Tuesday April 22 2008

We had fallen asleep in the early hours after feasting on homemade pizza and awoke from our living room quarters at around noon, Brodos on the floor, me on the sofa. Naturally, Morani and Maddok were already up.

We had known the pair of them for as long as either of us had been a part of the guild. Both members from the early days, this intelligent couple had long been popular and respected figures. Indeed, for around 18 months, Morani had been the lynch-pin of many people's in-game activities, scheduling, organising and leading the lion's share of guild raids.

Raids, for the unfamiliar, are lengthy escapades involving a group of 10 to 25 people playing co-operatively to kill a sequence of relatively tough enemies in a series of scripted encounters. Once downed, these enemies drop desirable items which can be used by certain members of the group. Lasting anything from one hour to seven, with the norm hovering somewhere around three, these endgame raids form a central part of many players' online existence, a trickle of challenges and items which fills the void left by the departure of traditional levelling once a character plateaus at the highest possible level.

I hate them. Organising other people in real life is a pain, but at least you can hit them if they turn up late or forget to bring the tickets. Online, these people are sat at their desks in their own individual lives, sprinkled across a range of different countries. They may be distracted, bored, tired, they may take an important phone call, hear a knock at the door, discover that their house is on fire or simply need to go to the toilet.

Whatever takes their attention away, it leaves between 9 and 24 of their associates tapping their feet, grumbling, even dying (in-game only, unless they're exceptionally stressed) all the while getting increasingly annoyed at the fact that the same boss keeps defeating them again and again. When it does eventually die, everyone crosses their fingers for the drop of a decent item, and whatever appears must be distributed according to some mutually agreed-upon system. Losing out is a common cause of resentment.

The difference between undertaking a basic quest - "Go and kill ten frogs," "Go look at a pond," "Give this hat to my wife," - and leading a raid is an equivalent organisational gulf to that between making two slices of toast and planning a wedding. 25 interdependent people, all ostensibly attending for fun, all under pressure and all reliant on you to micro-manage the whole scenario successfully. With the game's unusually high contingent of teenage boys, a bad raid is a veritable tinderbox of cock-waving, accusations and drama.

It is, unsurprisingly, the reason so many guilds fall apart. It is also one of the reasons ours hasn't. I tried it for two months and despised it so much I gave up raiding forever, and at that point Morani took over. She's level-headed and patient, plus her gender doesn't hurt - nothing stops a roomful of cock-wavers faster than a woman laughing at them. Except perhaps a hand grenade.

She couldn't do it, of course, without the backing of such a friendly and forgiving group of people. Every guild has had its moments of anger, outbreaks of spectacular argument which occasionally end in somebody leaving for good and insulting all and sundry on the way out. But we are luckier than most in this respect. If I had to pick one trait which identified us as a collective, I would say it was a shared sense of humour. And that leaves any social group reasonably well prepared for the slings and arrows which might be hurled in its direction. Most crises are placed in perspective once you can laugh at them.

Read from the start:
A Geek Adventure

Brodos and I had met Morani and Maddok once before, at the guild party in Reading. We already knew we were going to enjoy this part of the trip, so we felt comfortable to switch off charm duty and simply sit on somebody else's sofa, eating their food.