A guild culture of ‘casual raiding’ enhances its members’ online gaming experiences: A cognitive anthropological and ethnographic approach to World of Warcraft

Abstract

We document the norms and practices of a “casual raiding guild” pursuing a balanced approach to World of Warcraft gaming under the banner “offline life matters.” Confirming insights in the problematic online gaming literature, our ethnography reveals that some guild members experience gaming distress. However, this guild’s normative culture helps its members better self-regulate and thus protect themselves from, among other things, their own impulses to over-play and thus compromise their offline lives. We suggest that cognitive anthropological “culture as socially transmitted knowledge” theories—combined with ethnographic methods—illuminate how socially learned gaming patterns shape online experiences. Our approach helps us refine theories judging socially motivated Internet activity as harmful. We affirm the potential for distress in these social gaming contexts, but we also show how a specific guild culture can minimize or even reverse such distress, in this case promoting experiences that strike a nice balance between thrill and comradery.

Keywords

Cultural norms online gaming subjective well-being virtual worlds

Introduction

In a side note in his now classic work, Bowling Alone, Putnam (2000) proposed that new media technologies such as online social networking sites contribute to the degradation of actual-world social life and civic engagement, in the manner that they draw people out of offline networks of relationships into the more superficial connections characteristic of the Internet. Further research suggests that individuals drawn to the interpersonal dimensions of the Internet, in particular, experience negative outcomes associated with such use (Caplan, 2003). Studies even suggest that individuals can be so overly concerned with the Internet and social networking sites, in particular, as to experience deep psychological distress and social impairment characteristic of behavioral “addictions” (et al., 2016).

Social play in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) such as World of Warcraft (WoW), a subset of all Internet activity and the focus of this article, has also been associated with obligations and pressures that can produce compulsive over-play and psychological distress (Ducheneaut et al., 2006; Pisan, 2007; Snodgrass et al., 2011b). And play in online gaming groups referred to as guilds—in-game associations of like-minded players, the more particular focus of this study—can draw players into too intensive of online commitments, which both become distressful in their own right and also potentially compromise players’ offline lives (Pisan, 2007; Snodgrass et al., 2016; Yee, 2006). This is especially the case when guilds organize players into achievement-oriented collaborative events such as raids, where multiple players together try to defeat challenging “end-game” content and powerful bosses (Charlton and Danforth, 2007; Snodgrass et al., 2012, 2013, 2014b; Yee, 2006). In such contexts, MMO gamers can get drawn into communities and collaborations that demand increasing amounts of time, in some cases, maladaptively avoiding actual-world commitments and problems, which can harm gamers’ psyches and their offline social lives as their gaming assumes “addictive” qualities (Hussain et al., 2015; Snodgrass et al., 2011a).

Nevertheless, ethnographers have also shown that MMO guilds, although not immune to conflict, can provide members with supportive environments and rewarding experiences (Chen, 2012; Cockshut, 2012; Nardi, 2010). Participation in guilds can produce a sense of positive role fulfillment and even elation when in-game challenges are overcome with online friends and collaborators. So-called “hardcore” raiding guilds strive to be the first to complete MMO “end-game” content, thereby satisfying members (Chen, 2012; Cockshut, 2012; Malone, 2009). To obtain their goals, such guilds can be characterized by more top-down “authority-compliance” governance styles, as we’ve seen in ethnographic and other accounts of guilds and similar groups as “playful” forms of institutional organization (Lisk et al., 2011; Malone, 2007; Prax, 2010; Warmelink, 2014). And they typically exercise tight control over loot distribution (Malone, 2009). Failure and defeat are less acceptable in such contexts, and, to avoid them, such guilds can require members to give, in their own estimation, too much to the game, compromising their offline lives (Snodgrass et al., 2016). By contrast, “social” or “friends and family” guilds value casual socializing above in-game advancement, thus reducing member stress but also the exhilarating feelings of accomplishment that accompany successful raiding (Cockshut, 2012). Such guilds can be characterized by more laissez-faire and democratic governance structures—or even by no clear management and organizational structure at all—resulting in quite different in-game experiences (Cockshut, 2012; Lisk et al., 2011; Prax, 2010).

