“The value of WoW for analysing gangs is that players can’t advance through the game quickly without joining guilds. These guilds play off each other when trying to achieve certain tasks, and it’s not always the largest that are most successful. “You need small ones, and big ones, and how good you are is dictated by who else is around at time,” says Johnson.
When you subscribe to WoW you can choose which server you join. An interesting discovery from the WoW analysis is that this server identity is playing exactly the same role as ethnicity in street gangs. Players interact with other guilds on the same server but keep their distance from the other servers. Johnson believes that in a year he’ll have the answer to the way ethnic groups interact with each other.
This is because Johnson’s models work by looking at group interaction, not at individual people, and are rooted in his training as a physicist. But his view is supported by research from the streets carried out by Professor David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City. He says the killings carried out by street gangs are not about hierarchical criminal organisations struggling for control of drug-dealing turf, they’re about “respect”, “beefs”, “boy/girl stuff” and group dynamics.
“It isn’t about the individuals, it’s the groups,” says Kennedy, whose research has pioneered successful gang intervention programmes in the US.
“The whole point,” says Johnson, “on which David and I agree, is that we should be focusing on groups and group dynamics for these types of threats, not individual ‘baddies’.”
Kennedy and Johnson intend to collaborate. Kennedy will be on the streets with the police and gang members; Johnson “sitting in a dark room at my computer, with my C++ programs, fission-fusion coupled non-linear cluster equations, and paper and pencil”; and the WoW players perhaps at the Burning Steppes, where Grom Hellscream fell in battle against the demon Lord Mannaroth. And from it all, perhaps a single picture will emerge. As Johnson says, admiring WoW: “I think it’s a brilliantly designed game. And, ultimately, people like to join teams and perform tasks. That’s why you’ll never get rid of gangs – we’re all in gangs.”
