Tuesday 15 July 2008

Guild and real life collisions

One of the nice things about my guild is that it's full of people who know each other in real life and have friendships/relationships outside the game. This has it's ups and downs but on the whole it adds a good dynamic to the group.

The latest way that this combination has happened was a raffle in aid of a pre-school which was advertised on our guild forums and had as the main prize an amazingly created cake as shown below.
The main reason for posting about this is that I won :) but it does highlight the fact that when playing this game, the multi-player part really does mean you are interacting with rea people who have all kinds of other things going on in their lives. This does mean that in all interactions with them you need to keep in the back of your mind what the reasons might be for why they are acting like they do.

So to everyone that belittles players in Battlegrounds or mocks people in /2 just remember that and think twice before you hit enter after typing something vitriolic.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I used to be guild leader of a moderately sized guild of people. Over 90% of the guild was comprised of people who lived in the middle of nowhere, Minnesotta. I was the strange East Coast chick that they decided would make a good Guild Master. Visiting them was a blast and I really enjoyed being able to see them all, hang out, talk, exchange numbers, and share jokes.

The only thing about it was that the guys always seemed to bring their garbage and emotional spats into the game. A lot of them disliked one gentleman's girlfriend, people got upset when a guy got blasted and said some comments at a bonfire that they had, their boss (who was also in the guild!) had upset some people at work -- it always made for an interesting dynamic in the guild and I often served as mediator.

The anonymity of the internet results in people forgetting that there are also real people on the other side of the monitor. The social repurcussions of poor behavior are typically less severe online than off, which means that people are less constrained in what they feel they can say or do without being adversely impacted. It's interesting to consider how our conduct can be so constrained by repurcussions, but also a little sad.

Your guild made an awesome gesture!

Rakhman said...

The cake wasn't even a lie either... yum yum