Michael G. Lacy

• Ph. D.
• Colorado State University

We use ethnographic observations, interviews, and surveys to illuminate video game‐related gambling in India, where players use as currency decorative in‐game weapon covers referred to as skins . We focus on gaming and gambling related to virtual items acquired in the popular shooter game Counter‐Strike: Global Offensive , and our study unfolds amo...

Supporting Information for Open Access article (CC-BY): Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., Michael G. Lacy, Evan Polzer, and Chakrapani Upadhyay. 2024. “Gaming lounges in India afford socially productive gambling: The moral economy and foundations of play in Udaipur, Rajasthan.” Ethos 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12443

We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine 1354 survey responses from members of the American Anthropological Association about their practice and teaching of cultural anthropology research methods. Latent profile analysis and an examination of responses to open‐ended survey questions reveal distinctive methodological clusteri...

Background Social connection has been linked to reduced disease risk and enhanced antiviral immunity, but it is unclear whether online social connections have similar effects to those previously documented for in-person/offline social relationships, or whether online connections can substitute for in-person social relations when the latter are rest...

We examine internet gaming-related suffering as a novel syndemic most prevalent among contemporary emerging adults. Synthetic analysis of our prior research on internet gaming and health affirms how social factors and mental and physical wellness mutually condition each other in this online play context. Employing biocultural anthropological mixed...

Standard mediation techniques for fitting mediation models cannot readily be translated to nonlinear regression models because of scaling issues. Methods to assess mediation in regression models with categorical and limited response variables have expanded in recent years, and these techniques vary in their approach and versatility. The recently de...

Previous research has identified a link between experiencing life as meaningful and purposeful—what is referred to as “eudaimonia”—and reduced expression of a stress-induced gene profile known as the “conserved transcriptional response to adversity” (CTRA). In the current study, we examine whether similar links between eudaimonic well-being and CTR...

We explore the problem of distinguishing the relatively constant versus culturally variable dimensions of mental suffering and disorder in the context of a cross-cultural study of Internet gaming-related distress. We extend the conceptual contrast of “core” and “peripheral” symptoms drawn from game studies and use a framework that synthesizes cultu...

We compare the forms online gaming-related distress takes cross-culturally, and examine how much such distress resembles the World Health Organization’s (WHO) “Gaming disorder,” understood to be an “addiction.” Our preliminary exploratory factor analysis (EFA) in North America (n=2025), Europe (n=1198), and China (n=841) revealed a constant four-fa...

The most widely used formal approach to culture, the cultural consensus theory (CCT) of Romney, Weller, and Batchelder, originally relied on a priori definitions of cultural groups to map their unity and diversity. Retaining key features of classical CCT, we provide techniques to identify two or more cultural subgroups in a sample, whether those gr...

Objectives To combine social genomics with cultural approaches to expand understandings of the somatic health dynamics of online gaming, including in the controversial nosological construct of internet gaming disorder (IGD). Methods In blood samples from 56 U.S. gamers, we examined expression of the conserved transcriptional response to adversity...

Objectives To combine social genomics with cultural approaches in order to expand understandings of the somatic health dynamics of online gaming, including in the controversial nosological construct of Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD). Methods In blood samples from 56 U.S. gamers, we examined expression of the conserved transcriptional response to ad...

As a reflective activity at niche scale in transition management for system-wide changes in universities for sustainable societies, this study aimed to evaluate student environmental literacy (EL) and assess the effects of sociodemographic variables on the level of EL among students at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran. A total of 1,068 students t...

Research has established loneliness as a good predictor of intensive Internet use. But it is not fully understood whether Internet activity lessens lonely individuals' felt distress (known as positive psychosocial “compensation”), or by contrast further magnifies it (the “poor-get-poorer” hypothesis). Focused on online videogames in particular, we...

We present a perspective to analyze mental health without either a) imposing Western illness categories or b) adopting local or “native” categories of mental distress. Our approach takes as axiomatic only that locals within any culture share a cognitive and verbal lexicon of salient positive and negative emotional experiences, which an appropriate...

We employed ethnographic methods more attentive to insider gamer perspectives to develop culturally-sensitive scale measures of online gaming involvement and its positive and negative consequences. Our inquiry combined relatively unstructured in-game participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and a web survey. The latter derived from both...

We examine human displacement among indigenous tribal conservation refugees—the Sahariya—recently displaced from a wildlife sanctuary in central India. We focus on human displacement’s mental health toll as well as the displacement-related changes that help explain such emotional suffering. To do so, we compare individuals relocated from the core o...

This article provides an alternate method to assess the fit of the cultural consensus model (CCM) of Romney and colleagues to the responses of a group of informants about a domain of knowledge, and thus also to evaluate the extent of shared knowledge within a group. Criteria for judging the existence of singular culture have been articulated previo...

We examine how online sociocultural context influences play experience in the popular online role-playing game, World of Warcraft (WoW). We focus on how guilds, in-game associations of like-minded players, establish social relationships and cultural understandings that shape online play experience. Some guilds help their members regulate the stress...

