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Study of MMOG Proves Human Interaction Theory
An anonymous reader writes "A new study analyzing interactions among 300,000+ players in an online game universe, called Pardus, has for the first time provided large-scale evidence to prove an 80-year-old psychological theory called Structural Balance Theory. The research, published in PNAS, shows that individuals tend to avoid stress-causing relationships when they develop a society, resulting in more stable social networks."
I'd describe it more as a "social group" and then it is obvious that, given the option, people will gravitate towards groups that cause them the least social stress / most social support.
For those wanting to read the complete study you can get it here
Aren't the statistics inherently biased by being comprised of people who would be inclined to play an MMO? Just off the top of my head, maybe people could be gravitating away from stressful relationships in an MMO because they have so many stressful relationships in real life that they could be trying to "escape from" by creating an online persona.
The only problem with that approach is that it doesn't prove that the theory holds for a general population. It's very possible that the theory holds true for those groups of people, but it doesn't really prove anything useful. We can't tell if membership of these groups results in the behavior or if the behavior results in people becoming members of these groups.
At first glance this seems obvious, but if you think about it enough you'll probably be able to remember a few successful relationships you've had with various people who did not share your beliefs at all. Anecdotal evidence of course, but perhaps some humans seek a certain amount of disruption in their lives. The real question is whether people who play online games are a good representation of the general population.
I can only pronounce it one way.
And i seem to recall most people absolutely loving drama and being controlled by irrational desires. This sounds stressful to me.
I scanned through it quickly & my understanding is that this is more specifically studying the avoidance of friendships with friends of enemies. That's a little more complicated & interesting than simply 'avoiding stressful relationships'. It is a little obvious, but it says a lot about the formation of social groups & how they become divided.
This study no more proves the theory than the decades or hundreds of years of observation that led to the coining of that cliche. I'm glad MY tax dollars weren't wasted on this... I attached a note to the IRS asking them not to put it in that kitty, and I'm sure they heeded my request.
So what is distinctive about Group A that is not the same in Group B in that MMO?
Other than the name and colours they choose, they are exactly the same as almost every other grouping in those MMO's.
So what makes them "distinctive"?
It's obvious that the earth is flat -- how else would we stay on it? -- but science seems to deny that.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
They are purple we are green.
Setting the study results aside, I'm dubious at the idea that avoiding stress at the interpersonal level results in a more stable social network. I'd argue that it simply pushes the conflict up the social scale, making large-scale conflict more likely.
For instance, suppose I'm a liberal Democrat. I find it stressful to live in areas where I'm surrounded by conservative Republicans, so I tend to live in neighborhoods full of like-minded people. If everyone behaves this way, eventually the country polarizes into homogeneous districts, and I never have to get into lengthy bitter arguments about abortion or global warming or whatever.
Is this a recipe for a stable social network? No, it's a recipe for civil war!
We can take a useful analogy from materials science. Small-scale stress in materials is relieved by the formation of microfractures. These cracks tend to propagate, relieving more and more stress on the small scale, but eventually leading to total large-scale failure of the material. In contrast, if we heat the material up, forcing the molecules to interact with one another to recrystallize and eliminate small-scale dislocations, the material as a whole becomes annealed, and tends to bend rather than break.
When I look at the online population, I see a lot of 18 year old bi-sexual nymphomaniac miss-universe winners. I would believe a very much higher percentage then you would expect when looking at the general real world population.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Yes, they are 'biased' in the sense that they ask a 'within population' rather than 'whole population' question. There seems to be this idea percolating around /. that 'perfect studies' are possible (demanding TOTAL explanation of the variance). They are not. This study, analyzes the sample: Players of the game "Pardus" on "Artemis" who have interacted with at least one other player during the first 445 days of the game's existence. They make no claim about the general population, but merely remark upon the social interactions measurable within the population of their data set. The specious speculation you provide is outside of the purview of the study.
..shows that individuals tend to avoid stress-causing relationships..
You see, this is the real reason why slashdoters don't have wives and girl friends. It's natural to avoid stress causing relationships. :)
Or if people behave differently online... or when playing games. One might even think that people actually play games to relax and get away from the usual problems they are facing, and therefore try to avoid stressful situations when gaming. Hard to believe, I know.
