There’s a funny thing hap­pen­ing in my guild.

I logged on late the other night to hope­fully luck into a quick instance run (didn’t hap­pen), and there were four peo­ple from my guild on. I didn’t rec­og­nize any of them. I vaguely remem­bered read­ing someone’s app from a lit­tle while ago, but that’s all. I mean, I’ve seen them around, but this is the first time I had ever logged in and not known any­one who was online.

“Well, new guildies are good for the guild,” I thought.

How­ever, these peo­ple were chat­ting with each other over /g, and they all seemed to know each other pretty well. Even though I didn’t know them, it was obvi­ous that each of them was a good fit for the guild. We have a strange and fun guild cul­ture, and it was obvi­ous that they were steeped in it.

It felt like walk­ing into my liv­ing room and find­ing four very friendly strangers there.

I imme­di­ately went to the guild appli­ca­tion sec­tion of our forums… and was shocked to learn that I hadn’t checked up on it in quite some time. Turns out that these “new guildies” had been in the guild for four months, not just a cou­ple weeks. None of them were new at all, I sim­ply had yet to spend good time with them in my ran­dom, new-parent-constrained playtime.

Time changes when you become a par­ent. I’m grind­ing rep at work harder than ever (sup­port­ing fam­ily = play­ing for keeps), spend­ing as much good time with my wife and daugh­ter as I can, keep­ing in touch with my friends… I’m try­ing to wring every last sec­ond from each day. Activ­i­ties of relax­ation, like play­ing MMOs, used to take up a lot of time for me. Now those oppor­tu­ni­ties to relax aren’t as com­mon. Days are so busy that they blend together.

The weird thing is that my view of the guild and my friends in it had been like a pho­to­graph. Sta­tic. Unchang­ing. I’ve been play­ing and hav­ing fun and then log­ging out with the fol­low­ing mes­sage, “See you soon!” because it’s what I’ve always done.

Soon used to mean tomor­row, or even later today. Now, soon can become a week or two with­out even real­iz­ing it. (Wasn’t it just Mon­day yesterday?)

Now I log back on, and while time hasn’t moved for me (I feel like I was just on), to my friend who’s been on every day, I’ve been gone.

“Wow, it’s great to see you! How have you been?” says my casual friend.

I try to come up with what I’ve been doing in a way that’s not too per­sonal, or uncom­fort­able. I think, “Well, my daugh­ter has been chew­ing on the cof­fee table hard enough to leave marks” and then “Her diges­tive sys­tem doesn’t really seem to dig green beans” and then “I got a really painful and yet beau­ti­ful pang of joy when she screamed and cried as I left to go to work yes­ter­day morning”.

But instead, I say, “I’m good! How are you?”

“Well, I didn’t get the drop I was hop­ing for and I still can’t find the minor doo­dad I want (do you make them?) and…”

And I smile. The real­ity is that:

• Guilds are dynamic
• The peo­ple in these guilds are dynamic
• The game itself is dynamic

Every­thing con­tin­ues to move, even when you’re not watch­ing it.

I guess that the funny thing isn’t hap­pen­ing to the guild… it’s hap­pen­ing to me.