A New Kind of Guild

Every once in a while, the blog (yes, this one) comes up as a topic of conversation in guildchat. Usually, someone thinks I should write about them (they don’t really want me to write about them, they just think they do) or I didn’t properly emphasize their role in a successful guild adventure.

Like that nice epic weapon I got a few weeks back. It was one of the guild dudes that gave the wrong directions to our camp and sent me running hellbent into that named NPC’s lap. Although, as he remembers it now, he did that on purpose.

Our involuntarily-elected guildleader wondered aloud one night, what the future of gaming and blogging will hold. Maybe every guild will have an active blogger in its ranks, or taken further, maybe entire guilds will have bloggers as members.

I think we can all agree that would be disastrous:

Any minor disagreement between members would be immediately followed by a threat to “blog that shit.” ex. “That’s it dude. I’m blogging this shit.” Obviously, outsiders would be regularly threatened by guildmembers with a promise of “blogging that shit” if they don’t cooperate with camps, spawns, etc.

Members would spend inordinate amounts of time taking screenshots of everything. If someone is delayed, or falls behind running to a camp, the others would immediately suspect he was taking screenshots and run back to see what he had found.

Eventually, blogging could become so ingrained in that guild’s culture, they may never accomplish anything in game. Everyone would be alt-tabbed out of game to blog everything.

Somebody would design a tool to live blog all the gaming chat thereby ensuring that his/her/its blog never missed a single exciting moment of the gaming session. Of course, this would lead to chat spam like we’ve never experienced before with constant blog narration in game. “We are now attempting to clear the camp at the dungeon entrance. Our puller approaches the first mob. I’m so excited my nipples are hard.” (Sex sells.)

There’s only so much room for live, moment-by-moment, game blogs — some of the bloggers would have to move into niche blogging. Ex. “I hate PlayerX” blogs, “I hate everyone” blogs, “We’re the best guild ever” blogs (o wait, FoH has already done that to death), “I have sex with guildmembers” blogs, “Gaming fashion” blogs, “Game quests that can suck me off” blogs … the niches are limitless.

A new kind of AFK. We already have the “bio AFK”, the “smoking AFK”, the “/pizza AFK” and the ominously-vague “afkfas” — the “blogging AFK” cannot be far behind and would trump them all in afk length. Sometimes the words just won’t come.

Seems to me, one blogger per guild is plenty. Although to hear my guild talk some nights, one blogger is one too many.

5 thoughts on “A New Kind of Guild

  1. “Eventually, blogging could become so ingrained in that guild’s culture, they may never accomplish anything in game. Everyone would be alt-tabbed out of game to blog everything.”

    Consider the results if they all have two monitors. And/or, a microphone hooked into a speech-to-text program. Live! From the front!

    Chilling, really.

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  3. I have already contemplated this sort of feature. I’ve checked out the Combat Stats app for EQ2 (not that useful, but these types of apps are interesting nonetheless) and it monitors what is dumped to file via the /log cmd. This dumps text to a file, and Combat Stats intelligently parses the text to regurgitate back some stats by doing some simple math and such.

    It would not be hard to parse the same file triggering off of key words in a guild chat or group chat that trigger it to blog something. Heck, you could even have it monitor for new screenshot files to embed them in the blogged text.

    This would be like having an embeded news reporter on the frontlines… but we’d become innondated by countless gammer’s blogs with useless “I saw the named Gnoll of Uberville today, I pooped myself because he was a Heroic encounter and sadly today… I am flying solo.” accompanied by a screenshot or 30 of this great day in history. While cool, I dunno if this would have much appeal for anyone other than yourself, your guildmates, and perhaps a handful of friends… but it might still be something that’d be quite popular.

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