Posted by TwinHits | 6 Comments

United We Stand: I Swear They’re Real Friends!

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.

I can only imagine the difficulty that my parents have when they explain to their friends what their son is doing in college and what he wants to do with this life. I think half of it is simply a lack of a frame of reference; I imagine that what I say here only really resounds with those who have had a lot of experience with online communities. The other half I think is a misunderstanding, a faulty assumption on the part of the listener. Unfortunately for us, the news media and first impressions are not helping us very much in arguing that online communities are important. First among the false impressions is that what takes place online is not real because it takes place in a virtual world, interaction and relationships only matter in the physical world.

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Posted by TwinHits | 9 Comments

United We Stand: Show Them A Love They Can Never Destroy

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.

I find that I often have trouble explaining to others how much I love stuff like Star Wars: The Old Republic, guilds, E-sports, etc and I don’t think I’m the only person that has this kind of problem either. All the time I hear about disgruntled nerds how they can’t find or don’t think there are others who love and understand video games the same way they do. If they don’t say it, then they just act ashamed. Oftentimes then you pass off this shame onto others, blaming them for being shallow and not looking underneath the surface to find a “truly nice person”. I’m sure it’s not true if I were to say that I have never been one of these people, but for me it seems like there are always more people out there that understand then you would at first expect.

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Posted by TwinHits | 2 Comments

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.

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Posted by TwinHits | 4 Comments

United We Stand: Broadly And Wisely

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi mini-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.

Come to think of it, it really is a grand adventure that we are starting on. We have no idea what kinds of experiences we will have in SW:TOR, no idea what kind of people we will meet, or what kind feats we will accomplish. It’s not really very useful to look back at any other MMO experiences for this because we’re now older, more experienced, and, at a personal level, are approaching this game from a much different point of view. Because this is a grand adventure we must prepare, and we must prepare wisely. No where else is this more important than in preparing the most critical player construct in an MMO community. We must proceed from this point with a considerable amount of caution and wisdom if we wish to construct well organized guilds and maintain a strong player community.

Honestly, we do not know very much about what guilds are going to look like in this game or what kind of tools the game is going to provide us. Pretty much everything that we know is contained in this picture which I stole from the guilds page in the game systems section of the official website.

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Posted by TwinHits | 13 Comments

United We Stand: A Rather Lofty Goal

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi mini-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.

Sometimes we forget that we are not the only one playing our game. Sometimes, it’s a story that we read alone, a task we do by ourselves. It’s easy to forget that around the world, millions of others just like us are having the same parallel experience. They are experiencing the same worlds, the same stories, and the same adventures without an effect on our own experience. But Star Wars: The Old Republic is different; it’s not something we can take on alone. Already the community is millions of players large, a small segment of that finding this website and maybe even this column, but all of them sure that this game is not one that they are to take on alone, but together.

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