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."

Comments

LFG...

[MrRTFM]

Need crazy bomber - PST stats & achievement (no noobs)

Who cares about Iraq

[T Murphy]

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.

Read the abstract more carefully

[elrous0]

First of all, the abstract acknowledges that guilds are quite UNLIKE gangs in many important respects. They are much more varied in "backgrounds, age groups, and genders" than real gangs and they are rarely based on "like-seeking" (kinship).

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?!?!?

Re:Read the abstract more carefully

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

About the students in Physics bit: The results are often somewhat unfortunate; but there is an entire genre of papers, across a variety of subjects, generated by physicists' belief that, as long as they can develop a mathematical model, they can write on just about anything. There is a similar behavior in economists, who figure that, if they can assign dollar values to the major variables, they are on safe ground.

Sometimes the results are genuinely interesting, or even downright superior, if the area has been bogged down in excessive qualitative handwaving. Other times, you get breathtaking exercises in over-reduction, ignorant of a variety of messy details that have been common knowledge, among people who actually study the subject, for decades.

Re:Read the abstract more carefully

[Xacid]

One use I could perhaps see what they'd could use this research for is to justify offering something of either deterrence or rehabilitation through the use of guilds. Give guys who feel a need to belong and a need to whack shit with a weapon and you could *maybe* have something of a replacement with something like WoW. Hey, it's a stretch, but it's all I got. Worth noting: I have a little brother who seems to not mind the juvenile justice system all that much and is a relatively frequent visitor - however, once I got him into gaming and into things like Tribes, Priston Tale, and whatnot where clans/guilds existed his desire to go outside and henceforth get into trouble dropped significantly. Granted, it's just a patch for other socio/economic issues, but it could still have a somewhat positive effect. I'd much rather lazy gamers than violent gang members.

Re:Wow...

[thesandtiger]

Did you miss the part about how there's a model for the interaction, and that model is valid for both groups (gangs and WoW guilds)?

While this is nowhere near the same in impact as Newton's work, your comment would be akin to someone saying, "Duh, dumbass, we already KNEW things would fall if you drop them!"

In other words, you seem to have missed the whole point - this is about a possible verification of a model for human group dynamics, not about the existence of group dynamics. There is a difference, rather a large one.

other studies on group dynamics

[Onymous Coward]

You might be interested: Robber's Cave Experiment

Another (not a scientific) study: The Third Wave

Re:Without SEEING the formula, it's rather difficu

[kaplong!]

http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0812.2299 is a better (free) link to the preprint.

Re:Sarcastic question, answered honestly

[H0p313ss]

Because it is a science

I've dated sociologists, sociology is a science in much the same way Jazz is a color.

Re:Sarcastic question, answered honestly

[LandDolphin]

Obligatory. http://xkcd.com/435/