What are clans in online gaming?

If you’ve ever wandered into the competitive gaming scene, you may have noticed the existance of clans. For example, clans in Runescape will often hold wars with each other, and sometimes compete in other ways. While one may equate it to a gang or group of buddies, you probably are wondering exactly what it means.

The meaning of clans in gaming refers to the group of individuals who are connected by a certain degree of kinship, and often work towards common goals. In an MMORPG, this could mean that people aid each other in killing bosses, skilling, obtaining wealth, and offering an outlet to socialize.

In a grander scale, clans can contain subgroups of tribes, comprising thousands of people, and could be separated and sorted depending on their role in the game, gender, geographical location, and other factors.

Games sometimes have pre-determined definitions for clans within the game, and they may use other terms like guilds, gangs, or corporations (as in Eve Online). I’ve noticed through my decades of online gaming, the term clan had been used more in an organical fashion where games did not organize groups of people.

In the competitive gaming scene, clans can span across multiple games, including multiple genres. For instance, some e-sports clans had contained members in World of Warcraft, Counter Strike, and Starcraft 2 all under same domain.

It’s not uncommon for a clan to have their own website, forums, Discord or Teamspeak servers as means of independently communicating outside of games. In fact, it is probably more reliable to not depend on in-game communication for the sake of longevity.

Clans in Real Life

A Clan is an organization that pursues a purpose, the members of which have in common a series of characteristics that make them faithful to the cause that keeps them constituted as a group.

Generally, people who are members of a clan have a strong bond of friendship or family, tragic episodes that mark life are usually those that define the behavior and similarity between the beliefs of one person and another within a clan.

Etymologically, the term Clan comes from the Scottish Gaelic Clann which means "Descent" and in turn is related to family trees, so we can deduce that clans are organizations that in their time were only made up of members of a family or a very small or close social nucleus.

What About Clash of Clans?

I think when people think about clans in the context of gaming, the game “Clash of Clans” comes to mind. While it is more of a title than it is related to this article, it does display the perfect outline of clans in a strategy game.

Clash of Clans is a real-time military strategy game with a medieval and multiplayer setting, designed for mobile devices with the Android and iOS operating systems. The main objective is that the player builds a community that will have to protect, essentially a village, which will also serve to form and train troops, which will intervene in the dynamics of war. Thus, with this army, he will face his adversaries in order to conquer territories.

The resources to support the workers and soldiers in charge of the user are obtained from obtaining gold, elixir and dark elixir, the goods available in the game. These materials are used to have enough money to buy food, facilities and better military units, is the way we can progress properly in the game.

Clash of Clans has been developed by the Finnish company Supercell, and will be launched for the Apple platform in 2012 and for Google's in 2013. Since its inception, it has received excellent reviews and has turned out to be one of the studio's best products, since this and another title have earned them around two and a half million dollars a day in different periods.

Within the game, you can also have “clans” with other people around the world, so it’s not just NPC clans within the game. There are sometimes clans spanning hundreds of members, and often are linked by geographical location.