Guild

A guild /ɡɪld/ is an association of artisans or merchants who control the practice of their craft in a particular town. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of tradesmen. They were organized in a manner something between a professional association, trade union, a cartel, and a secret society. They often depended on grants of letters patent by a monarch or other authority to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials. A lasting legacy of traditional guilds are the guildhalls constructed and used as meeting places.

An important result of the guild framework was the emergence of universities at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford around the year 1200; they originated as guilds of students as at Bologna, or of masters as at Paris.

Early guildlike associations

In medieval cities, craftsmen tended to form associations based on their trades, confraternities of textile workers, masons, carpenters, carvers, glass workers, each of whom controlled secrets of traditionally imparted technology, the "arts" or "mysteries" of their crafts. Usually the founders were free independent master craftsmen who hired apprentices.

Clan (video games)

In computer and video gaming, a clan, guild or faction is an organized group of players that regularly play together in one or more multiplayer games. These games range from groups of a few friends to 4000-person organizations, with a broad range of structures, goals and members. The lifespan of a clan also varies considerably, from a few weeks to over a decade. Numerous clans exist for nearly every online game available today, notably in first-person shooters, massively multiplayer games, role-playing video games, and strategy games. There are also meta-groups that span a wide variety of games.

It is commonly argued that a "clan" or "guild" becomes like a family, and that all opinions and decisions represent each single member in the "clan" or "guild". Clans also tend to have a "try outs" initiation system established to weed out those who might not share common interest. A variety of methodical initiations are user-generated challenges ranging from jump courses, in-game achievement hunting.

Guild (ecology)

A guild (or ecological guild) is any group of species that exploit the same resources, often in related ways. It does not follow that the species within a guild occupy the same, or even similar, ecological niches. Guilds are defined according to the locations, the attributes, and the activities of their component species; for example, their mode of acquiring nutrients, their mobility, and the zones of their habitat that they occupy or otherwise exploit. The number of guilds occupying an ecosystem is termed its disparity. Members of a guild within a given ecology could be competing for some resources (such as space or light), while cooperating in resisting wind stresses, attracting pollinators, or detecting predators, such as happens among savannah-dwelling antelope and zebra.

A guild does not typically have strict, or even clearly defined boundaries. A broadly defined guild will practically always have constituent guilds; for example, grazing guilds will have some species that concentrate on coarse, plentiful forage, while others concentrate on low-growing, finer plants. Each of those two sub-guilds may be regarded as guilds in appropriate contexts, and they might in turn have sub-guilds in more closely selective contexts. Some authorities even speak of a fractal resource model. This is a concept that arises in several related contexts, such as the metabolic theory of ecology, the scaling pattern of occupancy, and spatial analysis in ecology, all of which are concepts fundamental in defining guilds.