Gangs and Guilds in MMOs, again

 Posted by (Visited 8948 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 142011
 

A long while ago I posted about some research that showed that gangs and guilds seemed to have mathematical characteristics in common.  A few days ago, I got this sent to me by someone at the department of CS and Engineering at the University of Minnesota:

Hi,

I saw a previous post on your blog about similarities between MMOs and street gangs. Me and my research group (VWO) recently published a paper which contradicts the previous results. We thought you may find it of interest.

Thanks, Muhammad

The blog post about the paper can be found here, with some conclusions, and you can also read the pre-print PDF of the paper. It looks like this is based on the the same set of Everquest II data that many researchers have been using for a while now — I am unsurprised to see Dmitri Williams credited.

  2 Responses to “Gangs and Guilds in MMOs, again”

  1. Yukon Sam says:
    September 15, 2011 at 6:58 am

    Could somebody point me to the publication of the paper in a peer-reviewed journal? I can’t find it.

    I do expect that there would be significant cultural differences between social guilds, raiding guilds and PvP guilds, and that every game has a different ratio of guild types.

    But that doesn’t contradict the conclusions of the original study, which are glaringly self-evident.

  2. len says:
    September 19, 2011 at 5:08 pm

    This implies that online worlds could have distinct features and nuances, so much so that their social dynamics cannot be assumed to be similar across virtual worlds.

    Content mztters. Bonding in the home and bonding in the gym and bonding in the classroom typically yield different bonds. I’m a bit surprised their findings would different. I don’t think it refutes assumptions that bonding is occurring on some level. That people thinking about it compared it to street gangs implies a zeitgesit in their models.

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