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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."
Need crazy bomber - PST stats & achievement (no noobs)
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
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.
My webcomic
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.
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.
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.
Because it is a science
I've dated sociologists, sociology is a science in much the same way Jazz is a color.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
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++
Obligatory. http://xkcd.com/435/
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
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.
At least sociology is on there.. speaks for itself that economics, history and educational science are not even mentioned.
Ignoring philosophy however is just ignorant.
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?
They are looking at the social structure. There will be the following:
o A reason why the groups exist (for protection or to make money, or to develop a new product)
o Ringleaders
o Individuals who offer a particular set of skills in return for help
In the facebook multi-player games, each person is able to create their own guild/team/gang/nation/region. It is up to them to offer incentives, rewards, help or assistance to attract and keep both junior and senior members. When another guild attacks two or more other guilds, the other two will join together to fight back, but split up once the threat is over. Word will also spread round, so that other guilds are ready to join together. Sometimes there will be a permanent merger.
If you were to look at the way sourceforge projects (device drivers/API's) will merge, split, and rejoin, due to technical/hardware/personality reasons, it is the same thing.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
...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.
Here ya go.
Cue cries of "This article is very dense. Does anyone have a link to a summary?"
If life is a waste of time and time is a waste of life, let's all get wasted and have the time of our lives.
Better obligatory: http://xkcd.com/451/. Although Sociology still comes out looking much better than Literary Criticism.
The plural of anecdote is not data. (Your dates should have been able to tell you that)
semantics are everything!
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'm glad somebody got the joke.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I love the smell of irony in the morning. :)
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
And yet ironically, getting a Philosophy degree is just dumb!
[It screams, "Hi! I have no intention of actually *working* for a living, I like to just sit around depressing myself with how much belly button lint I have"]
Or it screams that they are going to move on to Law School. I guess some could define that as not *working*
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
Hmm... I guess I should always ask a lawyer what their first degree was. (And try not to laugh...)
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
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.
philsophy, of course, is king of them all, grounding all displinse, including maths.
Mod this down before more people see Wesley Wheaton [sic] in a kilt! Great show though. Did not see the ending coming either, but it just makes me angry that I have to wait for season 4...
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
> I've dated sociologists, sociology is a science in much the same way Jazz is a color.
Sounds like somebody has the blues.
That's what B. B. said.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
The dean calls in the heads of the university departments for budget issues.
Dean: Come on physics, do you really need all this expensive equipment? Look at mathematics, all they need is paper, pencils and a wastebasket.
Mathematics: Even better, why not look at philosopy. They don't even need a wastebasket...
Right over your head.