In this article, we address the question of how social play shapes MMO experience, by exploring the manner that guild structure shapes MMO players’ subjective well-being, a topic rarely explicitly explored in the scholarly literature. We present ethnographic observation and interview data (collected largely between 2011 and 2012) with members of one WoW guild, pseudonymously referred to here as “The Knights of Good” (KOG).¹ Like other WoW raiders, KOG’s members collaborate together in multiplayer groups to battle some of this online game’s most challenging content. Our ethnography reveals that KOG’s members are not immune to sometimes intense achievement-oriented play that can produce distress—that is, play that sometimes feels stressful, compulsive, and out-of-control and that interferes with offline life (Griffiths et al., 2016). However, as a self-dubbed “casual” raiding guild (Cockshut, 2012; Sundén and Sveningsson, 2012)—somewhere between a “hardcore” and “friends and family” organization—KOG takes an unusually relaxed attitude toward WoW gaming, organizing itself under the mantra of “real-life comes first.” Our ethnography reveals how KOG’s particular governance and management style—a more democratic “team” approach relying on the personal charisma and individual leadership skills of its two founders (Lisk et al., 2011; Prax, 2010)—work better for this guild’s less “hardcore” membership.

Drawing on cognitive anthropological concepts of culture as “socially learned knowledge” (D’Andrade, 1995; Goodenough et al., 1996), we show that MMO guilds such as KOG can develop and propagate unique norms and governance styles that shape online gaming experiences, in this case ameliorating the distress that can emerge from highly competitive raiding. In contrast to Putnam, we emphasize the manner that player experiences importantly depend upon the correct fit between individual players’ personalities and expectations and guild structure and organization—which, drawing on work in cognitive anthropology (Dressler et al., 2007), we’ve framed elsewhere as examples of cultural consonance and dissonance (Snodgrass et al., 2014a).

As such, our study does not lead us to any singular judgment on the overall negative or positive character of online social play—the important thing is that players find online communities that meet their orientations and needs—a point that resonates with other studies of online gaming (Sundén and Sveningsson, 2012). Methodologically, our research illuminates the importance of ethnographic case studies such as ours to reveal the diverse ways that online communities can meet—or fail to meet—their members’ needs (Brown, 2015; Vesa, 2013). Overall, our cognitive anthropological and ethnographic approach to life online further complicates—and also potentially refines—more general theories such as Putnam’s about how socially motivated Internet activity might detract from users’ well-being, affirming such theories in certain ways and challenging them in others.

Research setting: the KOG

Ranging in size from groups of tens of players to massive numbers in the hundreds and even thousands, WoW guilds typically represent a group of gamers who, sharing common interests and goals, join together to pursue them. Prior to the foundation of KOG in 2008, its founders, Lainey (aged 44 years) and Vern (aged 35 years), now married, first met online in a hardcore raiding guild in WoW, where they experienced problems.² The guild in which they first met aimed to progress rapidly through raiding content, competing aggressively with other groups on the server. This guild removed Lainey and Vern when they did not show up for a raid, which was interpreted to mean (unjustifiably in these two’s eyes) that they were not committed enough to the guild mission. As explained to us by Lainey, final exam week had just ended—they were both students at the time—and they were tired and needed a night off from raiding. Lainey says that they were “kicked out” despite her being recognized as the guild’s “best healer” and having “exemplary attendance, like 99% raid attendance.” Still, she says, the guild’s council of leaders “got all uppity and pissed off and kicked us out, because we missed one raid.” Angrily, she considered quitting the game for good. Instead, she gathered the necessary signatures (a WoW requirement at that time) and founded KOG, presenting it to Vern as a Christmas gift on 24 December 2008. With Lainey, the self-proclaimed “guild mom,” and Vern, the raid leader, they started recruiting raiders in order to build the kind of guild “they wanted to be in,” soon having enough members to field a team that worked successfully and at a decent pace through the then “end-game” raiding content.³

Not wishing to inflict on others the pain and injustice they themselves had experienced—they were serious gamers and being removed abruptly from their former guild was traumatic for them—Lainey and Vern created a guild with a charter of promoting good. It would be a “casual” rather than a “hardcore” raiding guild, in the sense that they would aim to raid a few times a week, but they would not require players to show up for these raids, instead respecting members’ offline lives. However, out of consideration for others in the guild and to plan more effectively, players would be asked to sign up for raids that would meet at a certain time and place in the game. Players who showed up more frequently did have a better chance to make it into the guild’s raiding rotation, but there was no severe punishment characteristic of other hardcore raiding guilds.

Though aiming to progress through WoW’s raiding content at a relatively steady pace, KOG did not generally strive to be among the first on their server (and certainly not first across all servers) to complete end-game content, as some guilds did, instead taking frequent breaks from raiding to accommodate member schedules. Likewise, light banter accompanied the sometimes necessary stricter military-like hierarchically orchestrated raid communications, with raid leaders and other members often taking responsibility for foibles and offering constructive and supportive counsel, rather than berating subordinates and pointing fingers. The guild even organized charity events, encouraging members to donate to worthy social causes. Overall, as the name suggests, the guild strived to create “good” in their members’ lives and in the world more generally, which meant respecting the guild’s motto that “real-life is more important.”

