experienced players and guild managers who know each other face to face. They hold annual meetings at one of the member’s house where people can get to know each other. This group of members, I believe, has the strongest ties, because they all know each other well and you can easily tell this from the way they interact with each other.
Most of the actors in this community have a long shared history. The guild’s main focus is to organize “raids” which are groups of up to 25 people that go into a dungeon to kill bosses that drop better armor and weapons. These raids take place multiple times throughout the week and they usually last for about 3-4 hrs. Most of these raids require a lot of coordination and skill to get them done right and therefore, the guild spends a large amount of time getting to know each other and a boss fight might take many attempts before the guild succeeds. Thus, the actors in this community have a long shared history and in achieving their common goals they become a lot closer to each other than before. As the guild becomes more successful, players trust each other more and more. All guilds in WoW have names, which are displayed underneath each player’s nickname, this way they can all be identified. All the actors in this community speak the same language, which is the language of the game. I have witnessed a few cases of emotional support while I’ve been part of this guild. Once there was a guild member who was feeling depressed and decided to tell everyone in the guild. Some guild members responded by giving him support, and encouraging him to feel better about himself. Though, this type is support is not as common as in other communities, it is still there.
As I have described this community is a social network consisting of mostly weak ties, but with a few strong ties. This is a social network because it truly is a web of relationships where all the members in the guild know other members and interact in different levels with each other. These people bond with each other by accomplishing hard tasks that can only be done with cooperation and very good communication. Everyone has a common ground, which is to play the game and explore it’s more challenging areas. All the actors speak a common language and the guild itself has its own set of rules and norms, like showing up 5 minutes before raids and being prepared with items, etc. Through accomplishing these tasks people develop a history with each other, which is important in establishing strong ties. There is also reciprocity in this community, many members who don’t follow the rules and norms are not chosen to do raids, and therefore in order for the guild to help you, you must first gain their trust. All of these things result in a community with social capital. The social capital here consists of people in the game that you can trust. There are many players in WoW and usually you tend to rely and do more things with the people in your guild, because you know they are good and they also help you because they know that by helping you, it will help them because you will be a better asset when it comes time for a raid. Overall, I think this is a very interesting community that surprisingly contains many of the SNA attributes and properties we have discussed in class.
There are many youtube videos about raiding and guilds. Here is one for example where you can also see how people interact via voice chat. For more you can just search WoW guilds or raids in youtube.