The Escapist is running a controversial article about the natural dissolution of a guild in the virtual world EvE Online, describing how social influence can build - and destroy - communities. It describes "the failure cascade" phenomenon, a tipping point which results in the demise of a social group through stresses that lead to more failure, and so on until it falls apart.
From the text:
the failure cascade is the inverse of a network effect. Websites like MySpace define their value by the people that use the service just as guilds define their quality by their members. As bad events cause players to leave or become inactive, the quality drop leads others to do the same in a spiral that rarely stabilizes, until no one is left.
Social effects have been observed in games before, notably documented by Nick Yee's analysis of EverQuest which describes the mass emigration of groups from one virtual world to another.