At its core, KOG has 15 committed raiders, surrounded in turn by another 35–40 individuals, typically friends and family of the raiders, who show up more occasionally in the guild via both in-game text-based chat channels and KOG’s own private Ventrilo channels. KOG has attracted members who tend to be older than the average WoW gamer—typically in their early to mid-30s or above. Likewise, with a few exceptions, the members tend to be well-educated, white, and middle class, with a relatively equal gender balance. They also tended to be gainfully employed, with core members working, for example, as a bill collector, a military contractor (who had previous service in Iraq), maintenance workers at a hotel (a husband and wife), a nursing assistant in a cardiac intensive care unit, a health insurance salesperson, an assistant manager at Walgreens, and in retail at a bookstore. One raider was a medical student, and another was in nursing school. Many of the core raiders had children, as did Lainey, one of whom himself along with his girlfriend were also KOG members. Most of KOG’s core raiders were “serious” WoW players, possessing multiple max-level characters (level 85 at the time of our research during 2011–2012). For example, one member informed us that he played over 80 hours a week and had 10 separate characters in the guild, many of them maximum level. Of note, many of these core members had left hardcore raiding guilds to join KOG, having had negative experiences like Vern and Lainey’s.

Research methods: an ethnographic approach to online game worlds

Research points to different types of guilds defined by their goals, level of ambition, intensity of activity, and required expertise and time commitment (Williams et al., 2006)—some driven by the desire for casual socializing, others by role-playing aims, and still others by varying degrees of zeal to defeat challenging WoW content or even other players (Chen, 2012; Cockshut, 2012; Nardi, 2010). As treated in this literature and also in our own research, MMO guilds can be thought of as communities or organizations with distinctive cultures, worlds (guilds) within worlds (MMOs) within worlds (life offline), so to speak, whose nested sub-cultures can be investigated ethnographically (Boellstorff et al., 2012; Snodgrass, 2014; Warmelink, 2014).

Our research team conducted participant observation research in KOG over roughly a 6-month period in fall 2011 and spring 2012, observing and documenting in field-notes KOG’s weekly raids via live Internet streams on YouTube and other online video services (and in a few instances in the actual home of this guild’s founder couple), conducting informal interviews and generally participating in and observing this guild’s online and sometimes offline activities. In addition, we conducted 21 more formal “semistructured” interviews with members of KOG about their gaming motivations and positive and negative play experiences, concentrating especially on their raiding experiences with KOG and other more “hardcore” guilds. The interviews were drawn from a convenience sample from KOG’s membership, although we interviewed all the guild’s “core” raiders. Interviews generally lasted between 30–60 minutes. Some interviews were conducted face-to-face, such as those with Lainey and Vern, who were local, although most were conducted over Ventrilo, a voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) commonly used by members of this guild. All interviews were fully transcribed and, along with field-notes, entered into and managed with the software MAXQDA.

Importantly, one of KOG’s core raiders is also a member of our research team and a co-author on this article. This member provided us with access to this unique setting, helping establish trust so that members felt comfortable revealing intimate and sometimes painful life details related to, as we’ll see, disability, war, transgender identity, single parenthood, and their (failed or realized) life ambitions (Brown, 2015). This member also helped us develop research questions and approaches, ensuring they were meaningful and of interest to insiders to this guild community, lending our project some of the qualities of participatory and community-based collaborative research (Cornwall and Jewkes, 1995). Situated in part as insiders, we can speak more authentically and self-reflexively about the lived experiences of actual WoW raiders, one of the strengths of immersive ethnographic participation demonstrated in other studies of WoW, EVE Online, and other MMOs (Brown, 2015; Nardi, 2010; Vesa, 2013; Warmelink, 2014).

By contrast, others in our research team, although typically experienced online gamers and members of the guild, were not raiders. But we did play the game with KOG’s members and, as mentioned, observed and documented in field-notes all raid activities via multiple sources (e.g. not just Twitch and YouTube broadcasts, but also WoW’s in-game text-based chat channels and the raiders’ Ventrilo conversations, to which we were privy). Still, we were usually referred to as “the researchers,” with members recognizing us as typically less committed online gamers but nevertheless potentially potent in our ability to document and frame KOG experience for an audience. Not wanting to overwhelm, we typically only sent a few researchers into any given night’s raid and limited our questioning there, refraining from talking at all during critical raid moments. We also assigned individual researchers to “shadow” and thus document the words and activities of a given raider, with more in-depth “debrief” conversations saved for after the raid. Here, more neutral outsiders of the guild’s daily activities in “naturalistic” settings, we can more objectively critique the positive and negative tenor of KOG gaming experiences—less compelled to defend the interests and character of “our” guild, a characteristic strength of ethnographic observers who maintain boundaries between themselves and their respondents (Brown, 2015; Sundén and Sveningsson, 2012).

