What is a Gaming Clan ? 

1.   Overview 
In computer and video gaming, a clan or guild is a group of players who regularly play together in multiplayer games. The word "clan " comes from the gaelic word "clann" meaning group of children. These games range from groups of a few friends to 1000-person organizations, with a broad range of structures, goals and members. Numerous clans exist for nearly every online game available today, notably in first-person shooters, massively multiplayer games, role-playing games, and strategy games. 

Player organizations probably emerged in the earliest networked multiplayer computer games that brought together disparate groups of players, such as players in a MUD from two rival universities. The first turn-based or RPG clans were the player guilds in the first graphical MMORPG, Neverwinter Nights, which ran on AOL from 1991 through 1997. The first real-time game clans as we recognize them today were formed in 1996, around games such as Quake, Descent, and the Netmech multiplayer expansion pack for the PC game MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat. 

Starting with small groups, referring to themselves as guilds or clans, these organizations typically involved gamers playing one particular game. Around 2000, it seems that several of the larger groups formed themselves into multi-game organizations, allowing gamers to play with the same people in many different games. Some MMORPG guilds claim hundreds of members (or more), and some guilds have even obtained registered trademarks for their names. 
 
2.  Clans by structure  

2.1  Small social groups  
Most gamers organize themselves into small group of people in order to play with each other and socialize after playing the game.

Typically, these groups start suddenly, contain a handful of members, focus on a single game and have a short life span.

There typically can be hundreds or  thousands of these clans or guilds in each online game. 
 
2.2  Single-game groups 
There are also many larger, longer-lasting groups devoted to a single game. Examples can be found in every long-lasting online game, in particular, role-playing games, which have a strong social element. 

2.3  Communities 
Some gamers are organized less formally in communities, which may also contain clans or guilds. Often these communities include websites generating a fair amount of news and active forums to give the members their sense of community. It is not uncommon for a community to be based on more than one game. 

2.4  Online Gaming Groups 
Finally, there are a number of more persistent and more organized groups that field players in a variety of games. These groups share some of the characteristics of the single-game groups and communities. These are known as Online Gaming Groups (or OGG for short). 
 
2.5  E-Sports teams 
E-Sports clans are organizations created solely for competition. They are often small in size but their size is also usually determined by how many players they need to meet numbers for competing regularly. Social interaction and friendship is often a requirement for the stability of these teams but it is not the main purpose for the organization, this means that many of these teams are short lived but those who do not fall apart due to social conflicts tend to last for a long time and stay together should they change to a newer game. E-Sports teams also often have a tendency to form larger multi-game OGGs. 
 
3..  Why Gamers join clans  
Joining a clan places one within a social network which provides access to resources, knowledge, and help needed to accomplish many game related goals. In addition, banding together with like-minded players seems to fulfill a human desire for social interaction. Taken together, these two factors can vastly enhance the gameplay experience of many players.

Clan members often use a variety of methods to collaborate, communicate and improve their gameplay. 

3.1  Internet  
GetGosu.com's "Gosu" Software Platform allows clans to congregate in virtual rooms to chat or prepare for their next game.   

3.2  Voice communication 
Being able to talk to your team during a match and change tactics instantly gives an obvious advantage, but it is also widely used for chatting outside of competitive play.  GetGosu.com's "Gosu" Software Platform allows users to communicate amongst eachother or with customer support staff using integrated VOIP technology. 

3.3  Messaging 
Instant messaging by utilities such as GetGosu.com's "Gosu" Software Platform, allow gamers to write simple text messages to each other providing both have the utility and have set up an account on the system. Many games actually provide simple in-game messaging facilities. A player can send a message visible to everyone on a server, or this can be restricted to just the player's team.  

3.4  Proof of skill  
Some clans only recruit skilled players and will only recruit players who they think can help their clan win matches. It is common for a prospective clan member to be asked to prove their skill in a game, by taking a series of tests against current clan members in a private server. 

3.5  Teamwork  
In order to excel at competitive online gaming users should regularly practice with the same group of players in order to ensure that tactics and strategies can be executed in an organized and effective manner.  GetGosu.com's "Gosu" Software Platform enables users to join games of CounterStrike:Source on a pre-set team, therefore, being a member of an active clan will ensure that you are always able to find a group of like-minded players to form a team and get gaming.  If you are without a team or clan, you should seek one out, because playing with strangers will limit the effectiveness of your teamwork. 

4.    Clans by game genre 

4.1  Clans in first-person shooters  
These games initially only offered "deathmatch" play, where gameplay is focused solely on killing the characters of the other players. The popularity of clans and team-based versions of deathmatch led to the design of objective-based team games such as "bomb defusal" and "hostage rescue." 

Due to the relatively unorganized structure of first-person shooter games the players tend to take on the organization themselves. This has led to the genre generating a large number of websites to help organize these gaming communities as well as the vast number of different styles of clans in these games. Some clans are large and have loose associations with each other and may only play on public servers with each other for social reasons. At the other end of the spectrum other clans may prefer to keep a small, tight team of players and concentrate on playing competitively against other clans in arranged matches and possibly in leagues. While the clan itself provides the social element in larger clans, the social aspect for the smaller, more competitive clans comes more from interaction with other clans. 

