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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 to thousands 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. It is not uncommon for a community to be based on more than one game.Syndicates
Finally, there are a number 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.
Many clans have their own private servers to play their game of choice on. These are most handy for holding practice matches against other clans and other forms of practice. Private servers are also convenient since they do not have problems that plague public servers, such as team killers and other behaviour that is the gaming equivalent of the anti-social behaviour when people have anonymity over the Internet such as spamming and trolling on message boards and chat rooms. As a side note, there are even clans who set up just to perpetuate this kind of abuse.
Clans in strategy games
Most popular multiplayer strategy games such as Warcraft and Command and Conquer series' offer a matchmaking service to find matches provided by the publisher or developer of the game. Often these services have their own structures for organising clans. Some of these services offer tournaments and ladders for clans to compete on either directly clan versus clan or indirectly by giving clan members points for winning 1v1 or 2v2 games and adding that to clan totals.Clans in RPGs
Clans also exist in other genres, where they often go by a different name and serve a purpose more suited to the game. Many online massively multiplayer and computer role-playing games tend to call them 'guilds' or invent their own term (for example Star Wars Galaxies calls them 'player associations'). 2025, a web browser-based game, formerly called them 'alliances', but switched to 'clans' as the word increased in popularity. In EVE_Online, they go by 'corporations', who in turn join up to form larger 'alliances'; in this game, however, the default structure and organization of corporations is defined in more detail by the developers of the game than is common in most MMOs.There are few guild versus guild tournaments in online RPGs, although the number of games with guild versus guild combat is increasing. Guilds usually are a cooperative planning and play group in these games, sometimes paralleling the functions of medieval guilds. In Neverwinter Nights, where the first such guilds appeared, they declared their own quests and scheduled cooperative play. Sometimes in MMORPGs, guilds take on the role of vigilante groups or the mafia, protecting its members from other players and guilds. These guilds form in the most literal sense in games that feature player versus player combat.
EverQuest led to the birth of so-called uberguilds, which are highly specialized guilds formed by the most dedicated players on the server for the purpose of securing for its members all the newest and most powerful abilities and loot. These guilds typically have regimented and selective application procedures that may take into account not only the desirability of an applicant's virtual character and playing skill but also a recruit's time commitment and even, in some cases, computer hardware and bandwidth. They typically do not share strategies or admit non-members to their adventuring groups or "raids"; during the days of EverQuest guilds would invariably censor the in-game chat display when posting screenshots to avoid revealing their strategies. Uberguilds often race to be the first to accomplish some particular task in the game; in the case of new items, such guilds place their logo on screenshots of the item's properties in order to record their accomplishments. Most of these guilds, particularly in EverQuest and World of Warcraft, use an often-intricate variant of DKP to determine loot distribution. (As a side note, however, Fires of Heaven, arguably the most well-known EverQuest uberguild, has historically given the guild leader the right to distribute all loot, avoiding what the guild sees as a needlessly complex system. Despite the guild's wide influence, this system of loot distribution has not found popularity among other uberguilds, which see DKP as a necessary tool to avoid disputes and to ensure fairness.)
Organization
The larger a clan gets the more hierarchical the organizational structure tends to become. Usually there is at least a clan leader, in small teams a clan leader may only be a team captain heading the team in game and initiating discussions to solve problems. In larger clans the leader is often responsible for the entirety of organizing the clan, with a number of basic members. If the clan expands, experienced members are usually promoted and are delegated various tasks such as recruiting, disciplining rule-breakers, member training, webpage maintenance, and others. Certain clans take this type of organization to a higher level where they emulate the structure (and sometimes name) of a military with specific ranks, positions, and groups. These clans are usually found in shooter games and are often referred to as Tactical Realism Units.
In most games, players show the clan they belong to by using a unique tag which takes the form of a prefix or suffix tag. Tags are often enclosed in brackets or symbols and coloured differently if the game allows it. For example, in a name like ""[EW" is the clan tag and "Bob" is the player's name. Some clans prefer to have a more subtle and arcane way of indicating membership, such as a simple marking in or around the name. For example, "Bob!!" with "Bob" being the player's name and "!!" being the clan's tag.
In MMORPGs and strategy games the game often features a separate mechanism used to identify the clan a player belongs to. For example in Dark Age of Camelot, the player's guild appears in full below the player's name. In games that allow players to customize their appearance (usually by picking the color of their attire), clan members might all share a similar look, or bear their clan's logo on their character's outfit. The MMORPG World of Warcraft introduced tabards, in which a guild master could customize a tabard to any look he wanted, and then guild members could buy one so they'd all be wearing guild colors.
Computer and video game organizations | Electronic sports
Clan (jeu vidéo) | Clan (computerspel) | Spillklan | Klan (gry komputerowe) | Clã (jogos de computador)
Resources
Guild Leadership Article Gaming Clan Resources at the Central Outpost
"Clan (computer gaming)"