Overall, our methodology, which is in fact a collection of methods as others have noted of ethnography (Sundén and Sveningsson, 2012), rendered us participating “auto-ethnographers” in some instances, more neutral observers and crafters of a “case study” at other moments (Brown, 2015; Warmelink, 2014). Our team approach to research did provide us with access to multiple perspectives on KOG and WoW raiding, a clear strength of our study, somewhat akin to the manner that Sundén and Sveningsson (2012) as a pair could access in both straight and queer WoW gaming, Alliance and Horde factions, PvP and PvE servers (player-vs-player and player-vs-environment), and so on. But we recognize that our arguments are still limited by our finite points of view—our particular “situatedness” and subject positions, so to speak—more dialogical conversation (between ourselves and KOG as a whole) than factual account, traits generally characteristic of ethnographic research, which we and others have written about extensively elsewhere (Boellstorff et al., 2012; Brown, 2015; Hine, 2000; Snodgrass, 2014).

Ethnographic results: a guild pursuing good and (relatively) casual raiding

Real life first

Emerging from their own negative experiences with their previous guild, Lainey and Vern promoted in KOG an ethic of “real life comes first,” which was repeated frequently to members of our research team. In part, as we learned from member Breezy, this meant relaxing raid schedules and attendance requirements, in recognition that members had other offline commitments, and not taking the game too seriously. As Breezy puts it, “I’ve changed some of my outlooks on life in general. I’ve become a bit more relaxed. Stuff that’s not serious, you shouldn’t take seriously. Just enjoy it and take it for what it is and move on.” Reflecting such an ethic, KOG frequently made concessions for players’ more serious offline commitments, for example, adjusting raid schedules when one member, BlueFalcon, had affairs to attend in Iraq, or stopping the raid progression when Vern or others, real-life students, had class projects to complete.

Likewise, as we observed, raids themselves tended to be supportive endeavors, with Vern, as raid leader, and others as well offering words of encouragement like, “Good job!,” or advice on how to improve performance, rather than punishing or embarrassing members for mistakes. As Lainey put it, on being asked about her guild by one of our research team members, Scarlett,

What kind of guild is KOG?

Where people aren’t dicks to each other. If you’ve ever been in a real hardcore raid guild, they are not nice people.

So what do you do if somebody’s not participating well?

We tend to be a little more forgiving of people, who have issues in real life. That’s why we have class leaders, we try to get people to work with their class leader. How they can get their gear better.

So it’s more like training them, rather than punishing them?

Yes. But other guilds will just punish you. Have you ever been in a guild where like they’re competing to be on the top 10 list on the server? The hardcore people are really ridiculous. They just want to do it as fast as they can. They call it “e-peen.” Their e-penis. They stroke their e-penis by having the best gear, being number one. It’s status, they have status, and they like to show it off.

Notice here that KOG has not abandoned their standards: they still strive for raiding mastery and success, checking on their members’ performance. But KOG’s senior members typically chastised others in a way that was helpful and supportive rather than punitive. They reasoned that in helping members improve they also helped the guild to improve and thus more successfully progress in the raid.

Others first

To a large extent, these patterns reflected Lainey and Vern’s own personal ethics, emerging from their life and game experiences. Lainey, the guild’s “mom” and a mother of three now grown children in her offline life, prided herself on being a supportive and generous person:

I love the social aspect of it. I really love the people that I have in my guild too. I know a lot about them. I’m guild mom. So if someone has a problem I get dumped on for hours sometimes. But it’s okay!

Lainey notes, too, how it is important to teach others to “behave like adults” and be “mindful” of others’ needs (her words), especially during the potentially most contentious moments of the game, when distributing loot or gear won at the end of even months of pitched battles against a finally defeated tough raid boss. Indeed, Lainey conceptualizes her avatar Tessa as a “benefactor” who enjoyed helping others: “I see Tessa being a benefactor for a bunch of people, and I like to be able to do good things for people, in my real world as much as I can for how much I can in game.” Though she and Vern had power and authority in the guild, she told us she did not like to order people around and “make anyone do anything,” instead trying to motivate people to be better in the sense of helpful and group- instead of “me-”oriented (her phrase). Lainey’s main character, unsurprisingly, was a healer, as this WoW class is known for their generally more supportive and generous personalities.

