Ahey, 
What follows is the first of a series of grass roots posts I want to write, on what being in The Haven means to me, and on what I hope it might (come to) mean to you all.
A few caveats:
Community
The Haven is a community guild... and that means what, exactly?
Well, if you look up the word Community on wikipedia, the very first paragraph mentions 94 discrete definitions of the term, dating no further back than the mid-1950's. In the meantime, dictionary.com has a few good ones. My favorite is the following:
Read through that phrase a couple of times, like I did, and you'll come to the same conclusion I did: it doesn't bloody say anything!
So if The Haven is supposed to be a community guild, what the hell does that mean, anyway? Oh, sure, you know what that means, and so does the guy next you, but if both of you are normal people, without recourse to amazing powers of long-range telepathy, chances are you won't be thinking the same thing. At all.
So, I thought I'd take this chance to share with you what the word means to me.
What a community is not
A good way for me to get started on defining community is to set up some comparisons.
1) A community is not an organization
A community's members converge into it. You can't recruit into a community. You can control the size of a community and you can control who gets left out, but you have absoloutely zero control over who gets pulled in. By the same token, you can't assign roles to community members, unless they're already willing to take on those roles. You can (and should) organize activities within a community, but you can't organize the community itself.
2) A community is not a corporation
In a community, you can't draft mission statements and plan objectives for the quarter. The most you can do is establish principles for its existence and maybe set some guiding policies. Other than that, community members will find their own place and do what feels best for them. Also, there's a rather soft limit to how many rules and regulations you can impose on a community. If you go overboard, people will simply ignore those rules, or if unable to do so, leave altogether.
3) A community is not a family
Community members stay together because it feels good or because it is useful. Love is generally not involved, nor are artificial blood or legal ties. You can expect help from fellow community members as long as it doesn't strain them too much, but it would be unfair to expect most of them to go out of their way on your behalf, even though it may happen at times.
4) A community is not a group of friends
This one may sound surprising, but what it means is that communities converge around a common starting point that is beyond who the members are. Once people are in a community, friendships can and usually will develop, at least among some of them, but friendship flows from the community, not the other way around.
What a communiy is
So. A bunch of people coalescing around common interests shared with each other, participating in activities with each other, maybe developing a friendship or five, with or without a particular goal in mind, and not subject to too much regulation. Sounds good, but even though a pattern is starting to emerge, it still doesn't tell us much.
Still, a pattern is better than nothing, and reading through that previous paragraph again, one word comes to mind: neighborhood.
Neighborhoods, especially in small towns, make great communities. People all know each other by name, they pitch in to help each other whenever appropriate and practical, they borrow sugar from each other, and chances are, the Smiths are actually friends with the Joneses down the street. On the other hand, neighborhood committees are great for planning pot luck Sunday lunches and organizing the neighborhood watch, and they may go as far as trying to dictate what kind of plants you can grow on your front lawn, but if they go too far, they simply fall into ridicule.
Community guilds
So what does this mean for us? Ultimately, what does a community guild look like?
First off, a healthy community teems with communication, and a guild is no exception. There's forums, various TeamSpeak channels, and of course, /g. Naturally, all of these have their own meaning, and it's up to each member to figure out which channels they want or need to use at any given point in time.
Then, there's shared interests. A good community will cater to as many of its members' interests as practical. For a WoW guild, this means people to level with, people to do instances with, people to do arenas, battle grounds and world PvP with, people to RP with, and of course, people to raid with. Some times, it can also just mean people to chat with and blow off some steam after a long day.
Lastly, there's planned events. The weekend raids are our particular version of the Sunday pot luck, and much like a neighborhood event, a raid requires a decent amount of organization and structure if it is to be successful. Hence, the raid leader and the master looter, and the event sign-ups and loot rules. There's other types of events as well, such as RP events like the wedding we had, once upon a time, or PvP events like the fishing extravaganza that's happened a couple of times.
Mostly, however, a community guild is about belonging and feeling at home while you're playing the game. That doesn't mean everyone has to be your best friend for life. Some times, the couple next door just doesn't feel like answering random knocks on the door, and that should be just fine. Other times, little Jimmy will come out and play, and all will be grand. Either way, for good or bad, you're home.
Of course, it's not always sun and roses. Like any community, guilds go through troubled times, every once in a while. There's a lot of reasons this might happen, but that's going beyond the scope of this post.
(There's one reason that interests me in particular, however, which is growth. But that's a subject for another post.)
Guild principles revisited
Ok, so, now you've read through all that, and a valid question is, so what? Well, like I said at the start, this is more of a groundwork post, but that doesn't mean there's not something to think about.
Namely, this feels like a good time to quote the core principles and see if they support what I've been talking about:
We don't cheat, are friendly to each other, and are helpful to each other every once in a while. Our group has a purpose, but beyond that, we play the game like we want to. What could be cleaner?
The whole of The Haven
I know that for a lot of you, most of The Haven is about the raiding. From that viewpoint, the guild must look like a collection of rather tight rules and procedures.
I know that for some of you, The Haven is about playing the game with your friends. From that viewpoint, the whole of the guild, clocking at over 300 characters belonging to probably more than 100 different accounts, is perhaps a little too overwhelming.
There's two things you need to realize:
If nothing else, I promise you'll enjoy the ride!
Cheers,
J.
What follows is the first of a series of grass roots posts I want to write, on what being in The Haven means to me, and on what I hope it might (come to) mean to you all.
A few caveats:
- First, this is not guild policy. While I did elicit feedback from the officers before posting this, it is mostly my philosophy that's here, and I do not have (and do not want) the authority to establish philosophy as policy.
