World of Warcraft and Voluntary associations

First off, let me apologize for my inactivity on this blog the last couple of months. Working full-time while finishing my master-thesis got me to pay full attention to those things. My World of Warcraft-career has effectively taken a beating also with 1900 rating as top rating this season but I'm hoping for season 10!

So, let's discuss some of the findings that my research have produced this far. 

In political science there has since the 1990's existed a rather interesting theory of that engagement in different voluntary associations such as football-teams, environmental organisations such as greenpeace, political parties and so on are producing good democratic outcomes such as higher voter turnout, higher political interest and stronger generalized trust for the members of those associations, something that is often termed Social Capital. This is believed to be because associations like these provide their members with a regular social interaction with people that they would otherwise not have met and thus teaching them to cooperate and solve problems between each other (for a brief overview of the theory one can read http://abs.sagepub.com/content/42/1/47.short by Dietlind Stolle or for a more thorough walk-through I would suggest the book Making Democracy Work (1993) by Robert D. Putnam).

However, during the last couple of decades research, especially in North America, have found that there has been a general decline in people engaging in these types of organisations which have been interpreted as a strong detriment to our democratic societies and this is where my research comes in. I argue that this decline is not as strong as is generally believed, but rather that the engagement in voluntary associations have moved from the formal sports and political organisations to more digital form of associations in games like World of Warcraft. Therefore my research, as a first step, focused on if one could argue that a voluntary associational-like environment could be found in World of Warcraft. 

By creating an analytical framework of what a voluntary association generally should exist of and what different aspects such an association needs in order for it to create good democractic outcomes I found that the Guilds in World of Warcraft for all thoughts and purposes consists of the same important aspects as a real-life voluntary association.

The aspects the theories proposed were:

1. Regular social interaction
2. A Common goal for the organisation
3. Organised scheduled meetings or events
4. Entry- and exit-threshold
5. Face-to-Face interaction
6. Heterogeneity (For example more ethnic diversity between the members)
7. Horizontality (Decisions taken in democratic manner)
8. Engagement-level (Most members participating in the everyday work of the organisation)
9. Large amounts of time spent in-group

 

For most of the variables the Guilds should be believed to be even stronger creators of Democratically beneficial outcomes than real-life voluntary associations due to them both providing members with more ethnically diverse settings than real-life voluntary associations and members investing large amounts of time in the guild compared to the time people spend in political parties and so on. However, what the guilds generally did not provide its members with was Face-to-Face interaction, but this could be somewhat off-set by the frequent use of Voice Communication guilds often uses. 

 

Thus I conclude that indeed it seems that the disengagement in Voluntary associations might not have been so strong as other research have previously suggested but rather moved over to a new digital arena that Social Sciences, and especially Political Science previously have overlooked, namely the MMORPG:s. The next step seems therefore to be to analyse whether or not the players of World of Warcraft have started to play World of Warcraft instead of participating in real-life voluntary associations or if they now actually have a new voluntary associational-aspect in their lives that they would not have had, had the games not existed. (The results of this analysis will follow in an upcoming blog-entry in the next couple of days. In other words, "to be continued"!

 

In the mean-time, what do you think of my results this far? Does your guild seem to fulfil the requirements of being seen as a voluntary association?

 

/Best Regards Sebastian Lundmark