There are no guilds on the web

This week is Project Tron Week whereby I slowly plug back into the grid. Not the World of Warcraft grid but the grid known as the World Wide Web. If this sounds trivial to you it's probably because you only have one email address and a facebook account. I've been working and living online for over a decade and have accounts and email addresses and online presence scattered about nearly everywhere. Having abandoned all of them for well over a year, slogging through long-neglected inboxes, updating profiles and culling friends' lists across a dozen services really is a week long project. The bulk of the task is fairly monotonous so I'm having plenty of time to notice parallels and differences between existence on "the web" and existence in WoW.

For starters, fewer people seem to play the web. Objectively this is almost certainly false, but as I click through twitter streams, flickr galleries and LinkedIn connections (I am setting aside a whole day to cope with my return to facebook later in the week) there is, as there always has been, a shocking redundancy in the people. There must be a math formula somewhere which asserts that most social networks max out a certain number of people within two degrees of separation, but it's tangibly obvious. Even after nearly two years' hiatus from twitter, the sheer number of icons I recognize by sight is disconcerting. There is a large pool of people whom I've never met yet remain familiar to me by name and/or icon avatar merely by their repetitious occurrence as friends of friends. My awareness of these people mirrors my familiarity with "strangers" in WoW -- where a "stranger" is defined as someone with whom I've never grouped but perhaps only encountered in Trade chat or simply stood next to repeatedly in the Auction House.

While this stranger recognition phenomenon on the web parallels that of my gaming experience, one thing I instantly noticed missing from the web are Guilds. Nothing on the web -- yet -- precisely parallels the gaming Guild. I mentioned this to a friend over lunch today and, because she is both a savvy product developer and a non-gamer, we had an interesting conversation trying to figure out what it was I meant by saying "there are no guilds on the web."

That statement is nothing more than my raw, intuitive response diving back into the myriad of social networks I'd left behind, but I, again, intuitively feel there's truth to it. It's far from clear to me whether not "guilds" could even exist in something so fundamentally unconstrained as the so-called real life that the web purports to reflect. It's even less clear whether web guilds would even fill a positive function. My gut instinct is that they most likely wouldn't because there is something fundamentally impossible about it.

Guilds serve nearly as many functions as there are guilds, which makes their role difficult to explain to a non-gamer. From an extremely high level perspective, gaming is about goals and it's not too much of a stretch to say that a guild reflects those goals. There are raiding guilds and pvp guilds and role playing guilds and real-life-friends-only guilds -- though realistically few, if any, guilds are comprised exclusively of members with such narrow goal-sets. Nonetheless, an association with a "raiding guild" versus a "small friends guild" communicates something about the individual player that goes beyond other observable cues (gear, class and name choice, profession skills, etc). Over time, guilds become recognizable to the larger server population and every player accrues stereotypes and expectations they associate with members of a given guild. College fraternities and sororities are one real-world example of this type of stereotyping-by-association. Whether through rumor or exposure to individuals, greek houses have simplified reputations: "they're a party frat," "they're all artsy," etc.

"How is this different than facebook groups? How is it different than my friends list? What function could guilds possibly serve on the web?" my friend asked at lunch. You can belong to many groups on facebook but you can only ever be in one guild at a time. This is a restriction of the game most take for granted though its merits are occasionally debated in forums. You can only belong to one greek house, you can, generally speaking, only live in one neighborhood, work for one company; you can only drive one car at a time. However, none of those is particularly strong metaphor and I'm not precisely sure why.

The second question is easier to answer. Leaving aside the fact that one's friends' list in WoW isn't visible to other players (in contrast to twitter et al.), a friends' list is, obviously, a list of other players one enjoys. "Then why aren't you in the same guild?" Just because I enjoy playing with a given individual in no way means I want to be part of their guild or vice versa. Friends' lists in general make overlapping venn diagrams of infinite complexity. A friends' list could only be likened to a guild insofar as it's a guild defined solely by the list owner. While many services force mutual consent on a friends' list (i.e., I can't add you unless you allow it), that consent is very one-to-one and in no way implies that Friend 1 wants anything to do with Friend 9. While many guilds in fact work that way, by in large they lean more toward a many-to-many model than one-to-many.

The last question, "what function could a guild possibly serve on the web?" is almost beyond my capacity to answer. I simply haven't thought about it for long enough. But I can make a preliminary stab given a few thought constraints. Given a site that rates the popularity of locations (Yelp comes to mind) in an extremely time-sensitive manner (Dodgeball/Foursquare comes to mind), I can imagine functionality for a guild-like feature that no reasonable friends list could replicate. I can imagine this in terms of goals. It's Saturday afternoon and I want to know what's popular; what's popular to my 20-something single friends is almost guaranteed to be totally unlike what's popular with my friends with toddlers. "Three of your friends are at the puppet show. Four of your friends are off mountain biking. Three of your friends are getting drunk at the free rave in the park. Two of your friends are at the giant clothing sale downtown." That information is interesting in one light, because it presents me with a number of activity options, but it doesn't carry the same weight as if I knew, say, 90% of the Shopaholics Guild is at the clothing sale (which would say to me, "that must be a really good sale"). Where this imaginary functionality falls apart in the face of reality is that I can't see individuals willingly associating themselves with single-stereotype groups. It's relatively easy to make this kind of association within the context of a game because a game is already an isolated activity-type with guild-identification feeling more like a refinement than a gross personality reduction.

Looked at from a different angle, it also seems obvious that guilds are missing from the web because overt competition is missing from the web. There is no drive to "win" the web, there is no progression. A game guild with game-specific goals (mostly just raiding I suppose) can be objectively measured. There are any number of websites which assign "gear scores" to players and guilds and track guild achievements such as defeating successively more difficult game challenges (instances, raid bosses, etc.). Driven guilds work together to master various accomplishments. This maps relatively badly to real life. "94% of your guild owns a home!" "Avg player baby score: 1.3!" "Total meals eaten out this week: 484!" Aside from, perhaps, sports-inclined people ("Your guild has climbed a total of 8,204 vertical feet this week!") or eco-causes ("Team Green has saved 4.3 cubic pounds of carbon!") it seems that applying objective measures to people's collective personal lives is probably a horrible idea.