The life and death of online gaming communities: a look at guilds in World of Warcraft

• CHI 2007 - Best paper award nominee

Because of the collaborative nature of the activities they offer, massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) can be fascinating laboratories to observe group dynamics online. In particular, players must form persistent associations or "guilds" to coordinate their actions and accomplish the games' toughest objectives. Managing a guild, however, is notoriously difficult and many do not survive very long. In this paper, we examine some of the factors that could explain the success or failure of a game guild, based on more than a year of data collected from five World of Warcraft servers (the most popular MMOG in the U.S. to date). Our focus is on structural properties of these groups, as represented by their social networks and other variables. We use this data to discuss what games can teach us about group dynamics online and, in particular, what tools and techniques could be used to better support gaming communities.

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citation

Ducheneaut, N. ; Yee, N. ; Nickell, E. ; Moore, R. J. The life and death of online gaming communities: a look at guilds in World of Warcraft. 25th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2007); 2007 April 28 - May 3; San Jose; CA. NY: ACM; 2007; 839-848.