Game-guilds and street gangs both driven by team formation
I am unsurprised to see that there is a fresh paper out that states that there are strong mathematical commonalities between gang formation and guild formation. (I am also unsurprised to see Nic Ducheneaut and Nick Yee among the authors of the paper).
In particular, we find that the evolution of gang-like groups in the real and virtual world can be explained using the same team-based group-formation mechanism. In contrast to the quantitative success of our team-based model, we find that a homophilic version of the model fails. Our findings thus provide evidence that online guilds and offline gangs are both driven by team-formation considerations rather than like-seeking-like. Interestingly, each server’s Internet protocol (IP) address seems to play an equivalent role to a gang ethnicity.
— “Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs driven by a common team dynamic”
The source data comes from WoW guilds and from Long Beach CA street gangs — and with lots and lots of data points to boot.
What’s the mathematical model underlying the two? Well, it’s a basically pragmatic approach to team-building:
- teams try to recruit people with varied skills or attributes
- people join based on judging what they can add to the team
- the people joining a team assess the team as a whole, rather than looking at every member
- the team accepts someone based on what they think the person can contribute
- people leave when there’s lots of members who offer the same attributes they do
- people always look for teams where they can contribute more
- when membership n a team is stable, the team grows by merging with other teams
This kind of sounds like how companies work too. In fact, the paper suggests at the end that maybe this is just how human teams work — street gangs and online game players have fairly little in common, demographically speaking.
To me the thing that is interesting about this is that in all three cases, of course, we’re talking about a group formed to accomplish ongoing operational objectives. The above recipe, barring sentimental attachments to teammates, sounds like exactly the most rational way to attempt to construct a team to win at things. I’d be curious to hear about formation models in cases where the objective is different.
One neat tidbit: the relative sizes of guilds in WoW seems to be on a basically invariant curve — similar to how the relative sizes of cities in the US across a century of census data seems to magically keep to the same curve decade after decade, even though the absolute size, and indeed position of a given city on the list, changes over time. However, unlike cities, this doesn’t seem to be on a power-law curve.
9 Responses to “Game-guilds and street gangs both driven by team formation”
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I think no matter what the objective the teams will come together along the same lines. After all, winning is just completing an appropriate set of objectives. The way to “win” if your goal was to hang out with friends would be to have a group that can stand to be around each other, that is scheduled so as to have time to hang out with each other, and to have some method of conflict resolution or isolation so that one conflict doesn’t destroy the group else the group meets it’s only failure condition by failing to survive. That still requires organization and people in specialized roles. Still requires you to limit new membership to personalities that are complementary to what you already have, and probably going to weed out having too many people of the same type that might unbalance the group and make opposing personalities too moody.
In other words, maybe it’s not that this is how humans organize, maybe it’s that this is how organization works.
Given a psychological desire to be accepted as part of the group, and a desire to stand out and be lauded for individual achievement, the logical outcome is a team structure where everybody has a variant of the same uniform but brings a different skill set to the table.
But I beg to differ in regards to companies. The ideal in far too many companies is a bank of workers with identical skill sets performing an identical function at identical workstations, interchangable and expendable. That’s not the norm in a development environment, but it is still very much is the norm in a production environment.
And managers puzzle over why they can’t get their workers to gel as a team, and why turnover and morale are in the pits. “Those team-building exercises worked so well at the executive retreat. What’s wrong with these people?”
I also wonder how these dynamics would pan out in more homogeneous cultures.
The trouble I have with this paper is that communication studies and the current body of knowledge appear to be largely ignored. There are hundreds of models of group development and many different models of group formation, and yet the outcome presented in this paper isn’t placed within any existing framework. I’d be wary of drawing any significant insights from this paper alone. There are more comprehensive works that can serve the “group development for game design” interest.
The pessimistic side of me wonders when we’ll start seeing sensationalist news linking video gamers and street gang violence. It’s been a couple days now, Jack Thompson wouldn’t totally been on the ball getting in front of cameras with this.
I share M. Ramay’s unease with this paper. In addition to the lack of reference to the current body of knowledge, the models in this paper are too simplistic.
The paper draws attention to an apparent dichotomy between homophily and complementarity, and develops models for each. What the paper fails to do is to propose that both homophily and complementarity operate at the same time on the same people. To use the gang as an example, perhaps the homophily dynamic draws together a population of a particular ethnicity while the complementarity dynamic influences which people join which particular gang within the ethnic population. This would have been a more interesting model and study.
Would be interesting to see this duplicated with Eve, where Corporation size (even excluding NPC default corps) can run much larger than your typical Guild (up to 500 members, not counting core Goonswarm corps that can top a thousand, although this is complicated by multi-account players), and where alliances are much more coherent and immediately functional populations than in any other game, running clearly into the thousands.
–Dave
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This really isn’t surprising as it all mirrors the dominant social unit evolved by humans – the tribe. Much like fish in a school, lions in a pride or baboons in a troop, humans have adapted to tribal life over hundreds of thousands (if not a few million) years. When you say “team” think “tribe.”
Interesting. Makes sense when you think about it. 🙂 I wonder if there are any design considerations that you might take from this to apply to MMO design?
And Fortuente, another Daniel Quinn reader, eh? 😉 I think I recognize that phrase from Beyond Civilization…