The Guild

Today is more of a rave than a rant. I spent yesterday watching all the webisodes of The Guild. How did I not hear of this earlier? Of course, I always thought a show about gamers would be sort of boring. I mean, how exciting is it to watch people sit at their computers, play games and talk to people. But then, the Big Bang Theory is evidence that shows about nerds (who game) can be successful, so anything is possible.

Now the Guild is a little different from "typical" gamers, imo. It is written by a gamer (a female one to boot!), so it has the lifestyle and terminology pretty much down. But its about a group of local gamers, who can meet and interact in person. That's not too typical. Certainly in my own experience, members of one's guild run across the country and sometimes even across the world (hello to my hubby from France, whom I met playing EQ). Also, most of the time, the gamers rarely, if ever, meet other players. I've met some of the people in my guilds, we actually planned a vacation to New Orleans for Mardi Gras with a bunch of them (and yes, at first we did call each other by our character names, rather than our real names). That was a real blast! But I've never met most of my good guildy friends.

But like The Guild, the majority of my social interactions (at least several years ago) was through my on line guild friends. And they ran the gauntlet of power gamers, flirts, rules lawyers, auction studs, casual players, 'goody goods', role players, etc. My life a few years ago, was pretty much rushing home from work to log on and spending the rest of the evening and most of the weekends playing. We used to eat while gaming, using quick raid breaks to throw clothes in the laundry or nuke food. I know a lot of my guild buddies skipped classes, called in sick to work and spent the vast majority of their time on line. I was never quite that bad, but I will admit that when I had my first child, it was challenging to play and breastfeed at the same time.

Our life revolved around playing the game for several years, doing raids with our guild, completing epic quests, leveling our characters. When my husband was in France for four months waiting for his visa to be approved, during my first winter in Philly, I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't been able to speak with my guild mates. I only knew a couple of people in Philly (also gamers, but neither were playing much at that time), so having the social interactions with my guildmates through that long cold dark time really kept me from being incredibly lonely.

We had the best guild in EQ, Legions of Darkness. It was one of the top guilds on the Innoruuk server and in the game. It was great being a part of great group of players, who knew how to play and were dedicated to the game. Even now, many years later, we're still in touch with people with whom we played. We continue to play other games, WoW, EQ2, Vanguard. Even those that don't play as much are my Facebook friends, so we can still keep in touch.

We haven't played much recently, most of our gamer friends have stopped playing for various reasons, and some like one game better while other friends like different games. Breaks always seem to happen when hubby and I go on an extended family visiting vacation. At the moment, we haven't played our on-line games in nearly four months, which is a pretty long time for us. Maybe after our Christmas vacation, we'll contact some of friends and play again. I hear both EQ2 and WoW have expansions out or coming out that we haven't tried yet.

For anyone that has played MMORPG and been in a guild, The Guild webisodes are a little microcosm of that life. They are pretty spot on with the types of people that play (some exaggerations of course) and how gamers react with each other. The three seasons (plus extras - the Christmas ones are great) take a few hours to watch, even though the episodes are like six minutes apiece (12 episodes per season). Definitely brings back memories.