Welcome, once again, to LawMeme's ongoing series of gaming-themed pieces in anticipation of next month's State of Play conference. This week, I'll be rounding out last week's discussion of guilds in multiplayer online games.
After arguing that guilds in aren't almighty sovereigns, the organic will of the people, or mere tools of the game designers, it's time to get positive. This time around, I'll suggest five useful ways of thinking about them: as corporations, as social clubs, as close-knit communities, as representatives, and as administrative agencies. None of these perspectives is fully accurate, but neither are they mutually exclusive. As always, more inside . . .
An opening note
Before getting into my own theorizing, I'd like to give a shout-out to Dan, Greg, Ted, and Julian over at Terra Nova, and not just because they've been linking to this series. They're exploring a much wider range of issues than I've been able to get into here, and throwing whole new areas of inquiry on the table on a regular basis.
Even more excellently, they've been playing host to some truly outstanding discussions. If you read Terra Nova without reading the comments, you're missing out on some great primary evidence: people are pulling out all sorts of wonderful anecdotes from all sorts of games. The discussions on history in MMORPGs and on virtual property and politics.
Also, I'd like to point you to this comment on my post from last week, which provides evidence to refute (or at least qualify) one of my claims. I stand corrected: guilds (or guild-like groups) can apparently emerge without any assistance from gamd designers. (I do, however, disagree with Dave on the meaning of guild features, for reasons well-stated in the Terra Nova thread on history in online games).
Finally, I'd like to note that this week's statements are awfully sweeping, and that this week more than most, I'm relying on information passed to me by players from around the gameiverse. Am I wrong about a trend? Is there a counterexample to my claim? An anecdote to show just how right I am? Did I say something objectively false about a particular game? Please, please, please: post it in the comments and add to the world's store of knowledge.
And now, on with the main show.
Guilds as Corporations
Corporations are not people. They are creatures. Creatures of state law, to be precise. (And some federal law, mostly to do with securities, while we're being precise). Creatures of Delaware state law, most often. And, despite what you may have heard from the people telling you that corporations aren't people, state law doesn't give corporations particularly extensive rights or powers. Nor do states simply charter corporations to force them to carry out specific tasks. No, the object of modern corporate law -- at least in theory -- is to encourage people to create and run efficient companies that do things generally to the benefit of society. Artificial groups of people, given a few specific powers, let loose to run their own shows, and doing things that often help society as a whole -- we might as well be talking about guilds.
The first major cluster of corporate laws are the ones that control corporate governance and accounting. The technical term for the subject of these laws is "internal affairs:" that is, the things that are peculiarly "corporate" about corporations. We require them to have boards of directors and other officers; we require them to have independent auditors and to file statements about their finances, generally certifying that the officers haven't been skimming money from the corporate treasury into their own pockets.
Your typical MMORPG, on the other hand, requires in code that each guild have an owner; the owner has the power to appoint and remove leaders who have the power to approve or expel guild members. Where there are corporate (excuse me, guild) treasuries, there are also "laws" governing the accounting and financial standards guilds must obey. No taking more money out of the treasury than your members have put in; owners can review all transactions with the guild lock-box. There are game equivalents to shareholder proxy fights and changes in management: the leaders serve at the pleasure of the owner, and the members can vote out owners they dislike.
Now, while people may complain about "corporate welfare" in the real world, when games subsidize their guilds, it's usually accounted a good thing. There are the mechanical subsidies, ones it's easy to overlook: the private chat channels usually associated with guilds make it easier for them to gather and to plan group activities. But there are overt subsidies, too. Asheron's Call's allegiance system is my favorite example. When you gain experience points, the player you've sworn allegiance to gets some bonus experience points, too. Just by being in an allegiance pyramid, players gain plenty of extra experience, even if they do nothing else together. Players love features like these: not only are there nice goodies involved, but they provide a real boost for socialization, bringing players into closer and more frequent contact with others in cooperative settings.
More subtly, games subsidize guilds (and raiding parties and informal groups of players) indirectly in the sense that they often provide substantial rewards to any organization of players that can cooperate effectively. Where formal guilds exist, they're almost always in the best competitive position (among all possible organizations of players) to take advantage of these rewards. If it takes four hours of play with a twenty-person party to clear out the monsters guarding a magic spring whose waters increase one's resistance to magical attack, it takes a non-trivial level of cooperation to pull off a trip to the spring. The chat feature of guilds, in particular, can be invaluable in coordinating such quests. The net effect is that players who join a guild and start questing together are getting on the first level of a reward escalator that operates much like a tax deferral. The longer you stick together, the more your investments in the guild compound.
