Daily Archives: June 29, 2007

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end?

(Part four of “teams, friends, guilds, other players and stuff”)

OK, so you’ve joined a guild. What now? Well… it depends!

Thank you, the end.

Hrm. That climactic grand finale was a bit of a let-down, really, but as Oscar Wilde once said: “There are more guilds than there are stars in the sky, and, as snowflakes, no two are alike in their infinite variety. Which is lucky, ‘cos seriously if Whistler bumps me from the Kara team one more time I’m totally going to /gquit and find another one.”

As I mentioned in the prologue, what really started this whole series was Will Wallace’s piece, “Guilds as Retention Mechanisms“. I was going to leave a comment there along the lines of “It depends!”, which then grew into a musing on the nature of guilds, which mutated into a sprawling series of posts, and has now come back to “it depends”, because as old Oscar (what a visionary) pointed out, guilds cover the gamut from a couple of people who wanted their own cool tabard to huge multi-game communities of hundreds of people, focused on any or all of PvPing, casual questing, crafting, raiding, roleplaying, and anything else you can do in a game. Coming back to the question I asked myself, did I stay in certain games longer because of the people, or did I forge closer ties with the people because I enjoyed the game and therefore played it more, my grand conclusion is: it’s both. If you’re enjoying a game, you’ve got more incentive and motivation to find groups or a guild, and they in turn (barring colossal clashes of personality and guild meltdowns) reinforce the enjoyment to keep you playing. If the game itself isn’t really working out for you, it can carry over into groups/guilds, with minor annoyances that you’d otherwise overlook becoming extra reasons to quit. Which is still a bit of a disappointingly woolly ending really. Hrm. I know! Beckett said, “always leave them with a joke”, so here’s one of his:

A man walks into a fish and chip shop, and asks for cod and chips twice, and the other man says… I heard you the first time.