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Online "Guilds" Mirror Real Life Gangs
j-beda writes "In June 2009, Dr. Neil Johnson published a paper titled 'Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs driven by a common team dynamic' in Physical Review E that found the way in which WoW 'guilds' form can be described by a mathematical model that can also be applied to an unrelated group of people: street gangs in Los Angeles. Since 'Any group that satisfies these fairly autonomous, competitive criteria would also (fit the model),' said Dr. Johnson, the findings are of interest to those combating international as well as local terrorist cells."
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You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
This summary is very vague. Does anyone have a link to the real article?
Did somebody just rediscover the fact that humans have been forming little social groups, sometimes partially or wholly kin-based, other times simply social, for most of their evolutionary history?
This isn't a "Oh, look at those gamers and gangsters and terrorists, how exotic" thing. This is how humans have operated(and to a large extent continue to operate) until the very recent rise in formalized mechanisms of social organization(and even these tend to be infested by little social cliques of various sorts, if you scratch the surface).
the findings are of interest to [those] combating international as well as local terrorist cells
Who cares about Iraq when I can help fight the terrorists by playing WoW all day.
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I've always maintained that my fascination with the Bloods and my hatred for the color BLU was driven by the combat training I received playing Team Fortress 2. Although I'm too chicken shit to join a real gang, I wonder if I can sue for punitive character damages...
Different games can generate different models
Eve Online uses a company stucture for its guilds/clans etc
However i dont think all guilds/clans/corps will evolve the same way, thats more down to the players involved and who has their hand on the collective rudder.
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.
Oh well, its still better than attacking Iraq when bin Laden is in Pakistan.
you're a goonswarm all the way, from your first corp-owned corvette to your last dying day!
Secondly, there are *many* more offline groups that are more closely related to street gangs in structure and practices than guilds, and no one seems too alarmist about that. Odds are your local church, your business, your college fraternity, even many of your local civic organizations have initiations/hazing/etc. that more closely resemble that of gangs than any guild I've ever been part of. And those are *certainly* more homogeneous in "backgrounds, age groups, and genders" (like most street gangs) than any WoW guild.
In other words, guilds bear a pretty piss-poor correlation to street gangs, compared to just about any small real-world organization. I suspect the authors were either reaching here or were so hopped up on the idea of studying online guilds that they lost their way (the famous line from PCU comes to mind "You can write your thesis on Gameboy if you can bullshit well enough."). And does anyone else find it academically strange that this came from a bunch of grad students in Physics?!?!?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Anyone who plays WoW is a gansta anyway.
The relation I've noticed (being a soccer player) is with soccer teams. I've seen the exact same cycles of drama and team splits. Its just like an online guild, but in slow motion (as they don't spend as much time together in a week).
Am I the only one trying to imagine what it would be like if the Fancy Lads started beef with the Crips?
Really. I tried it again after a year off, and yeah, the graphics are great and play on ANYTHING these days, however it just doesn't have the same hold as it used to. I'm playing Eve now, and yeah, it's grindy (all grinding, really) but it seems a bit more "adult" - maybe that's just it. The trial for EQ2 is going well, and that even seems a bit more adult, too.
Gangs are gangs. I've never done well in raid situations as I tend to get toned out (firefighter) for calls when we're about to enter the instance, etc. I'm always "that guy" who goes linkdead...
So, you're saying that the group of people I am working with on this data-warehousing project are also a "guild-like" (and therefore "gang-like") group?
And no, I didn't rtfa because it already sounds sensationalistic... and also because I don't feel the urge to pay to read the PDF.
Karma: NaN
I have to give a presentation on a mathematical model today, and I am just now hearing about this; does anyone have a link to a paper they wrote or more information?
I googled it while previewing my comment and found a pdf presentation:
http://carbon.videolectures.net/2009/other/ccss09_zurich/johnson_bnb/ccss09_johnson_bnb_01.pdf
They compare two competing theories -- homophily or that like attracts like, and a theory that group formation is driven by a search for compliments -- and conclude that the latter drives group formation in *both* gangs and guilds.