Guilds as Social Clubs
There is another important reason why players join guilds, one intimately bound up with games' status as games: it's fun to join one. Guilds have something for every suit in Richard Bartle's famous deck of player types. The same achievers who seek out dragons to slay and rare gems to find dream of being a guild leader, or even an owner. Leading a guild safely through a dangerous quest, after all, is an bigger accomplishment than tacking a measly single-player quest. Explorers, always a bit strange, actually seem to enjoy the scut work of managing membership rosters and treasuries; they’re always looking to leverage guild resources in clever new ways. For every chaotic-evil lone-wolf killer, there are probably several lawful-evil wolf-pack killers, looking to leverage guild subsidies into new levels of PvP lethality (and, besides, “Death Knights of Plunder” makes a nice, intimidating guild name). And socializers? In addition to the intrigue of the rise and fall of guild officers, guilds are as fun a group to hang out with as any other offered by a game.
Many guilds are founded by friends in real life; one EverQuest guild is owned by a matriarch and led by her children and grandchildren. The theatrical component of life in a virtual world seems especially to surface around guilds. Many guilds -- in many games -- will have times for pure socializing, in which the membership will gather in some particularly scenic part of the game, bring along virtual food and virtual drinks (usually alcoholic), and have a picnic. (Or, for guilds with more violent memberships, the gathering will be an all-out battle royale; I've also heard about one Dadaist EverQuest guild that collectively set up halfling characters on a different server and spent a day running around trying to confuse the locals with absurdist antics.) These events –- somewhere between ritual and chat room –- are often an anchor of game life for players. Of course, much of this would happen without guilds, but features such as guild-level chat make guilds particularly inviting environments for such interaction.
While the market-economy features of online games have been quite thoughtfully described, these games also tend to have substantial gift economies. Guilds are often the locus of quite extensive gift networks. The experience gains that Asheron's Call gives to people atop allegiance pyramids is only rarely "sold." Instead, allegiance-ors and allegiance-ees frequently live in relationships of rough reciprocity, governed as much by cumulative senses of fairness as by explicitly bargained exchanges. In games with looser guild structures, guild members often gain status within a guild by making large cash donations to the guild treasury. As higher-level members of a guild acquire new, cutting-edge, items and weapons, they pass their old (but still valuable) ones down to “younger” members of the guild. Very few of these exchange relationships are reduced to explicit accounts; instead, most guilds function as informal patron-client networks.
Guilds as Close-Knit Communities
"Close-knit" communities are the Holy Grail for economists who analyze social organization using the tools of game theory. Robert Axelrod's famous analysis of tit-for-tat strategies in the prisoners' dilemma game launched the idea that people engaged in repeated interactions with the same smallish group of people will be able to develop and sustain cooperative behavior. Groups that lack this high connectivity and temporal continuity, on the other hand, fragment into mutual distrust and more frequent betrayal.
"Close-knit" is the term (at least in recent law-and-economic scholarship) for those communities that achieve a high level of cooperation through informal means. A great deal of empirical work has centered on trying to identify the practical attributes that make communities close-knit. The idea is to seek out examples of communities that have cracked tough collective-action nuts. Well, guilds are great examples, so we might well ask what it is about them that makes them work.
On this view, guilds will be the largest groups of players which are capable of remaining close-knit. In adventuring-based games, the cooperative structure of questing rewards size; as long as guilds are stable at all, they will expand until the coordination problems of adding more members more or less cancel out the benefits from being able to take on larger quests. Empirically, the observed size of guilds supports this hypothesis. Although guilds sometimes have membership rosters approaching 300 members, their ranks are often padded with players' "alternate" characters or with no-show members who are not actively playing the game. More realistic estimates of the number of active players in many guilds put the observed maximum between 50 and 125 members.
Sociologically, this size limit fits almost exactly the expected upper limit on the size of (non-dysfunctional) border-defined social groups. Border-defined groups are those, like guilds, in which membership is binary; there is a sharp transition from "in" to "out;" the bulk of energy devoted to membership management is focused on classifying individuals on one side or another of this border. All empirical indications are that border-defined groups, both online and offline, start to break down as their membership climbs past the double digits. Fifty players can keep track of each other; two hundred cannot.
