Lin, et al.
Holin Lin, Chuen-Tsai Sun, Hong-Hong Tinn
Social Enclave and Cooperation in Online Gaming
- Exploring Clan Culture
Online Multi-player games are community-oriented. One of the most distinctive phenomena in online gaming environment is clan culture. In the game world, players form groups to attack monsters together, share goods and honors, and combat against other clans. Clan is an economic unit in which players organize collective actions to carry out missions that are difficult to accomplish by individual. On the other hand, clan members are constantly in competition with each other to achieve higher goals for individuals. Clan is also a social unit in which members make friends, try to move upward to higher ranks in a power hierarchy, and develop norms for insiders to follow.
Considering that many clans only have an "oral commitment" from their members, we should be surprised by the very stability and daily operation of such system, and the degree of loyalty many clans enjoy from their members. In this study, we want to explore how diverse gamers create their social enclaves in an online environment, and how rules and norms are created to make the cooperation among characters possible.
Our research question is three-folded. First, how a clan is formed? What are the incentives for players/characters to join a clan? What are the principles of including/excluding clan members? Second, how is cooperation made possible among anonymous clan members? What are the mechanisms that help to guarantee this? What functions do status hierarchy and community rules perform in such a process? Third, how do such constant competition and cooperation co-exist in the gaming community?
To explore the above issues, the oldest and the most populated online multi-player RPG game in Taiwan, "Lineage", will be used as our major site for participant observation. In-depth interviews of clan members from Lineage will be used to collect additional data.
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