From the article:
Specifically, we used detailed empirical data sets to show that the observed dynamics in two very distinct forms of human activity—one offline activity which is widely considered as a public threat and one online activity which is by contrast considered as relatively harmless—can be reproduced using the same, simple model of individuals seeking groups with complementary attributes; i.e., they want to form a team as opposed to seeking groups with similar attributes homophilic kinship. Just as different ethnicities may have different types of gangs in the same city in terms of their number, size, and stability, the same holds for the different computer servers on which online players play a given game.
I don't see any parallels between real gangs and guilds, especially because leaving a guild isn't normally considered treason and doesn't put you (or your avatar) in any (virtual) danger. You can switch guilds as often as you like, no one cares.
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/the-guild-episode-11-battle-royale/y0g5hgdl
Any church that promotes hazing must be an awesome church.
No, it's been observed that people have been gathering this way for a very long time. However, there's this field of study called "sociology" which aims to figure out what makes these groups come together or fight. And your comment got me wondering just how old the field of sociology really is.
I've only just started researching, but the earliest cite I've found so far is an examination of the pre-Civil-War south. This was about the 1850s, so sociology is a young science. And it's a slow-moving, vague science, combining the touchy-feely nature of biology, the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, and the dismalness of economics. Why, it's just like a version of theology applied to the common man.
Because it is a science, there are occasionally breakthroughs or discoveries. And when they happen, they get announced. And when they're announced, people either perk up or yawn and brush them aside depending upon how profitable they sound.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
So does that mean that because I was a guild leader of a high profile WoW guild, I would also be qualified to lead an LA gang?
Sure does open a whole new set of career oppertunities
It's very easy to build a "model" for something. You just abstract everything until it is meaningless.
Since this article is locked behind a pay site, it's going to be difficult to evaluate it at the moment.
From TFA:
So if GroupA lacks characteristic B and person C has characteristic B but not characteristic D which would negatively affect GroupA then GroupA may admit person C.
Writing it is simple. Defining characteristics in quantitative methodology is the difficult part. How much of B offsets how much of D?
Thomas Nagel famously argued against the reductionist approach of physics and other "hard science" disciplines in his paper "What is it like to be a bat?". A rough summary of the paper is that he thinks science may be able to tell us how something works, like the echolocation abilities of a bat, but it's much harder to give an account for how it's like to actually experience something, like what echolocation actually feels like.
This is all by way of saying that you're spot on. Reductionist approaches are problematic and have widely known to be problematic for at least decades if not longer. This is not to say that reductionism is necessarily wrong - it could be the case that if we know everything physical about the world, we will know everything about the world - but it seems less and less likely to those who are not in the "hard sciences". Psychology and Neuroscience remain two distinct disciplines. You can't tell sociological phenomena simply by observing and describing in physical terms physical phenomena. And etc.
This may be an example of the latter. The sociological phenomena of groups have been well-studied by sociologists and psychologists, and we do have quite extensive explanations of group and social dynamics from these disciplines. Yet here, some physics students come in and try to study what has been studied and come to some questionable conclusions that seem to be problematic if examined from a sociological or psychological perspective (as pointed out by GP).
Whoops - should have linked to the paper at arxiv.org:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.2299
You might be interested: Robber's Cave Experiment
Another (not a scientific) study: The Third Wave
Guilds are forced to build teams in WoW because that is what the game requires. You can't win any of the raids with a team of 25 rogues.
One mans terrorists is another mans raid buddy.
Suicidesalution whispers, "Hey Xjihadcowx, wanna do ToC 25 man?"
Xjihadcowx whispers, "Is Osama leading?"
Suicidesalution whispers, "Nah, he at a Starbucks in Vancouver but says internet there sucks."
Xjihadcowx whispers, "That sucks. Yeah I'll go send me an invite."
Awesome....post a story that requires a login to download the PDF.
Provide a link to the file that works please
They measure cumulative size distribution (how many groups of size >= N) and churn (how many people leave the group for another one in a given period).