Likewise, Vern, too, strived to put others’ needs and feelings above his own, promoting an ethic of generosity and humility rather than hardcore competitiveness. Here’s the way the raid’s main tank, Rayna, describes Vern and his avatar Steely:

If you’ve met Steely, who is the guild leader, or Vern, he is an extremely charismatic guy, and that is one thing that I have never really mastered very well. He knows how to really pull people together and they just love him. He’s extremely humble. He’s willing to sit himself. He’ll always say that he’s not performing, and someone else can take his spot. He’s very altruistic and charitable and those are features that I really don’t possess very much.

Vern acknowledged that he could get frustrated sometimes with raid members’ mistakes and a stalled progression, but he prided himself on being a person who used his brains rather than his in-game brawn (he was a skilled player with a powerful avatar) to motivate others. Taking an analogy from youth soccer, of which he was also a coach, he told us, “You can yell at kids, but not at adults.”

Collaboration

One of our group’s researchers observed in his field-notes that “leadership” was not even the right word to describe the way Lainey, Vern, and the guild as a whole raided, echoing the observations of one of raid members themselves. As Josh noted 7 March 2012,

Overall the raid seemed to be quite laid back as most of the players were still talking about news, sports, etc., while attacking the enemy. As one pointed out, there was little to no leadership within the guild about where to go, how to attack, etc. Everyone seemed to know, for the most part, what to do in order to beat the bosses.

Josh and others, in fact, documented how the raid members knew very well each other’s style of play, strengths, and weaknesses, reflecting, in part, the fact that they had played together for so long. As such, they were often able to coordinate even difficult raids in a relatively effortless manner, with few commands necessary, cloaking any obvious signs of raid hierarchy. When the raids were working as they should, according to KOG’s members, they reflected true collective and supportive problem solving, with many to most members of the raid participating in not only the execution but also the strategizing, as documented by another in our research team:

This week the raiders are finally trying Deathwing [a boss] on the heroic level, and I immediately notice a difference in the tone of their interactions. There is much more excitement and tons of talk about strategy before they begin … Sable, Breezy, Steely, and DocMartin are most involved in the planning. They begin the raid, and it becomes apparent to me that this is really a massive team problem-solving effort. Phrases like, “Does anyone understand the mechanics?” and “Let’s divide into groups” are heard, as well as more detailed dissection of exactly what distance each player must be standing and who should be taking which hits, etc.. They wipe [fail] almost immediately and then wipe again, but they seem to be encouraging each other some. Breezy says “We’ve just got to be a little more aware overall” and jokes that they should “expect the unexpected.” Emotions are definitely running higher than on the usual normal level raids. Valissamunk begins to take a more prominent role in the strategizing. I had never heard him speak up this much.

The raid continues in an animated fashion, with raiders yelling things like, “No, no, no, dammit! and “Good job!” After trying several new approaches and wiping four or five times, they finally beat the boss, and the guild chatroom exploded with mad chatter, with the raid team and other observers too all congratulating each other and talking animatedly about the victory, reliving the action for quite a while after the actual event.

Doing good, promoting tolerance

In addition to promoting positive feelings and cooperation during raids, KOG also aimed to promote a more general ethic of support, tolerance, balance, and overall enhancing rather than compromising guild members’ offline lives and even the world more generally. The guild once solicited donations from members and others and subsequently purchased a new wheelchair for one of its members, Hadley/Sapher, who had lost a leg after being hit by a car. They even successfully gathered money for Hadley on another occasion, which paid for 7 months of her game subscription. This helped her, as one member told us, “continue playing, because she’s very confined in real life. She can’t do much. So she can run and jump and fly and do all kinds of really cool things she can’t do in real life.” Likewise, Lainey and Vern looked for members who were aiming to do good in the world, which they were asked to describe in KOG’s guild application. And members were encouraged to donate time and money to social causes, including in the past earthquake relief in Haiti and a local AIDS run. Additionally, the group’s main raiding tank, Rayna, is transgender, which provides an example of KOG’s respect and tolerance for diversity, on which many guild members prided themselves. Lainey often described to us how the guild helped Rayna find and get comfortable in her new feminine identity and “learn how to be a woman,” by, for example, spending

many hours chatting with her, about what’s going on with her life, just trying to offer her encouragement, giving her tips on nails and hair, all these things you wouldn’t really think of as having anything to do with WoW.