- Second, I've been told that some times I come off as patronising. This happens under the most varied contexts and it always takes me by surprise when people tell me about it. If that happens here, I apologise in advance.
- Third, this particular post is mostly descriptive in nature. However, it does lay down the groundwork for the next posts in the series, so I hope you can at least have some fun reading it.
Community
The Haven is a community guild... and that means what, exactly?
Well, if you look up the word Community on wikipedia, the very first paragraph mentions 94 discrete definitions of the term, dating no further back than the mid-1950's. In the meantime, dictionary.com has a few good ones. My favorite is the following:
Read through that phrase a couple of times, like I did, and you'll come to the same conclusion I did: it doesn't bloody say anything!
So if The Haven is supposed to be a community guild, what the hell does that mean, anyway? Oh, sure, you know what that means, and so does the guy next you, but if both of you are normal people, without recourse to amazing powers of long-range telepathy, chances are you won't be thinking the same thing. At all.
So, I thought I'd take this chance to share with you what the word means to me.
What a community is not
A good way for me to get started on defining community is to set up some comparisons.
1) A community is not an organization
A community's members converge into it. You can't recruit into a community. You can control the size of a community and you can control who gets left out, but you have absoloutely zero control over who gets pulled in. By the same token, you can't assign roles to community members, unless they're already willing to take on those roles. You can (and should) organize activities within a community, but you can't organize the community itself.
2) A community is not a corporation
In a community, you can't draft mission statements and plan objectives for the quarter. The most you can do is establish principles for its existence and maybe set some guiding policies. Other than that, community members will find their own place and do what feels best for them. Also, there's a rather soft limit to how many rules and regulations you can impose on a community. If you go overboard, people will simply ignore those rules, or if unable to do so, leave altogether.
3) A community is not a family
Community members stay together because it feels good or because it is useful. Love is generally not involved, nor are artificial blood or legal ties. You can expect help from fellow community members as long as it doesn't strain them too much, but it would be unfair to expect most of them to go out of their way on your behalf, even though it may happen at times.
4) A community is not a group of friends
This one may sound surprising, but what it means is that communities converge around a common starting point that is beyond who the members are. Once people are in a community, friendships can and usually will develop, at least among some of them, but friendship flows from the community, not the other way around.
What a communiy is
So. A bunch of people coalescing around common interests shared with each other, participating in activities with each other, maybe developing a friendship or five, with or without a particular goal in mind, and not subject to too much regulation. Sounds good, but even though a pattern is starting to emerge, it still doesn't tell us much.
Still, a pattern is better than nothing, and reading through that previous paragraph again, one word comes to mind: neighborhood.
Neighborhoods, especially in small towns, make great communities. People all know each other by name, they pitch in to help each other whenever appropriate and practical, they borrow sugar from each other, and chances are, the Smiths are actually friends with the Joneses down the street. On the other hand, neighborhood committees are great for planning pot luck Sunday lunches and organizing the neighborhood watch, and they may go as far as trying to dictate what kind of plants you can grow on your front lawn, but if they go too far, they simply fall into ridicule.
Community guilds
So what does this mean for us? Ultimately, what does a community guild look like?
First off, a healthy community teems with communication, and a guild is no exception. There's forums, various TeamSpeak channels, and of course, /g. Naturally, all of these have their own meaning, and it's up to each member to figure out which channels they want or need to use at any given point in time.
Then, there's shared interests. A good community will cater to as many of its members' interests as practical. For a WoW guild, this means people to level with, people to do instances with, people to do arenas, battle grounds and world PvP with, people to RP with, and of course, people to raid with. Some times, it can also just mean people to chat with and blow off some steam after a long day.
Lastly, there's planned events. The weekend raids are our particular version of the Sunday pot luck, and much like a neighborhood event, a raid requires a decent amount of organization and structure if it is to be successful. Hence, the raid leader and the master looter, and the event sign-ups and loot rules. There's other types of events as well, such as RP events like the wedding we had, once upon a time, or PvP events like the fishing extravaganza that's happened a couple of times.
Mostly, however, a community guild is about belonging and feeling at home while you're playing the game. That doesn't mean everyone has to be your best friend for life. Some times, the couple next door just doesn't feel like answering random knocks on the door, and that should be just fine. Other times, little Jimmy will come out and play, and all will be grand. Either way, for good or bad, you're home.
Of course, it's not always sun and roses. Like any community, guilds go through troubled times, every once in a while. There's a lot of reasons this might happen, but that's going beyond the scope of this post.
(There's one reason that interests me in particular, however, which is growth. But that's a subject for another post.)
Guild principles revisited
Ok, so, now you've read through all that, and a valid question is, so what? Well, like I said at the start, this is more of a groundwork post, but that doesn't mean there's not something to think about.
Namely, this feels like a good time to quote the core principles and see if they support what I've been talking about:
We don't cheat, are friendly to each other, and are helpful to each other every once in a while. Our group has a purpose, but beyond that, we play the game like we want to. What could be cleaner?
The whole of The Haven
I know that for a lot of you, most of The Haven is about the raiding. From that viewpoint, the guild must look like a collection of rather tight rules and procedures.
I know that for some of you, The Haven is about playing the game with your friends. From that viewpoint, the whole of the guild, clocking at over 300 characters belonging to probably more than 100 different accounts, is perhaps a little too overwhelming.
There's two things you need to realize:
- One, the two paragraphs above do not represent "two sides" of this guild. They are two different ways of looking at the guild, but that separation, for those of you that see it, exists only inside your own mind.
- Two, regardless of what your viewpoint into the guild is, chances are you're a human being, again lacking those amazing powers of remote telepathy, and as such, that viewpoint is bound to be limited in one way or another.
If nothing else, I promise you'll enjoy the ride!
Cheers,
J.