There’s a little bit of the Middle Ages in some unexpected places online, and one of these is the realm of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs).
Consider the term guild. In English, the word existed from the early thirteenth century and was originally spelled yilde—combining the Old English terms for an association of craftsmen or traders, gegyld, and for a payment, gild. It denoted a privileged association which one had to pay to join, and over time came to describe the powerful associations of traders who controlled exclusive rights to particular goods or markets in a region.
Although such guilds continued to exist in vestigial form in the twentieth century, the term had become largely used to invoke a medieval setting and connotations—something that made it the perfect fodder for the pseudo-medieval worlds of online fantasy gaming, as well as for their natural preoccupation with strict hierarchies and measures of expertise.
Gaming guilds are typically headed by a “guild leader,” who wields quasi-dictatorial powers over his or her members along feudal lines. Below the guild leader exist a number of “officers,” sometimes with particular responsibilities: recruitment, the management of official guild websites or discussion forums, internal discipline. Below the officers come full “members” of the guild, while below them are “initiates” or probationary members.
As this kind of set-up suggests, gaming guilds can be every bit as concerned with pageantry and rigorous internal discipline as their antecedents. While some avowedly “casual guilds” take a laissez-faire attitude, and “social guilds” are mainly about hanging out with real or virtual friends online, serious “raiding guilds” can entail stringent application processes, financial subscriptions, and minimum attendance pledges of ten hours a week or more.
Indeed, membership of the world’s most elite gaming guilds—found perhaps above all in South Korea, where video-gaming is the country’s second most watched television sport—can be a lucrative career for a fortunate few. More than fifty million guilds are thought to have risen and fallen worldwide during the last decade of online gaming—with the milieu even breeding its own hit web comedy series, The Guild, which has attracted over 92 million views around the world for its six seasons, created between 2007 and 2012.75
Guilds aren’t the only gaming groupings around. Often, some serious gaming collectives will also refer to themselves as clans: another word rich in historical and feudal associations (it’s existed in English since the fifteenth century, originating in the Gaelic word clann meaning family or offspring).
For the most elite of all, though, it’s the process of self-naming that’s most important. Consider “The Syndicate,” a self-titled “virtual community” founded in 1996 that pointedly describes itself as something apart: “the Syndicate isn’t a guild, we are the industry leaders in gaming excellence and the most successful virtual community in the history of online gaming”—a claim only slightly undermined by the “history of the guild” section on their site, which begins: “The Syndicate is one of online gaming’s oldest and largest guilds . . .”76 Complete with its own coat of arms and motto (“In friendship we conquer”), the Syndicate boasts an online “charter” in the high medieval tradition, complete with mission statements, standards of conduct expected of members, and even an annual conference. For some modern netizens, playing games together is perhaps the world’s most serious brand of fun.