Small social groups

Most gamers organize themselves into small groups of like-minded players in order to play together and socialize. Typically, these groups start suddenly, contain a handful of members, focus on a single game and have a short life span. There are literally hundreds to thousands of these clans or guilds in each online game.

Single-game groups

There are also many larger, longer-lasting groups devoted to a single game. Examples can be found in every long-lasting online game, in particular, role-playing games, which have a strong social element.

Communities

Some gamers are organized less formally in communities, which may also contain clans or guilds. Often these communities include websites generating a fair amount of news and active forums to give the members their sense of community. It is not uncommon for a community to be based on more than one game.

Syndicates

Finally, there are a number of more persistent and more organized groups that field players in a variety of games. These groups share some of the characteristics of the single-game groups and communities.

E-Sports teams

E-Sports clans are organizations created solely for competition. They are often small in size but their size is also usually determined by how many players they need to meet numbers for competing regularly. Social interaction and friendship is often a requirement for the stability of these teams but it is not the main purpose for the organization, this means that many of these teams are short lived but those who do not fall apart due to social conflicts tend to last for a long time and stay together should they change to a newer game. E-Sports teams also often have a tendency to form larger multi-game syndicates.