As pointed out in this boing boing post, the paper titled "Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs driven by a common team dynamic" discusses how the structure of online guilds can be modeled using the same mathematical models as street gangs.
"Massively multiplayer online games typically allow individuals to spontaneously form, join, or leave a formal group called a guild. [...] Millions of people worldwide log on to the world's largest online game World of Warcraft (WoW) for the equivalent of several days every week. Indeed, online games are one of the largest collective human activities on the planet [...]It's an interesting read and the authors analyze the data that they have collected over the last few years to show evidence of a quantitative link between the collective dynamics of the two systems above.
A seemingly unrelated social phenomenon that is also of great concern is urban gangs. Urban gangs have been gaining in popularity among young people both nationally and internationally. There are obvious differences in the settings and history of online guilds and offline gangs, however, the empirical data sets that we have compiled enable us to perform a unique comparative study of their respective grouping dynamics."
The authors of the paper are: Neil F. Johnson, Chen Xu, Zhenyuan Zhao, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nicholas Yee, George Tita, and Pak Ming Hui.
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