In fact, Lainey, Vern, and others monitored the guild chat channels for examples of homophobia, racism, or too angry of words, which they quickly shut down, aiming to maintain an environment that remained friendly and supportive for all. Overall, the guild succeeded in maintaining its particular public ethic of respect and tolerance for diversity. To a large extent, this seemed to be because the guild members understood that Lainey, Vern, and others’ hearts were in the right place. That is, they really cared for each other, we concluded, as we saw on 4 September 2012 when one raid member, Sable, was late and in fact hadn’t been logged on for 20 hours (as they could see in the game’s roster). A long and somewhat worried conversation ensued before the raid, with everyone hoping he was okay.

Still (somewhat) competitive

Nevertheless, much of KOG’s staying power and appeal to its members related to the fact that the guild was able to succeed in its promotion of good, tolerance of diversity, and so on, while also remaining competitive and successful as raiders. For example, Clark/Tracker described defeating a difficult boss as “a really good feeling, probably the best feeling I ever had in that game because it was something that not everybody could do.”

Lainey, too, was driven by achievement motivations, though for her it was more about helping the guild succeed as a whole than achieving only individual success:

Because I was a single mom, I dropped out of high school, I got a GED, and I took care of three kids and took a lot of crap from the welfare office for years, and a lot of crap from society for being the, you know, that which we consider a problem. So, it’s been good for me as far as my self-worth to be able to be successful at running a guild in World of Warcraft and to have people respect me and look up to me, because I didn’t get a lot of that in my real life until, until I started playing World of Warcraft and until I started running a guild.

Lainey continues,

For me, what I want is for my guild to achieve things and for people to see us as being a good guild. I don’t care what they think of me as a player. I’m more interested in the group, getting some kind of notoriety, I guess, because it means more that way.

In Lainey’s words, in particular, we see the ethic of camaraderie, collaboration, and group effort that animates KOG’s success: they succeed as a team together, rather than just as individuals. We see, too, KOG’s emphasis on balance, on making sure that KOG succeeds in ways that does not eclipse or compromise life offline. As Lainey puts it, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have been able to earn the degrees and stuff [laughs] if I didn’t keep some kind of balance.” Or, as guild member BlueFalcon tells us,

Most people that display maturity are well balanced. Yeah, they get upset at times or are passionate about things, however they are not completely unreasonable, like ‘I am going to spend all of my kids’ college fund playing WoW’ kind of thing.

For BlueFalcon and others, KOG helps them regulate their play in just that manner, keeping them from doing “nothing but play WoW 24/7,” as he and others have seen, even feeling at times such a pull within themselves.

Guild fragility

As mentioned, KOG’s membership is composed of many “recovering” hardcore raiders (their phrase), who joined KOG after experiencing WoW burnout. Still, sometimes KOG’s more casual pace doesn’t satisfy its members. One member, Stimpy, told us, he frequently got bored during raids, which were often not challenging, and thus surfed the Internet during them. Or, as DocMartin told us explicitly,

I wanna say for me personally, and I can’t speak for everyone, that there are times where I really would like to compete a little bit more. I think that we have a lot of good players, and I would like to see us push a little bit more. But I think that can very easily get out of control at times, and I would say that I can’t fault us for maybe not pushing so hard, cause I would rather have a good experience and a little bit more fun playing than pushing five days a week for several hours and maybe killing like one boss or something. That’s just not as much of a fun environment.

These somewhat conflicting desires led sometimes to guild tensions, as in one instance when a contingent of players suddenly and dramatically abandoned the guild in order to join groups progressing more quickly through the raid content. This left many group members perplexed as they logged into their WoW accounts to find the guild roster gutted.

This led to canceled raids over the coming nights. One member somewhat melodramatically declared to us, “This guild died.” Another “whispered” to a research team member via a private in-game chat channel:

Missy whispers: where folks will come here and use them and their generous nature to gear up and then once they have what they need, move on to a more progressed guild. It is kind of sad, because the people in this guild that I do know actually really care about it and put in a lot of work.

Another echoed this sentiment, telling us it was sad for guilds like KOG to put so much effort into individual players and then to have its members use them more as a “stepping stone” for gaining acceptance to a more hardcore raiding guild. Another described it as a “slap in the face” to the guild, when players benefitted from Vern/Steely’s and Lainey/Tessa’s kindness and then left in this manner. Eventually, the guild regrouped by concentrating on 10- rather than 25-man raids, finding success at clearing tough groups of enemies from the game, when another core member left unexpectedly, which further challenged the guild’s positive moral framework, as revealed by the following interview exchange:

Breezy: And we slowly started to restructure it and we finally got back to point where we could pretty much clear the place and we did clear it and that’s when BlueFalcon left. And I was mad at him because we had put in a lot of extra time to get him his legendary weapon and that was what ticked me off the most, is that we had gotten him the legendary. We had gone on separate special runs that weren’t scheduled just to get him the legendary. [Int: Who’s “we”?] Myself and Stee[ly], especially Stee[ly], he put in a lot of extra time there, and other members of the guild. I mean it was all guild stuff. They had put it together and gotten him his weapon. And it was like, wow, so you’re basically just taking that and ditching us now, that’s really cool [sarcastically], especially since we had just got a group back together that could go in and clear the place. But he has always been that kind of person. He’s like a child trapped in a 37-year old man’s body.

