by E. Michael Hutchison

Created on: January 19, 2007   Last Updated: April 12, 2007

With the introduction of the internet into the daily lives of the masses, the inception of a "virtual reality," long a favored concept in science fiction and other forms of story telling was inevitable. The new virtual reality seems to have come to us in the form of the Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (The MMORPG for short), most popularly, Blizzard's World of Warcraft (Or WoW .). WoW provides gamers with hours and hours of entertainment in a fantasy world occupied by "Dungeons and Dragons" and "Lord of the Rings" style scenarios and characters, but the social implications of the game cause it to take on a setting that looks less like a virtual reality and more like an alternate dimension. Much can be learned about the current state of humanity by studying the events of any WoW server, and how some players managed to manipulate the reality of the World designed by Blizzard in such a manner that benefited the few and the powerful, and kept the game from being fun for the masses.

The game setting is a familiar one: You take on the role of a virtual character (Anything from human to undead to the minotaur-like tauren), you kill monsters and carry out quests for experience, you hit your maximum level, at which point you gather with larger groups of people in order to destroy massive bosses with high-quality treasure rewards.

It all sounds very cut-and-dry, but upon reaching end-game is when most players find they run into problems progressing through the game. Once you reach the maximum level of 60, you can not progress further into the game without a large group of people. The very first end-game dungeon requires ten people, two of them require twenty, and the most difficult dungeons (With the best treasure) require a whopping forty people. Such a demand for people in MMORPG's gave rise to the concept of the guild.

The purpose of a guild is to play together and "raid" the most difficult dungeons together under a common moniker for the purpose of conquering end-game content. The most successful guilds treat the game as more of a job than a game, and this professional (Nicknamed "leet") attitude is necessary in order to keep moving forward regularly. For a guild to progress through the first forty-man dungeon, it means night after night of six to eight hour practice sessions with (Ideally) the SAME GROUP of forty people until your practice finally pays off and all forty of you have mastered your role in this dungeon then you start all over again in

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