Researchers propose “internet gaming disorder” as characterized by excessive or poorly controlled behaviors, preoccupations, and urges regarding online gaming that lead to distress or impairment (Pontes and Griffiths 2015). They suggest that distressful patterns of internet use, like other behavioral addictions, can be usefully classified with alco...

We present ethnographically-informed survey and interview data suggesting that problematic online gaming in the World of Warcraft (WoW) can be conceptualized as a response to pre-existing life stress, which for highly stressed individuals magnifies rather than relieves their suffering. In particular, we explore how relaxing and arousing in-game exp...

We use ethnographically informed survey and interview data to explore therapeutic and problematic play in the online World of Warcraft (WoW). We focus on how game-play in WoW is driven by shared and socially transmitted models of success that we conceptualize as cultural ideals. Our research reveals associations between having higher online compare...

This paper analyzes admissions to the Colorado Insane Asylum from 1879 to 1900. We estimate and compare admission rates across sex, age, marital, occupation, and immigration status using original admission records in combination with US census data from 1870 to1900. We show the extent to which persons in various status groups, who varied in power a...

SubCultCon: Maximum-Likelihood Cultural Consensus Analysis with Sub-Cultures https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=SubCultCon The three functions in the package compute the maximum likelihood estimates of the informants’ competence scores, tests for two answer keys with known groups, and finds ”best” split of the informants into sub-culture groups. Ve...

We discuss why nature reverence and pro-environmental thinkingamong indigenous peoples inhabiting a Wildlife Sanctuary in southern Rajasthan does not translate into more actual conservation practice. We point to the way that the post-Independence dispossession of these peoples from their lands has resulted in a failure of institutional organization...

The use of sexed semen in the dairy industry has grown rapidly. However, high costs and low fertility have limited the use of this potentially valuable tool. This study used simulation to evaluate 160,000 combinations of key variables in 3 spheres of influence related to profit feasibility: (1) market (e.g., milk and calf prices), (2) dairy farm ma...

Yee (2006) found three motivational factors-achievement, social, and immersion-underlying play in massively multiplayer online role-playing games ("MMORPGs" or "MMOs" for short). Subsequent work has suggested that these factors foster problematic or addictive forms of play in online worlds. In the current study, we used an online survey of responde...

Honors directors and deans know or presume that retention and graduation rates of honors students substantially exceed those of non-honors students. In our research, we have attempted to better determine what portion of this success is attributable to the academic and other benefits of honors programs as opposed to the background characteristics of...

Combining perspectives from the new science of happiness with discussions regarding “problematic” and “addictive” play in multiplayer online games, the authors examine how player motivations pattern both positive and negative gaming experiences. Specifically, using ethnographic interviews and a survey, the authors explore the utility of Yee’s three...

We use ethnographic, interview, and survey data to examine problematic play within the popular online game, World of Warcraft, or ‘WoW’ for short. Research shows that players drawn to the interpersonal dimensions of online games are more prone to experience negative outcomes associated with their computer use. Our study suggests that it is not only...

Videogame players commonly report reaching deeply "immersive" states of consciousness, in some cases growing to feel like they actually are their characters and really in the game, with such fantastic characters and places potentially only loosely connected to offline selves and realities. In the current investigation, we use interview and survey d...

We outline a novel approach to calculate exact p-levels for two-sample randomization tests. The approach closely resembles permute in its applications, with the main difference being that the results are approximated only if the execution time needed to calculate exact p-levels would exceed a specified maximum. We demonstrate its use by deriving p-le...

Problem: Solar energy has potential to solve many types of planning problems. Knowing where existing household solar energy users are located and what factors explain this distribution can help craft appropriate local policies. Purpose: This study analyzes the spatial distribution of households who heat their homes with solar energy across the cont...

ABSTRACT  In this article, we examine the environmental thought and practice of indigenous peoples living in and around a wildlife sanctuary in North India. Analysis reveals that those religious specialists (such as shamans) who possess knowledge of herbal healing are more committed than other villagers to preventing or mitigating the overharvestin...

In this paper, we argue that shamans as compared to non-shamans demonstrate a deeper connection to wildlife. Shamans display particularly powerful love and reverence for leopards. That shamans more deeply revere, even worship, nature suggests that indigenous Animism does impact the environmental thought and practice of our informants. However, our...

This article discusses the environmental ethics of Indigenous herbalists inhabiting the Phulwari ki Nal Wildlife Sanctuary in Rajasthan, India. Our respondents protected forests from activities like illicit tree felling because (a) they realized that their own human well-being is tied to the fate of the natural world, and (b) wild animals such as l...

No explained variation (R2) measure for ordinal response models enjoys wide use, and such measures have in fact received little specific attention or evaluation. To remedy this gap, the author presents and justifies R2 O, an explained variation measure for ordinal response models, which is based on a recent ordinal dispersion measure. The use and f...