Discussion of results in relationship to the literature

Inspired by Putnam’s “bowling alone” account of online social networks, studies of MMOs have illuminated the potentially socially and psychological harmful dimensions of online realities, with MMOs problematically eclipsing offline life in importance (Ducheneaut et al., 2006; Griffiths et al., 2016; Pisan, 2007; Snodgrass et al., 2011; Yee, 2006). Ethnographers, too, have shown how WoW raiding, in particular, can be distressful. Chen (2012) describes the sometimes deep frustration and failure in his own more casual and social raiding guild, as well as interpersonal conflicts that disrupted the guild. Nardi (2010) examines how some players, spurred on in part by their guild-mates, get so “caught up in” their play as to lose balance and proportion and become “overwhelmed” by their passion for the game, even judging themselves “addicted” to WoW. And others have described how so-called “hardcore” raiding guilds’ competitive strivings and more top-down leadership and organizational styles can place their members under duress (Lisk et al., 2011; Malone, 2007; Prax, 2010).

Our ethnography does reveal that KOG’s members are vulnerable to distressful online gaming experiences, as when they are sometimes driven to pursue a more “hardcore” and achievement-oriented style of raiding, either while remaining within KOG or when moving outside of it. However, with Lainey and Vern as role models and moral guides—and under the banners of real-life and others first, leading by example, doing good, tolerance for diversity, and even social justice—KOG’s members play in ways that model their founders’ values and approach. Lainey and Vern’s thought and practice infect the guild, so to speak, creating a distinctive culture of more relaxed raiding that furthers the well-being of KOG’s members. As such, our research echoes more fully ethnographic and other scholarship illuminating how online gaming guilds create positive experiences for their members (Chen, 2012; Nardi, 2010; Sundén and Sveningsson, 2012; Vesa, 2013; Williams et al., 2006).

In cognitive anthropology, culture is understood to be that which one must know in order to function adequately in a given social system (Goodenough et al., 1996). To function effectively within KOG, members need to know—and indeed psychologically “internalize” or commit to (D’Andrade and Strauss, 1992)—this guild’s particular cultural “model” or understanding of “doing good.” These distinctive normative goals—socially learned and thus transmitted in the act of play itself and thus “cultural” in the cognitive anthropological sense of this term (D’Andrade, 1995)—importantly shape whether KOG online game-play is experienced alternately as psychosocially beneficial or harmful. That is, Lainey and Vern’s personal norms have become culturally institutionalized in thought and practice, now broadly shared in KOG as a whole rather than only evident in these two’s individual behaviors (D’Andrade, 2006).

Colloquially, Lainey and Vern are “role models,” as Rayna described them. In cognitive scientific vocabulary, they provide schematic prototypes of ideal behavior that are imitated by others (Rosch and Mervis, 1975), producing in the process KOG’s distinctive patterns of play. KOG does have other more formal governance structures—for example, they have experimented with “dragon kill points” (DKP) and other loot distribution systems (DKP offers a more formal way of keeping track of player participation and effort) (Malone, 2009). But KOG’s informal guild norms—a parallel and emergent form of governance relying largely on voluntary compliance—are particularly important in helping its members self-regulate, partially protecting raiders against even their own impulses to play harder and longer. Based in large part on these socially learned norms, KOG helps its members set reasonable limits on their hours played, thus protecting them from their sometimes own tendency “to care too much” (about raid progression), in one member’s phrasing. However, we would say that the protection is partial, in the sense that KOG raiders sometimes revert to earlier patterns of more hardcore play. As we’ve seen, KOG possesses a certain fragility, as when certain members “guild hop” into more competitive and achievement-oriented online groups.

In these terms, Putnam is not all right—or wrong—in his view of socially motivated Internet activity posing certain psychological and social risks. Such risks certainly exist, as KOG members themselves demonstrate and acknowledge, especially when speaking of their more “hardcore” raiding days. Likewise, theories counter to Putnam’s thesis proposing that online spaces are akin to the pubs or coffeehouses that came before them and thus serve precisely as the “third places”—between the first space of home and the second of work—whose loss Putnam laments are not all right (or wrong) either (Steinkuehler and Williams, 2006). Guilds can serve even socially and psychologically therapeutic third-place functions, as KOG surely does for many of its members much of the time.