They are able to come up with a simple mathematical model for the behaviour of players (essentially: recruit people with diverse attributes/skills) that reproduces the observed data extremely well. And they also show that the alternative 'kinship' model (recruit people with similar attributes/skills) fails to reproduce the observed data.
I would say that their model does quite a good job at modeling some rather nontrivial data.
http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0812.2299 is a better (free) link to the preprint.
Good thing they don't have any decent tanks, South Park might be in trouble.
"In other words, guilds bear a pretty piss-poor correlation to street gangs, compared to just about any small real-world organization."
You would have to compare street gangs to "Hard Core" guilds. They are comparing one standard deviation to the entire bell curve.
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
1 - Develop MMOG
2 - Get people to pay for playing and buying pixel-made goods with real money
3 - Sell user behavior data to whoever wants to pay you an extra
4 - Profit++
I find that WoW guilds often resemble political parties. They have drama, scandals, split ups and disbands, just like in politics. Then again, it's a group of people, and a group of people is a group of people, regardless of location.
Let's see - I play WOW and love it, and so does my daughter and my younger son. We play on avg. about 4-10 hours/week (depending on raids, instance runs, PUG needs, etc). We also use Vent to chat with the "real" people on the other end of our guild. Most if not all are married, have at least a kid or two and we all liked to play D&D when we were younger. WOW has become a great outlet to really get involved in a story and team effort - which is made possible by the basic concept of MMORPG's. so, this article really then, suggests that because our guild is successful (over 30 LVL 80's with all purple gear) that we could also overthrow the US Govt, or stage a bank robbery, or pull helpless truckers from their rigs in broad daylight to bludgeon and then steal their trucks??? Now, I could be wrong, but perhaps "someone" perceives this as a threat in some psycho-babble, macro-ignorant ploy to undermine for their own interests, what has to be one of the greatest games I've ever played or somewhere in the food chain there's significant profit sitting somewhere. Is it not the same to take a team of 20 boys & girls and coach and mentor them in soccer, and provide a website for them to check schedules, send emails to one another and yes, fog goodness sake - get to know the other teammates more than just on the field??? What if the coach is a child molester or a socio-path???? We're talking non-present, non-physical contact - and REALLY, if I wanted to establish a terrorist organization I probably wouldn't choose WOW to start making my plans on (BTW - Blizzard watches over all and sees all_
Times have changed, parents need to be more cautious and careful what happens online - but none of this even compares to the real life threat we potentiall face every day.
For every 1(one) case of child molestation ONLINE, there are another 20 that happen every second in REAL LIFE - so please focus your energies, your perceptions and your ignorant placement of labels elsewhere besides good natured, normal folks who like to play online.
If you read the article, then actually find out more about the writers of it - they're not from the USA, but rather China. Doesn't China sensor Google and turn off servers when someone has a moment of free speech, or when more than two gather in the Square before the human-crushing tanks are called in? Gotta be joking me - this harkens back to the day when the idiom "Well, he told me to so I did it"? Just because someone offers an "opinion" DOES NOT mean it is law, a given or needs to be read or followed - it is simply just that, someone needing to finish their doctoral thesis on something that pissed them off, because maybe they always get ninja'd in WOW and now have a bad attitude. Serves you right for calling your toon - Chen Tzu'Wan - Simply an idiotic article and a waste of time once you see who the "doctors" are. I just hope no one paid to have this "study" done. I have a suggestion - a study to study doctor's from other countries who attempt to hack the WOW servers worldwide, that come from a country known for it's high-level of hacking (CHINA)> Did you know that the CIA and FBI agents returning from China MUST destroy their laptops upon return to the USA for fear of being infiltrated with "bugs" and various nasties that could hack our internal networks???? Look it up, it's true and CNN and Fox did a piece about a month ago about it.
And so what we find when we look carefully is that the gang organization looks a whole lot like a typical corporate structure, a lot like McDonald's in some sense. And so just like McDonald's, it turns out there's a handful of guys at the top who are very successful who run the gang, who are bringing home, you know, mid to high six-figure salaries, but the 90 percent of the guys who are working in the gang are the young kids who are selling drugs on the street corner that it turns out they're getting paid roughly minimum wage for standing on the street corner and selling the drugs. -- Steven Levitt, NPR Interview
I think EVE Online bears this out, how a loosely coupled group of independent yet incentivised players can collectively make a place for themselves in a larger social space. Those larger groups then snap at each other for domination, and it's all the same "game" be it in virtual worlds, social worlds, or economic worlds.