(In contrast, center-defined groups are ones that tend to have very weak ability to exclude members. In them, status is defined through affinity with a visible group "core." Higher-status members are closer to the core and enter the group by emulating and cooperating with core members. An unmoderated Internet discussion group, for example, is a classically center-defined institution; those individuals who are clearly "central" to the group are the ones who post frequently and who are visibly favored by other frequent posters. Thanks to Jessica Hammer for introducing me to the concepts of "center-defined" and "border-defined" social groups.)
There is something else about border-defined social groups that merits attention. It is possible for them to exclude members relatively easily. In most games, a guild leader need only push a button to expel an errant member. Amitai Aviram's paper Regulation by Networks makes the very useful point that a network (or, really, any group) is able to control its members in direct proportion to its ability to exclude them. If you can keep evildoers off the network -- or out of the guild -- you can order them around much more readily than if they can always rejoin later in the day or under a different username. In a game world where large raids require fifty or more participants, a player expelled from a guild must make a reasonably substantial investment to find another. Although players are mobile between guilds, few regularly change their allegiance with any great frequency. It is quite possible for a consistently selfish player to be expelled from every "good" guild on a server.
(And while I'm skulking around Aviram's home page, his paper The Paradox of Spontaneous Formation of Private Legal Systems appears to tie together a great deal of what I've been saying about guilds in the context of other "private legal systems"-- groups within society that develop and enforce their own group norms. His point: precisely that when the legal system helps these groups communicate and exclude unwanted members, they will be able to create strong group norms. Neat.)
Guilds as Representatives
This observation about the "natural" size limit of border-defined groups supplies a surprisingly accurate "reason" for the existence of hundred-member guilds: one hundred is the geometric mean of one and ten thousand. That is, if the "problem" is to impose close-knit order on a ten-thousand member community, the sociological "solution" is to divide it into one hundred subcommunities of one hundred members each, since the "problem" of order within each subcommunity and among the subcommunities will then be equally difficult. At each level – guild control of rogue members and server-wide control of rogue guilds – the reputation-tracking problem is the same: a hundred actors keep tabs on each other.
In many ways, the competition-among-guilds problem is easier to solve in that the damage guilds can do to each other is quite severe. When a large raid takes eight hours and requires careful timing, a guild willing to take some casualties in order to spite another guild can easily crash the party, lead dangerous monsters through the designated resting area, and cause the entire raid to fail in spectacularly bloody fashion. Two feuding guilds can quite easily block each other from useful advancement. In bilateral dealings, then, the classical analysis of basic tit-for-tat strategies points to the emergence of cooperation.
In strong-guild games such as EverQuest, cooperation at the inter-guild level has emerged, with a vengeance. I spoken already of those marvelous raid calendars, in which slots are given out first-come first-served. Note that these slots are often given as gifts between guilds; a guild that has reserved a slot it winds up unable to use will either release it to be reclaimed, or give it to another particular guild as a favor.
This technique of
unilateral gifts as a way to even up accounts is familiar from Robert Ellickson’s famous (at least among legal scholars) book, Order Without Law, in which he details the enforcement of informal norms among neighboring cattle ranchers. The basic tit-for-tat rule is a good starting point, but it has trouble when circumstances beyond peoples' control cause imbalances in relationships. It makes more sense, for example, for one rancher to spend three days fixing a line of fence than for two ranchers (one from each side of the fence) each to spend two days fixing half the line of fence. Instead of trying to split all tasks fifty-fifty, neighbors typically keep a rough mental account of where they stand with each other. If someone does more than their share in maintaining your common fence, you may take them a truckload of produce. As long as most people play along with this informal rule, mutual debts never get very far out of balance.
On servers that allow fighting between players, sometimes major guilds decree certain zones to be neutral ground, with no fighting allowed. Strong norms against looting corpses and using profanity have also both developed at times among players; guilds have become mediating institutions for blocking these sorts of behaviors. One need only inspect the codes of conduct that many guilds post on their out-of-game home pages to see the extensive list of norms that have become part of guild culture.
The mechanisms by which these norms are developed and communicated are far from clear. But it is striking that guilds, even if not always "governmental," do function, at the server level, as representatives of their members. Indeed, just as guilds, internally, have owners and leaders, there are also more "important" guilds on each server. Most EverQuest servers now have one dominant "superguild," often the only one capable of attempting the highest-level raids. Although its powers need not allow it to dominate other guilds directly, such superguilds seem to function, at least, as coordination points for server-wide politics, mediating between other guilds in disputes.