Indeed, we’d suggest avoiding conceptualizing online social activity as being wholly negative or, by contrast, only positive. Full-blown techno-pessimism or optimism—and thinking of society in such simplistic terms, free from culture that shapes social relations in particular local ways—does not do justice to the complexities of life online described by ourselves and others. And our cognitive anthropological point of view makes it challenging to ever pronounce definitively on the healthfulness or lack thereof of any online social formation such as MMO guilds. For us, the key is fit—or what has been called “consonance”—between individual desires and guild culture and structure (Snodgrass et al., 2014a). Even hardcore raiding and “power gaming” more generally can lead to powerfully satisfying experiences (Cockshut, 2012; Malone, 2009). But their distinctive demands and governance styles only promote their members’ overall well-being when and if those members are ready to make the necessary offline life sacrifices to ensure online success (Chen, 2012). A similar point could be made for KOG, whose softer style would not be for everyone. And as we’ve seen, KOG member needs in fact evolve longitudinally, as evidenced when some previously “hardcore” raiders seek refuge in KOG, only to return once again to more competitive raiding environments, a point made in other studies (Chen, 2012).

Conclusion

Researchers are aware that MMO guilds take different forms—in one well-known contrast, casual treehouses compared to military-style barracks (Williams et al., 2006). However, we have never seen a guild such as KOG described in the literature nor have we encountered such a group in our own play. Chen’s (2012) guild with its ethic of “having fun, hanging out” is close, but not equivalent in its lack of KOG’s moral imperative “to do good in the world.” KOG is unique in its particular constellation of values and behaviors, and one aim of this article was to document this guild’s unique community and culture. Furthermore, we hoped to show how KOG’s culture led to particular kinds of social and self-regulation, which more typically led to positive MMO experiences because it met the particular needs and orientations of its (typically older, well-educated, and politically progressive) members. Researchers have documented the diversity of MMO guilds and social play (Cockshut, 2012; Ducheneaut et al., 2007; Nardi, 2010; Sundén and Sveningsson, 2012; Williams et al., 2006), but they have less commonly tried to understand how particular guild structures might pattern its members’ individual subjective well-being. Our research represents a step in that direction, a second aim of our ethnographic case study.

To conclude, KOG does resemble a socially productive “third place” of a kind, potentially replacing in importance for its members cafes, beer halls, and other earlier social spaces (Steinkuehler and Williams, 2006). Importantly, KOG provides the potential for both stimulating comradery and pleasure, on one hand, alongside adrenaline-induced—rather than caffeine- or alcohol-fueled—compulsion and frenzy, on the other. Cognitive anthropology directs us to avoid singular judgments on the negative or positive character of online social play in KOG or elsewhere: players must find online communities that meet their particular orientations and needs at a certain point in time, a point resonant with other MMO accounts (Cockshut, 2012; Sundén and Sveningsson, 2012). And ethnography gives us the tools to render more visible the particular cultural forces shaping positive well-being in this unique online third place, illuminating the limits of more generalizing theories such as Putnam’s.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank the Colorado State University students from the fall 2011 seminar, Cultures of Virtual Worlds: Research Methods, who helped with this research. We are also grateful to the members of The Knights of Good for allowing us into their guild and lives.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Colorado State University and its Department of Anthropology.

Notes

Author biographies

Jeffrey G Snodgrass is a professor of Anthropology at Colorado State University (CSU) and Director of the Ethnographic Research and Teaching Laboratory (ERTL) that conducted this research. The other co-authors were former CSU graduate or undergraduate student members of this lab.

Greg Batchelder is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Alabama.

Scarlett Eisenhauer is a PhD student at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Anthropology.

Lahoma Howard is in a PhD program in Sociology at CSU, where she also instructs and supervises the internship program.

HJ Francois Dengah II is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Utah State University in the Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology.

Rory Sascha Thompson completed an undergraduate degree in anthropology at CSU.

Josh Bassarear is in a Master of Arts (MA) program in Social Work at the University of Utah.

Robert J Cookson is completing a second bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Alaska Anchorage, while also working as a petroleum engineering technician for ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc.

Peter Daniel Defouw is in an MA program in Multicultural Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Colorado Denver.

Melanie Matteliano works in the private sector while also supervising summer anthropological field schools.

Colton Powell is pursuing an MA in Public Administration at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio.

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