It is kind of a interesting paper, but how in the world did it get into Physical Review? Just because you do some statistics doesn't mean you are doing research in physics. Shouldn't this have been sent to a sociology journal?
Yo yo! U shoulda seen that lich mutha****a go down. I busted out my +5 holy burst repeating crossbow gat and put a S in his chest so hard his momma felt it. Me an' my homies is some bad mutha****as, terrorizin tha' Menechtarun hood.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
http://www.crimecraft.com/
Jhyrryl
You can't join a street gang from your mom's basement.
Have gnu, will travel.
I've gotta wonder... since when do LA gangs have tanks?
...that the same parallels can be drawn between gangs and college fraternities. But of course, it's only proper do to it with gamers' guilds, 'cause games are the evulz.
The claim still sounds suspect, though.
E.g., while the PR stunt... err... I mean press release mentions guilds and gangs, the way I read it that's _all_ the data they had. They _only_ studied WoW guilds and gangs, they have no other data about any other group. For all we know, it might be how all human groups work.
Especially in their light of claiming that it's specifically about competitive groups: "[i]He defines competitive groups as organisations that have features like a need to protect themselves from other groups. They develop their own rules, carry out clandestine acts and share a desire not to get trapped.[/i]" But I see no null hypothesis there. If some dynamic is specific to such groups carrying out clandestine acts and trying to not get caught, then where is the measured delta compared to _non_competitive groups?
And it seems like a particularly non-supported claim to anyone who actually has some experience with the multitudes of types of WoW guilds. There are PvP guilds, twink guilds, raiding guilds, but also social guilds where pretty much they only share a chat channel. I've even been in a social laid back guild where "epic" was as forbidden as the sterotypical four-letter-word in guild chat, because most of the higher levels were already refugees from raiding guilds that got torn apart by greed and raiding drama. There are guilds who are in willy-waving contests with each other, and guilds who cooperate. Etc. There's entirely too much behaviour variation to paint them all with his "competitive group" brush.
And I'm really not getting the vibe of carrying out any activities that they try to keep secret. On the contrary, your average willy-waver would shove his achievement list down everyone's throat if he could. There are people building whole sites and basically virtual shrines to the greatness of their virtual selves, and their online exploits. How the heck _that_ resembles the behaviour of groups engaged in clandestine acts and trying to not get caught, is truly beyond me.
Basically while they may have measured some elements of human group dynamics, the claim that it's about clandestine activities and stuff, seems to me like just a PR stunt to hopefully get the CIA's money. Just claiming that you've built yet another sociology model makes you yet another of those soft science colleges, while making a grand claim about predicting international terror cells gets you in the news.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I believe the author was a victim of a Kazzak Paladin bomb. Yes, indeed, wiping out most of Stormwind population... that is terrorism! It's just like politics, when you join a political party, its nearly the same as you went to jail and pops 3 options: - You have a strong name and did terrible things and you respected by that... keeps you out of trouble and you are free to follow your own path. - You are a John Doe, and you join some gang so they can protect ya, but you end up enslaved by their will. - You end up being someone's bi$%&. This is really pathetic.
I wouldn't pay any attention to this paper since there is a Wikipedia reference... :P
It's not a flame - wikipedia isn't bad at all but it's not a solid citation. At least not for a scientific work.
"I need a grant"
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Online "Guilds" have a singular vague similarity to real life gangs.
fixed.
and heres the quote
"an unexpected quantitative link between them"
I do wish my mirror only displayed that much of me when i looked.
> I've dated sociologists, sociology is a science in much the same way Jazz is a color.
Sounds like somebody has the blues.
The cited article is indeded locked behind a pay site but it is availble on arxiv just try this link http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.2299
wasn't there a numb3rs episode about this?
Right over your head.