Destroying community in MMORPGs

I came across a very interesting paper this morning, Destroying community in MMORPGs: How groups are undermined by Barnes it discusses the nature of MMORPG guilds/communities and how they react to attack. The paper proposes that all the members of the community are connected together by at weak bonds but that certain subsets of the community are connected together by strong bonds. When attacked the communities will fracture into the component cliques that have developed strong bonds. The paper is online as part of Curtin University School of Internet Studies' Online Conference on Networks and Communities along with a whole lot of other interesting stuff. Incidentally the Barnes paper cites my Information Operations in and around EVE Online paper which is exciting, especially since I haven't published that paper anywhere except on this blog.


In other news my Twitter as a Vector for Disinformation paper has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Information Warfare's next issue. Once it's released I'll replace the draft that's available here with the final copy.