This isn't an issue of something written on paper. The problem is that despite polarisation, these two faction would be living all across the country side by side. Geographical division is impossible in those circumstances, hence it results in civil war where sides battle for supremacy. In the end, it may end with victory of one side and unification (i.e. US, Russia), or it can end up in two-sided ethnic cleansing and division into two countries (i.e. Cyprus).
4chan's existence completely invalidates this study.
~The roAm
But they hardly needed to study games to figure this out. Go talk to people who are politically extreme and the validity of this theory will be obvious (Marxists and neo-cons, for example).
They aren't looking at extremely polar relationships like between a rabbi and a Nazi. It looks like it's more of a "once removed" relationship -- for example, "the friend of my enemy is my enemy". It is these kinds of relationships that have long been expected to be more stable when you consider a large social system. As they say in TFA:
Structural Balance Theory is an 80 year old psychological theory that suggests some networks of relationships are more stable than others in a society. Specifically, the theory deals with positive and negative links between three individuals, where 'the friend of my enemy is my enemy' is more stable (and therefore more common) than 'the friend of my friend is my enemy'
They have an interesting picture as well but I wonder what a much larger picture showing various groups would look like. I'd almost expect it to be a kind of fractal with small groups linking to other groups by only a relatively few links, and then the superset of those groups linking to other supersets...
It makes sense, but it's always nice to see some evidence, even for "common sense" things. I suppose that's at least one good thing that's come from MMOs -- they consist of huge social networks which exist in a medium which allows for easy analysis of player inter-relationships and anything else of statistical interest.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Pardus is an entertaining game. One could play for long stretches avoiding most other players.
If one joined a strong faction, one could stay within their territory, working for the "man" and have a good time. Unfortunately, it is a game with a limited number of "moves" per day.
Anyone else get all excited to see games they used to play in scientific papers? If I had known I could have published on it, I would have played more during grad school.
20 characters max for the password? How will I use my favorite poems as passwords?
Group A prefers the company of individuals with high standards for gameplay output, and take their game very seriously, possibly more so than their actual paying occupations; they are obsessive, not only regarding gear, but also in quality of strategy and tactics, right down to the sequence in which they deploy their special attacks. Being with each other, they can feel superior to others in the game. Group B, on the other hand, prefers a much more casual game experience, and though they are a bit rag-tag, they nevertheless help each other out here and there, but gravitate to each other mostly for the company. Group B understands that real people have real jobs, real families, and real life obligations. Group B just wants a group of friends that they can talk to while they grind, and maybe even do a little bit of RPing, and regard Group A as a bunch of fascist nut jobs.
In short, the difference between Group A and Group B is priorities. Both groups seek to enjoy the game, but neither group has the same concept of how the game should be enjoyed. One group is elitist, the other is very casual. There are likely several other groups between Group A and Group B, as well as groups that vary on completely different axises. A member of Group B would never be welcome in Group A, because he is not interested in maximizing the potential of his character. Meanwhile, a member of Group A would never be satisfied with the level of organization of group activities in Group B.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
I guess it began back in the Walmart when I was much younger...a sale was on: 'Hand-exercising kits' and weights of 0.5, 1, and 2.5 kilos were all extremely low priced as if Arnie Schwarz had had a yard sale in which Sam Walton's ghost had apparated and instantaniously snapped up most of the stuff. So I got back in my parent's Corolla with my thin, wimpy arms straining to carry roughly 15kg in squeezy torsion handles and weights. I wasn't unattractive, infact later in life I became pretty popular with the la...that's another story.
It was around that time that a now-old MMOG was out - I remember sitting on the lawn listening to that cool English band Oasis on my Walkman with those raspily melodic vocals as electric in my ear canal when a large shape eclipsed the sunlight, causing me to instinctivly look up. It was Brandon, an extremely obese but affable and eccentric nerd who lived two doors down from us in our leafy suburban middle-class mediocrity-filled neighbourhood. 'Peter' he began, his face lighting up with a proud smile 'I have PK'ed eight people in Fel today and I plan on reaching a dozen by midnight...coffee permitting.'
Back then I was naive to it all...it could have meant anything. Being a guy who didn't miss much Brendon cut off my predictable question with: "PK is player killing - you chase down some guy and ice him and then take all his stuff! I have 56k and they're all on 28.8k so the connection to the UO server is so, so much better dude. Evisceration with my indy/fort double axe!"
