Mac_Fife, I think many fans have thinking similar to yours. The guilds have no real authority or say. They are just groups of people doing whatever they do.
I think most fans have the ‘guild idea’ upside down in that they seem to think it is the organization of the guild that is doing anything. The fans are doing things. They organize, and I use that word loosely, to support what they are doing and label that a guild. None of the guilds are doing anything that OU is not doing. Here fans have decided titles, ranks, privileges, participation, and etc. are not important and are to be mostly avoided… well… not participation. In that regard, while participation is important it is that it is based on individual choice not a set of qualifications and control.
To answer your ‘why’ question about recreating a plutocracy… there is no reason other than many fans thought it would be fun. It’s just what they did. It may well be that a future plutocracy will develop around those that run servers. I’m not sure what other social organization name will fit.
I agree with you that the ‘guilds’ idea gives players another ‘thing’ to figure out. Most seem to misunderstand how guilds work in Uru and they certainly seem to get lost in the historic, IC, and OOC distinctions of guilds. That alone is a good reason to avoid them. BUT… I think if there were no guilds in the Uru fan community new players would form them. It seems to be a natural spin off of Uru.
The guilds, membership, and the clicks of people that form and run guilds brings with it all the problems of personalities clashing. But whether we call them guilds or not we are going to have some measure of drama simply because that is the way people are. We can see that in open source projects, politics, any fan group, and any other social grouping you can think of.
Rank within the guilds is arbitrary. Over time I have learned the majority of people want some measure of rank or status. As Dot pointed out, some people need some structure to roll well. Whether that is just ego, a by-product of their social learning in RL, or what I am unsure. When the GoC was set up the rules were written so people could see that rank and status reflected what actually gave people rank and status in the OOC community, basically service to the community.
While there is nothing to keep anyone from deciding to say they are a member of a guild, most people seem hesitant to do that. Something is needed to give them permission, even though they do not need it… They also needed some way to advance. In the GoC we wrote those out. One could just do a map and decide to say they are a master in the GoC, or even skip the map. But, by posting rules people can self advance and play within a structure. It is there for those that need or want it. Most people seem to prefer that. All the guild can ever do is go through the IC motions of acknowledging the accomplishment and pronouncing them whatever.
To me a bizarre aspect of the guild issues is that anyone thinks they can keep another from participating. It just boggles my mind. More worrying to me is that others think they can be kept from participating in the community. I understand one could be excluded from some small group within the community. But, the majority of the community is open to all.
Do writers fit in? I think they do. The obstacles you point out are rational. I see becoming a writer and learning the art as the IC side of the OOC process of learning modeling and programming to write an age. For the parallel to work one must be able to learn the D’ni art IC’ly as they learn Blender OOC’ly.
The part of the IC story that possibly conflicts is whether we just find ages or open new ages created by current day writers. So far I think it has been a matter of finding old D’ni ages. But we have fans writing those as if they are just newly discovered ages. In that line I see where it would be an IC matter of having not yet learned to write ages. But as soon as someone wants to make a current day age with the Plasma engine… then it would seem the IC story would support someone having learned the Art.
More on Jamey’s topic… with Mac_Fife’s ideas… getting the guilds/fans organized to work together is what I was considering when I deiced to start
Standards for Discussion & Debate. I see the problems as less about guilds and more about people and how they interact. We know we have a small group of socially challenged people creating problems in the community. We can ascribe those problems to guilds and try to fix the guilds. I expect that to be none productive, as we have been there and done that before. I am hopping SD&D is targeted at the cause more than the symptoms.