The Guilds Part 2: The Guild of Greeters

The Greeters have suffered similarly to the Maintainers in that their membership and activity has dwindled. The key difference here is that the Greeters appear to not recognize this as a problem. Ja’de, the GoG’s current leader, herself told me the GoG was trying to decide whether this was an issue. It’s an issue. That they were “debating” something as plainly obvious as this struck me as like debating whether fire hurts. In some ways, the Greeters are what the Maintainers will become without Marcus’ recruitment drive.

Another important difference is history. The GoG is old, in existence since 2003. Unlike all the other Guilds, the Greeters existed long before Cyan re-introduced the Guilds (though the Writer-like Age-creators existed in the form of H’uru before the Guilds were announced as well). This contributes to the Greeters’ unique mix of issues. Another difference is organization. More than any other Guild, the Greeters are a private club. You cannot just become a Greeter, they have evaluations, etc. which (they claim) have served them well.

But here lies the problem. The clubhouse population is growing sparse. I recently popped into Uru and there were no Greeters. The hood was empty (or occasionally had a new player or two, never Greeters) and there were no greeters in the city. This is due in no small part to the Guild’s recruitment policy. It’s nice that some random person can’t come in and claim to be a Greeter and then harass another player, but this also stops new people in general from feeling like they can contribute. The rules and processes initially meant to maintain a professional staff have led to the Guild being a closed group living off a dwindling membership. This closed-ness extends to opinions about Uru, with few Greeters publicly disagreeing the the Guild views on Cyan, Uru, and the Guild practices themselves. There is no dissent in the Greeters, at least none the public can see.

The other issue is that the Guild members that do exist seem more pre-occupied with other franchises. Like with the Maintainers, it’s nice to have people advertising Uru in other games, but in this case (and, I would argue, the Maintainers’) it serves as a distraction. When a Greeter has some spare time, they choose between Uru (which is often empty) and another franchise. They are already predisposed to choose another game because those games have more people, but the choice is made even simpler when the Greeters claim they have a foothold in that game (World of Greeters).

The source of these problems, I would argue, is the Greeter’s official sanction by Cyan. Ignoring the favoritism charges, being made official comes with restrictions that hamper the Guild’s development. Being official keeps the Guild from accepting people out of liability concerns. Moreover, these liability concerns can be used to exclude those who disagree with the Guild. The Greeters would benefit from relieving itself from Cyan’s sanction because they would be able to relax their rules. Of course, the question is: would they?

This gets to another source of problems: the Guild’s leadership itself. As I mentioned at the start of this piece, Ja’de once said that the GoG wasn’t sure if a low membership was a problem. Since there have been no recruitment drives that I have seen, I have to believe that this faulty idea persists. If the Guild is not led by strong individuals who can recognize problems, then the Guild is doomed. If the present leadership is too proud to ask for help or too closed-minded to accept new ideas, then either the present leadership should be replaced or a new Guild should be formed- one dedicated to helping explorers in an open manner rather than trying to run a private treehouse help service.

This idea has its roots in the equally preposterous idea that Uru is destined to be small. Many use that view as a crutch to keep the community small, or to explain away critiques of the game. That, because we are non-violent we must be an unpopular or “niche” game. This is a lie. Uru and MYST in general are small because we have allowed them to become small. With the success of Portal and other primarily non-violent puzzle-oriented games, this idea that non-violent games are shunned is laid bare as false. Why shouldn’t Uru be successful and widespread? We’re the most difficult-to-kill community out there not because of how small or strange we are, but because of how dynamic and creative we are. The “hackers” who made UU possible, who developed the plugin for Blender, did not believe that Uru must be small. They believed that Uru was a powerful idea that needed its users to succeed. So why do we insist on thinking so cynically that Uru is too out of the mainstream to warrant a large following? Why do we limit ourselves based on the notions of violent vs. non-violent games? It doesn’t do Uru, MYST, non-violent video games, and video games in general any good if we insist on defining “mainstream” or “popular” as “violent.” Certainly violent video games are portrayed as more popular because they appeal to the most basic desire, but that’s a discussion for another day.

To bring this back to the Greeters, there’s no reason why the Guild should not be large and open. There is no reason besides misplaced paranoia of troublemakers and misguided pride in Cyan sanction that registration to be a Greeter should not be more open. There will be troublemakers in every organization and every group. This applies in the world outside Uru and inside. People should be warned that Greeters may be just as troublemaking as others, but that they are less likely to be so because they are recruited to help new people. In other words: there will be troublemakers, stop trying to figure out how to eliminate them and focus on how to keep them from reaching their goals.

Finally, this cannot be stressed enough: the GoG should be more open. Nobody wins when the fan help service is placed behind these sorts of barriers. The fans will feel the extra scrutiny means they deserve a better experience than the one they’re having. The volunteers feel they’re either being accepted into a needlessly proud organization or being forced to jump through hoops to serve the game they love. What if people were allowed to register to be a greeter simply by picking up the shirt, but were “promoted” based on reviews from the people they helped? A greeter does their job and politely asks that the person they helped if they would consider contacting person X or going to site Y to tell the Guild how their experience went. Then the Guild would get at least some information on how effective both the greeter and the Guild itself is in helping people. The key in this is to actually take the advice. Don’t just blow off my critique because it’s not showering you with praise. Take criticism, even “destructive criticism,” and ask yourself how the Guild or the individual greeter could make the experience better. You may not fix the problem the way the reviewer wants it fixed, but you’ll resolve the issue.

 

Filed under: The Guilds, community, cyan, guilds, myst, open source, uru