Criminal behaviour – it's all in the game

The Los Angeles police department is fighting street gangs. It reports that in the past five years there were more than 23,000 verified violent gang crimes in LA, including 784 homicides, nearly 12,000 felony assaults, approximately 10,000 robberies and just under 500 rapes.

At the same time, in World of Warcraft, the multiplayer online role-playing game, gangs (guilds, as they're known in WoW) are killing monsters, exploring dungeons, and carrying out tasks such as recovering artefacts and delivering documents. The connection is that the activity of LA gangs – the way they form, grow, operate and interact – can be modelled by WoW. The same is true for the actions of insurgents and terrorist cells. The Special Operations unit of US Southern Command is using the analysis of WoW to assist its planning. The research is also being fed into Iraq.

WoW has been studied before, but not in this context.

"We studied these online gangs at the same time I was looking at the offline gangs and it turned out the model we were developing to explain the behaviour of the online guilds began to coincide with the offline gangs," says Johnson. "We could explain the data using the same mathematical ideas. "The beauty of the data is that, unlike trying to monitor fish out in the Caribbean, say, you know exactly the time stamp and date of when people join guilds and when they leave. It's all registered on the server. It's a beautiful way of asking questions: is the largest group the most successful? Is it stable? Is it hard to join? How long do people remain members? If I leave, do I then break off and go to a smaller group? Essentially you're looking at the ecology of groups." The big question is, can Johnson's research tell the security services or law enforcement agencies how to handle gangs? "If I say 'it depends' it sounds like we haven't got an answer," says a mildly agonised Johnson. "But it really does depend on what other groups they've got going on." The big question is, can Johnson's research tell the security services or law enforcement agencies how to handle gangs? "If I say 'it depends' it sounds like we haven't got an answer," says a mildly agonised Johnson. "But it really does depend on what other groups they've got going on."