Knowledgemaps aren’t usefull in companies only. The can be used in every domain where people challenge to get knowledge. In multiplayer online games, especially in so called MMORPG like World Of Warcraft (WoW), the players suffer don’t having an easy way to get an overview of their own guild.

You have to know that in MMORPG people can build or join a guild to share their skills and help each other the finish heavy quests. In WoW people can select between various professions. Each profession (e.g. Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Alchemist) is able to produce important stuff for other players. In a guild people share this products very cheap. If you want to buy those item on the market you would pay realy a lot. An other important reason for guilds are to build groups of 5 players to fight in so called dungeons. Dungeons are places in WoW with heavy enemies. You don’t have a chance in dungeons without planning the group. The group should consist of a healer (very important), a tank (usually a warrior) and a combination of other classes.
In a big guild it is very hard to find out who’s a healer etc.. The problem increases by the fact, that people don’t play only with one character. For example one plays as healer and plays a warrior as twink too. You can just use one of them. People loose the overview of who is who and have problems to build groups for dungeons.

Using a knowledgemap that visualizes the guild by showing the guild characters, their professions and classes, solves the problem of guild organization and aquiring guild benefits. Connecting Characters with twinks and connecting characters to professions and classes creates a knowledgemaps that helps the guild. You don’t have to know which character has got what profession or is of what class. If you are interested in some armor, liquids, food, juwelery, etc. or if you are interested in building a group for the dungeons that needs a special combination of character classes and abilites, you only have to study the knowledgemap.

In that sence, knowledgemaps leeds to a well organized guild for MMORPG, where the players effectively create dungeon teams and profit from the products of other characters professions.
In my case, I used the knowledgemap metapher to visualize the characters, professions and classes. The guild tried to publish their assets as a forum thread before. But it realy wasn’t that easy to find out what characters is only a twink, etc. by reading all the posts. Especially when people leaves the guild, delete a character or what ever the assets of the guild changes even they mention it in a post. But it’s not possible to get the status quo of the guild if you have to follow all the posts in a thread.

On the other side, a knowledmap can always show the current situation and that’s the power of it: Visualization of the status quo in the guild, ability of organizing dungeon teams and benefit from professions of the other characters.