Competition between clans is common but also takes many forms. Some clans have been known to be content with playing against each other on public servers, while others organize matches with other clans. Notably, some take this further and take part in leagues and tournaments, such as those available at GetGosu.com.  Alot of the time this is purely for fun but some of these leagues and tournaments have become fiercely competitive to the extent that practice and planning will become highly organized. This kind of competition is referred to as electronic sports (e-sports). E-sports can be purely amateur over the Internet or for large cash prizes on local area networks. This kind of competition also applies to other genres, particularly strategy games. 

Many clans have their own private servers to play their game of choice on. These are most handy for holding practice matches against other clans and other forms of practice.  The emergence of GetGosu.com has meant that clans no longer need to maintain their own servers.  Clans can now both chat and practice on GetGosu.com's secure CounterStrike Servers. 

 4.2 Realism Units 
Realism units are clans that play only in "realistic" games. Most units model themselves on military units and typically play games like Day of Defeat: Source, and Counter-Strike: Source. They often have rules and standing orders - for example, they may restrict use of a certain weapon or vehicle to members of certain ranks within the unit or require members to ask the highest ranking member for permission to use it. 

 4.3  Clans in strategy games  
Most popular multiplayer strategy games such as Warcraft III and Command and Conquer series' offer a matchmaking service to find matches provided by the publisher or developer of the game. Often these services have their own structures for organizing clans. Some of these services offer tournaments and ladders for clans to compete on either directly clan versus clan or indirectly by giving clan members points for winning 1v1 or 2v2 games and adding that to clan totals.  Expect to be able to play strategy games on GetGosu.com's "Gosu" Software Platform sometime in the near future. 

 4.4   Clans in RPGs  
Clans also exist in other genres, where they often go by a different name and serve a purpose more suited to the game. Many online massively multiplayer and computer role-playing games tend to call them 'guilds' or invent their own term (for example Star Wars Galaxies calls them 'player associations'). Earth: 2025, a web browser-based game, formerly called them 'alliances', but switched to 'clans' as the word increased in popularity. In EVE Online, they go by 'corporations', who in turn join up to form larger 'alliances'; in this game, however, the default structure and organization of corporations is defined in more detail by the developers of the game than is common in most MMOs. Lastly, in Final Fantasy XI, such clans are called 'linkshells' and players of the game have the tendency and ability to be in more than one at once. 

There are few guild versus guild tournaments in online RPGs, although the number of games with guild versus guild combat is increasing. Guilds usually are a cooperative planning and play group in these games, sometimes paralleling the functions of medieval guilds. In Neverwinter Nights, where the first such guilds appeared, they declared their own quests and scheduled cooperative play. Sometimes in MMORPGs, guilds take on the role of vigilante groups or the mafia, protecting its members from other players and guilds. These guilds form in the most literal sense in games that feature player versus player combat. 

EverQuest led to the birth of so-called überguilds, which are highly specialized guilds formed by the most dedicated players on the server for the purpose of defeating the games most difficult encounters and securing for its members all the newest and most powerful abilities and loot. These guilds typically have regimented and selective application procedures that may take into account not only the desirability of an applicant's virtual character and playing skill but also a recruit's time commitment and even, in some cases, computer hardware and bandwidth. They typically do not share strategies or admit non-members to their adventuring groups or "raids"; High-end EverQuest guilds invariably censor the in-game chat display when posting screenshots to avoid revealing sensitive information. Uberguilds often race to be the first to accomplish some particular task in the game; in the case of new items, such guilds often place their logo on screenshots of the item's properties in order to record their accomplishments. Most of these guilds, particularly in EverQuest and World of Warcraft, use an often-intricate variant of DKP to determine loot distribution. 

5.   Organization 
The larger a clan gets the more hierarchical the organizational structure tends to become. Usually there is at least a clan leader, in small teams a clan leader may only be a team captain heading the team in game and initiating discussions to solve problems. In larger clans the leader is often responsible for the entirety of organizing the clan, with a number of basic members. If the clan expands, experienced members are usually promoted and are delegated various tasks such as recruiting, disciplining rule-breakers, member training, webpage maintenance, and others. Certain clans take this type of organization to a higher level where they emulate the structure (and sometimes name) of a military unit with specific ranks, positions, and groups. These clans are usually found in shooter or MMORPG games and are referred to as realism units. 

In most games, players show the clan they belong to by using a unique tag which takes the form of a prefix or suffix tag. Tags are often enclosed in brackets or symbols and coloured differently if the game allows it. For example, in a name like "=DOE=John", "=DOE=" is the clan tag and "John" is the player's name. Some clans prefer to have a more subtle and arcane way of indicating membership, such as a simple marking in or around the name. For example, "John!!" with "John" being the player's name and "!!" being the clan's tag. In many clans, there is also a suffix, which would include your clan rank or status. For example, if John was ranked clan leader, his name might be something like =DOE=John=CL=. 

In MMORPGs and strategy games the game often features a separate mechanism used to identify the clan a player belongs to. For example in Dark Age of Camelot, the player's guild appears in full below the player's name. In games that allow players to customize their appearance (usually by picking the color of their attire), clan members might all share a similar look, or bear their clan's logo on their character's outfit. The MMORPG World of Warcraft introduced tabards, in which a guild master could customize a tabard to any look he wanted, and then guild members could buy one so they'd all be wearing guild colors.