Demystifying guilds: MMORPG-playing and norms

One of the most influential gaming trends today, Massively Multi Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), poses new questions about the interaction between the players in the game. Previous work has introduced concepts such as community, commons, and social dilemma to analyze situations where individual choices may result in suboptimal global results. We propose to use the concept of norms instead. Modelling the players and groups of players in these games as normative systems with the possibility to create norms and sanction norm violations, we can analyze the different kind of norms that may deal with the trade-off between individuals, groups, and society at large. We argue that our model adds complexity where we find earlier concepts lacking some descriptive or overstretching when trying to analyze the balance between individual players and the game playing society. Author