I still didn't comprehend, but I knew it was a long haul explanatory time so my hand flicked instinctively to the Walkman, turning it off. It was then that Brandon and I went into his home, where his PC with its new fangled Pentium and Win 95 with Weezer playing Buddy Holly on the CD. That was special then...Buddy Holly; I could pull that up on youtube in seconds now, but seeing that cheesy vid was such a novelty then - yet I digress.
I learnt UO, and fast became a PK master with Brandon and I training intensely - it was here that the weights and hand-exercise came in. For awhile my fitness in real life and my avatar UO life balanced out so well. My arms became more toned with time, and this actually helped with reflexes as I zipped around those pixelated trees on the Brit path hunting down people. It was merciless because you could destroy hours of work in a few swings of an axe plus deft lootage...yet bizarrely I felt no regret over it all. This academic theory has to be hopeless when it comes to UO; which was toned down bit by bit until people could stay in a 'safe' realm and a 'danger' realm where murder was possible. The nostalgia that haunted me for nearly a decade after I quit in late 1998 was the worst; you wanted to recapture these 'good old days', but it was just frigid within an hour of play when you tried to.
Brandon went to some new-fangled MMOG called 'Everquest' - and I never saw him after that...except for one time in 2004 at a Taco Bell. He was at the counter anxiously enquiring about freezing the products - he sounded different, on edge, and I actually thought I heard him say he wanted 100 tacos and a burrito 'for the road'. Gone was his whimsy and charm and his breathing was heavier...I quietly slinked out of the place to avoid talking to him and soon after moved to Europe.
I guess there's something spurious about taking an interaction study and using it with games where anonymity and cartoonish avatars are the 'interactable' things rather than flesh, flab, blood and bone humans. But when you think about it...the greatest 'interactors' in MMOGs can also be the poorest interactors in life. It's in life where you are a human not an avatar, so this theory is kind of stupid since I could go at pains to achieve 'human stress' that leads to community in a videogame...but be a complete flat-out stunted 'human' nowhere near the theory's assertions in life - I mean getting to the point where you live on welfare and try to get three full bags of Taco Bell? That is too far.
US: there were plenty of supporters of southern regime in the north and vice versa. These were suppressed, often violently, especially in the south.
Russia: White vs Red civil war that started in 1917. It was the pinnacle of WW1 in many regards, as it forced GB and France to adapt as Russia pulled out of war, and it was one of the nastiest civil wars in the world - we're looking at huge death toll and classic "brother vs brother" action where even families would end up split and go against each other. This was caused by the fact that there were more then two sides to the conflict, all with different (often foreign) benefactors.
Cyrpus: I'm not sure what relations you're talking about, I've been to the place (Greek side), and there is very little friendliness towards Turks who are viewed as conquerors. Greeks also voted against reunification. Perhaps you're referring to sentiments in Turkish part, which is much poorer and would love a reunion to raise the quality of life. Greeks don't want that, and this is confirmed by a vote on reunification which largely killed any attempt of Turkish side to be able to become an EU member.
All in all, modern reactions don't really matter, as we're talking about wartime, not peacetime after the tension has boiled out. Cyprus is a textbook case scenario of ethnic cleansing in relation to civil war - Greek side has been ethnically cleansed of Turks, and Turkish part ethnically cleansed of Greeks. After this occurred, the refugee Turks from Greek side were housed in housing that used to belong to Greeks that lived on Turkish side and vice versa. As it stand now, there are almost no Turks living on Greek side and almost no Greeks living on Turk side.
When the country polarises in such an extent, perhaps it's time two new countries are formed consisting of the polarised groups.
You're just passing the problem one more step up the social ladder. You've averted a civil war, but created two hostile countries with nothing in common but resource conflicts and a huge hostile border, setting yourself up for a possible continental-scale international war. It's an India/Pakistan situation, but with more nukes.
Learning to deal with people you disagree with one-on-one rather than avoiding them really is the best option.
Some of these guys will be traders, others will be pirates, possibly bounty hunters and so on. It seems rather obvious the regular traders would not be trading, making alliances with or having positive interactions and communication with pirates, though pirates probably have some of their own traders who sell stolen goods back to the real market, if the game mechanics are that advanced.
But really all the conclusions they drew here shouldn't surprise anyone. Not that such tests are not worth conducting in case they show any interesting deviations from your expectations, but I think that a few more tests need to be carried out in less extreme environments - like a workplace or a marketplace where killing and outright stealing are frowned upon - to actually draw any useful conclusions.
which is totally what she said
This is a sociological theory.