Guilds as Administrative Agencies
So far, I've been speaking of the relationships between players and guilds, and among guilds. But now, we're ready to reconstruct something of the relationship between guilds and designers, which we shall do by considering the "history" of the rule against profanity in a the virtual world of Mandragora. (The name is borrowed from Emily Barton's The Testament of Yves Gundron.)
Initially, this rule was part of Mandragora's terms of service; upon complaint by players, the designers would investigate and proceed against the accused in a case-by-case sorta-judicial procedure. The designers didn’t like the use of foul language in their society, but they would have been willing to leave it alone -- except that players would complain to them, and some customers were reluctant to allow their children to play. Commercially, they had no choice but to respond to complaints and to enforce their policy against cursing.
Simultaneously, however, they were adding cooperative quests to Mandragora and tweaking its guild interface. And, gradually, players began to discover that instead of complaining to the designers about potty-mouths, they could complain to the offender's guild. While some guild leaders would turn a blind eye or claim it wasn’t their problem, other, more moralistic guild leaders would take action, often including expulsion. In such cases, players would then go to the designers, but informal guild-level enforcement fairly quickly produced a state in which most guilds took strong anti-cursing policies and laxer guilds were in the minority. As cohesive guilds gained power at the server level, they could push their anti-cursing norms on other guilds; only guilds willing to enforce these norms could participate in raid calendars and other inter-guild activities.
The end result, then, is that the rule against profanity has become enforced by an institution -- the guild -- far more competent to the task than designer-level adjudication. The incentives against profanity are much stronger, and it has become almost vanishingly rare among players. A side effect is that with far fewer cases of profanity being reported to the designers, those that do reach them tend to be either especially egregious or involve players without strong connections to a guild, making it much easier for them to take quick and harsh action; similarly, the "ignore" feature in chat becomes much more useful when there are only one or two players on one’s ignore list, instead of a never-ending stream of ne'er-do-wells. The work of enforcing this rule has been pushed down to an intermediate level; players don’t ask the administration for as much as they used to, because they can take care of problems on their own.
This story about guilds is fundamentally that of an administrative lawyer. It is a story about the delegation of power and a story about how agencies reinterpret their role over time. Even more than that, it is a story about institutional competence. Both law-making legislatures and law-applying judges can be seriously limited in their ability to handle certain kinds of problems; by giving power to an institution "closer to the ground," they trade off their ability to direct particular results in exchange for a more efficient, more expert, decisional process. The "design" problems of administrative law are about using a very limited set of tools -- judicial review, budgetary limits, procedural bars -- to make sure that delegated powers are not used arbitrarily. Similarly, designers seeking to devolve duties onto guilds are working with a limited palette; their design problem is that of giving guilds the ability to resolve disputes while keeping them accountable to players.
A Final Thought About Size
What I've been saying about guilds may, in the end, be an accidental artifact of a particular time in the history of online games. That little thought experiment about the "right" size for guilds was predicated on a server size of around ten thousand. That's about the server size of the typical mass-market massively multiplayer online game, as of when I started seriously thinking about these issues. But it hasn't always been that way, and it may very well not stay that way.
On the one hand, games used to be smaller -- and many games today are smaller. Certainly, all available evidence seems to indicate that smaller games are more sociable, more cohesive, and more narrative than big games. The Terra Nova discussion of history makes this point: player communities in smaller games can create collective narratives. But it seems to take designer intervention in 10,000-player games before anything worth classifying as "history" takes place. If you like, you can call these smaller games anomalies and write off their stories as mere small-group psychology. And that would be valid, if you really cared only about mass democracy and real-world politics at the national level. But stories are fascinating, too, and so is psychology -- and there are some great stories coming out of the small-game world. A Tale in the Desert springs to mind most readily, but LambdaMOO had that sense about it, too, and in fact, an awful lot of the small games do, if you look at them closely and with enough love.
And on the other hand, that very thought experiment carries the seeds of its own destruction. Imagine not a 10,000-player server, but a 250,000-player server. Suddenly, your geometric mean involves 500-player guilds -- and 500 of them per server. Those aren't manageable numbers, according to the theory -- which means the simple model of having one level of representatives and all groups being close-knit falls apart. You'll need something messier, more complicated. I'm putting my money on the emergence of realer "cities" (with lots of grime, crime, and anonymity) and realer "governments" (with lots of ideology, corruption, inefficiency, and highly colorful but strangely superficial politics) -- both indications that close-knitness has broken down and been replaced by the more exciting but more threatening ambiguities of modernity.
Next week, oh, I'm not sure yet, maybe something about inflation . . .