Little is known about producers' willingness to use manure. Past studies have focused on substitutability for fertilizers. We surveyed crop producers in a cattle-dense region of the Colorado Plains about whether and why they apply manure, focusing on how pressures (like owning cattle) or preferences (pro and con) affect their adoption. Using logist...

Objective. Much of the empirical work on environmental justice centers on the geographic distribution of potential chronic health risks (e.g., planned toxic releases or treatment storage and disposal facilities). Far less attention has been devoted to the geographic distribution of acute health risks that cause immediate harm. The purpose of this w...

The Level of Supervision Inventory (LSI) has garnered attention as a useful correctional classification and prediction instrument in Canadian settings, and has also been used in the U.S. The predictive utility of the LSI was tested on a sample of male community corrections clients in Fort Collins, Colorado using halfway house program completion, re...

Whereas measures of variation in nominal data have long been recognized and used by sociologists, measures of variation for ordered categorical data have received little attention. The authors discuss the potential usefulness of ordinal dispersion statistics in sociology and define a broad class of such measures, some of which have previously been...

To determine whether animal factors and level of professional veterinary medical training were associated with attitudes toward pain management in animals. Exploratory, descriptive survey. Students in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences professional veterinary medical curriculum (approx 540) and clinical faculty (approx 50),...

Case-control designs involve samples stratified disproportionately on a binary dependent variable. This design, though infrequently used by sociologists, offers tremendous logistical efficiency in the study of rare events, such as divorce, joining a religious cult, or committing a crime. This paper attempts to sensitize sociologists to the many sit...

A new measure of ordinal variation, the LSQ, is developed using a geometric representation involving the cumulative distribution function. Connections among it and previously suggested measures, the LOV, IOV, and COV, are clarified. This geometric perspective helps demonstrate that all these statistics measure the distance between the observed cumu...

Dental variation has been used commonly to assess taxonomic composition in morphologically homogeneous fossil samples. While the coefficient of variation (CV) has been used traditionally, range-based measures of variation, such as the range as a percentage of the mean (R%) and the maximum/minimum index (Imax/min) have recently become popular altern...

Supplementation of a strong didactic geriatric health promotion program (control group) with socio-behavioral interventions, including peer support, physician involvement, and behavioral contracting, resulted in greater benefit to older participants. In a randomized trial, 57 participants (aged 55–94 yrs) in the treatment group were more likely to...

Dental variation remains an important criterion for assessing whether a morphologically homogeneous fossil primate sample includes more than one species. The Coefficient of Variation (CV) has commonly been used to compare variation in a fossil sample of unknown taxonomic composition with that of extant single-species samples, in order to determine...

The purpose of this investigation was to advance recent discussion about the relative merits of two alternative instruments involved in the assessment of game orientation. Fourth- and fifth-grade students (N=471) responded to a questionnaire containing both the Game Orientation Scale (GOS) and an adapted version of the original Webb Scale referred...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and comment upon recent developments in the measurement and conceptualization of attitudes toward play, or “game orientation.” Recent scholarly work has become critical of the traditional measurement instrument, the Webb Scale, focusing primarily on the issues of situational ambiguity and unidimensional artif...

Sociologists from Veblen (1899) through contemporary critical theorists have produced considerable theoretical work about consumption, but a comparable flow of empirical work does not exist. This essay reviews three theoretical approaches (cultural, materialist, and critical theory) to consumption critique and extracts from them a set of suggestion...

In the context of recent attempts to apply critical perspectives to topics in rural sociology, two Marxian structural approaches to economic crisis under capitalism are applied to time series data for primary production in the U.S. red meat (beef and swine) industry. Neither approach receives unequivocal support. However, data from the swine indust...

The twentieth century rise in energy consumption appears to be due more to rises in affluence than changes in energy technology. This conclusion is disputed by suggesting that the rise in energy consumption is due not to a genuine rise in affluence, but to the use of energy to produce goods and services that only compensate for the poorer character...

The opportunity for sociological work on energy is demonstrated by a critical review of several bodies ofnon-sociological work on energy. Included in this review is the crisis genre, the energy primer, the political economy of energy, the work of "renegade" scientists, and research by traditional economists. By criticizing these bodies of work, the...

The general intellectual debate over energy issues has not exhausted the possibilities for sociological work. Sociology can improve on such previous work by providing an empirical-analytic moment, attending to meaning adequacy, recognizing process, assessing the materially determinative character of energy, and by being critical. However, if these...

There have been marked disagreements in the literature on the structure of power in American society. The authors suggest that this controversy is an artifact of ideological differences between sociologists and political scientists. This hypothesis is tested through the use of a pluralism-elitism scale. Political scientists are found to score towar...

Two factors are hypothesized to underlie the prestige of students within secondary school systems: family background, and personal qualities of the student. In a survey of two school systems, this hypothesis was not supported. An additional hypothesis suggested that the content of student values should become more like those of the adult world as t...