United We Stand: Maybe Someday They’ll Write A Book Too

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

If you ask anyone who grew up playing a lot of video games, they will go on forever about what video games have done for them. When I was thirteen, I had the honor of founding a clan in the game Star Wars: Jedi Academy and the experiences that I had there have had a huge effect on my life, eventually leading me to writing this column. Video games are actually important, if not just for the reason that they take wildly different people from all over the world and bring them together into one community.

We aren’t the only ones who know that games are important either. Professors and authors from all over the world are starting to write and talk about video games and online communities. What are they talking about? Well, basically how awesome we are. Think about it: We’re using the internet to create world-spanning organizations with the purpose of encouraging teamwork and accomplishing goals. It doesn’t matter that it’s all on a virtual medium, it’s all real anyway and it’s having a big effect on us and on others. The first generation of young guild leaders is entering the workforce, how awesome is that? Let’s take a look at two of these books that are out there right now that deal with how important MMO communities have become.

For example, a book that is definitely worth picking up is Sean “Dragons” Saltzer’s The Legend of the Syndicate: A History of Online Gaming’s Premier Guild and it’s recently released sequel The Syndicate: Beyond the Legend. Yes, a guild leader got up one day and decided to write a book and it got published. These books go in-depth into the creation of a wildly successful multi game guild and are filled with lessons that any officer can apply to their guild. The Syndicate now gets hired regularly to test games and write strategy guides, and it’s perfectly reasonable to say that they have been playing SW:TOR for quite awhile now.

Another great book is Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. This book, to put it simply, is about how awesome the Internet is at forming groups. The internet eliminates cooperation costs letting people form groups with unusual purposes, like organizing gamers in a virtual world, which without the internet would be too expensive and difficult to be worth it without a large institution. This is an incredibly important development, just look at the way social media is affecting news reporting if you want proof of the important effects that groups created through the internet are having.

What does all of this awesome stuff mean? It’s surprisingly simple. Guild leaders and members, what you are doing is very important. If not for the greater scheme of things and the continued expansion of human knowledge, it’s for that one member who you reach and you change. For that one member where the experiences they will have in your guild are some of the most poignant and important experiences of their life.