Games - Clan

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	Games - Clan

In computer and video gaming, a clan or guild is a group of players who regularly play together in a particular multiplayer game. These range from groups of a few friends to 1000-person organizations, with a broad range of structures, goals and members. 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 MechWarrior 2.

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.

Clans by structure

Small social groups

Most gamers organize themselves into small groups of like-minded players in order to play together and socialize. 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 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.

Syndicates

Finally, there are a numbers 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 syndicates.

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 unorganised structure of first-person shooter games the players tend to take on the organisation themselves. This has led to the genre generating a large number of websites to help organise 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 organise matches with other clans. Notably, some take this further and take part in leagues and tournaments. 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 organised. 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.

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