Nick Yee's research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places
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Publications (45)
Proteus, the mythical sea god who could alter his appearance at will, embodies one of the promises of online games: the ability to reinvent oneself. Yet inhabitants of virtual worlds rarely achieve this liberty, game researcher Nick Yee contends. Though online games evoke freedom and escapism, Yee shows that virtual spaces perpetuate social norms a...
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) occupy a unique position in the videogaming landscape. While multiplayer computer games are certainly not new (Spacewars, in 1962, was already designed for two players), MMOGs have gone much farther than any other genre in their attempts to encourage social interactions between large groups of players. Thi...
Understanding gaming motivations is important given the growing trend of incorporating game-based mechanisms in non-gaming applications. In this paper, we describe the development and validation of an online gaming motivations scale based on a 3-factor model. Data from 2,071 US participants and 645 Hong Kong and Taiwan participants is used to provi...
Examining how in-game behavior preferences map onto real world demographics provides important empirically-derived insights into how to match game-based mechanisms to target demographic segments. Using behavioral and demographic data from 1,037 World of Warcraft players, we use multiple regressions to provide this mapping. Given current interest in...
Studies in the Proteus Effect have shown that users conform to stereotypes associated with their avatar's appearance. In this study, we used longitudinal behavioral data from 1,040 users in a virtual world to examine the behavioral outcome of conflicting gender cues between user and avatar. We found that virtual gender had a significant effect on i...
Personality inference can be used for dynamic personalization of content or system customization. In this study, we examined whether and how personality is expressed in Virtual Worlds (VWs). Survey data from 1,040 World of Warcraft players containing demographic and personality variables was paired with their VW behavioral metrics over a four-month...
We studied the extent to which time-on-task is correlated with perception of usability for people who are familiar with a phone model and for those who are not. Our controlled experiment, conducted in Japan, correlated subjective usability assessments with time-on-task for expert and novice users on three different mobile phone models. We found tha...
To examine the expression of personality in virtual worlds (VWs), the authors tracked the behavioral and linguistic output of 76 students continuously over a 6-week period in the VW Second Life (SL). Behavioral metrics in SL were consistent over time, but low stabilities were observed for linguistic metrics. To examine the ways in which personality...
In this paper we investigate effects of the content of interruptions and of the time of interruption delivery on mobile phones. We review related work and report on a naturalistic quasi-experiment using experience-sampling that showed that the receptivity to an interruption is influenced by its content rather than by its time of delivery in the emp...
The current study tracked 80 participants who spent an average of six hours per week in Second Life over six consecutive weeks. Objective measures of movement and chat were automatically collected in real time when participants logged in to Second Life. Data regarding the number of groups and friends was self-reported through online questionnaires...
Several hypotheses regarding the importance of gender and relationships were tested by combining a large survey dataset with unobtrusive behavioral data from 1 year of play. Consistent with expectations, males played for achievement-oriented reasons and were more aggressive, especially within romantic relationships where both partners played. Femal...
The current study examined problematic Internet use (PIU) among people who play MMO games and sought to determine whether aspects of the MMO experience are useful predictors of PIU. The study sought to determine whether game-related variables could predict PIU scores after accounting for their relationships with psychosocial well-being. Novel metho...
In the late 1960s, Mischel (1968) sparked a debate in personality psychology by critiquing the reliance on trait-based frameworks of behavior. While the standard approach had been to measure stable dispositions (such as Extraversion), Mischel argued that behavior was largely determined by situational demands (such as being at a party). In the decad...
CogTool is a predictive evaluation tool for user interfaces. We wanted to apply CogTool to an evaluation of two mobile phones,
but, at the time of writing, CogTool lacks the necessary (modeling baseline) observed human performance data to allow it to
make accurate predictions about mobile phone use. To address this problem, we needed to collect per...
Studies in the Proteus Effect (N. Yee & J. Bailenson, 200727.
Yee , N. and
Bailenson , J. 2007. The proteus effect: The effect of transformed self-representation on behavior. Human Communication Research, 33: 271–290. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) have shown that the appearance of avatars (i.e., digital representations of our...
Virtual environments allow individuals to dramatically alter their self-representation. More important, studies have shown that people infer their expected behaviors and attitudes from observing their avatar's appearance, a phenomenon known as the Proteus effect. For example, users given taller avatars negotiated more aggressively than users given...
Social science research demonstrates that people are drawn to others perceived as similar. We extend this finding to political candidates by comparing the relative effects of candidate familiarity as well as partisan, issue, gender, and facial similarity on voters’ evaluations of candidates. In Experiment 1, during the week of the 2006 Florida gube...
Conversations are characterized by an interactional synchrony between verbal and nonverbal behaviors [Kendon, A. (1970). Movement coordination in social interaction: some examples described. Acta Psychologica, 32(2), 101–125]. A subset of these contingent conversational behaviors is direct mimicry. During face to face interaction, people who mimic...
To be immersed in a virtual environment, the user must be presented with plausible sensory input including auditory cues. A virtual (three-dimensional) audio display aims to allow the user to perceive the position of a sound source at an arbitrary position ...
Online games have exploded in popularity, but for many researchers access to players has been difficult. The study reported here is the first to collect a combination of survey and behavioral data with the cooperation of a major virtual world operator. In the current study, 7,000 players of the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) EverQuest 2 we...
Psychology is generally concerned with studying the mind, the brain, and human behavior. While popular media often focus on clinical psychology (the study and treatment of mental illness), there are many other forms of psychology, ranging from neuropsychology to cultural psychology to sports psychology. This entry largely focuses on experimental ps...
Contemporary virtual worlds tend to insist on employing the metaphor of embodiment and replicating physical reality. We are represented by graphical avatars that in turn sit in virtual chairs around virtual tables. On the other hand, in what ways might this insistence on replicating physical reality constrain the kinds of work that might take place...
As digital communication becomes more commonplace and sensory rich, understanding the manner in which people interact with one another is crucial. In the current study, we examined the manners in which people touch digital representations of people, and compared those behaviors to the manner in which they touch digital representations of nonhuman o...
This article illustrates the utility of using virtual environments to transform social interaction via behavior and context, with the goal of improving learning in digital environments. We first describe the technology and theories behind virtual environments and then report data from 4 empirical studies. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that teach...
This chapter investigates the nature and structure of social networks formed between the players of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), an incredibly popular form of Internet-based entertainment attracting millions of subscribers. To do so, we use data collected about the behavior of more than 300,000 characters in World of Warcraft (the mo...
We studied the characteristics of hand touch with a mechanical device that approximated a handshake, and we then examined
the effect of handshake mimicry on assessment of a partner. Two participants interacted with a force-feedback joystick that
recorded each of their hand movements individually. The two participants then greeted one another by fee...
Virtual environments, such as online games and web-based chat rooms, increasingly allow us to alter our digital self-representations dramatically and easily. But as we change our self-representations, do our self-representations change our behavior in turn? In 2 experimental studies, we explore the hypothesis that an individual’s behavior conforms...
The use of embodied agents, defined as visual human-like representations accompanying a computer interface, is becoming prevalent in applications ranging from educational software to advertisements. In the current work, we assimilate previous empirical studies which compare interfaces with visually embodied agents to interfaces without agents, both...
Every day, millions of users interact in real-time via avatars in online environments, such as massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These online environments could potentially be unique research platforms for the social sciences and clinical therapy, but it is crucial to first establish that social behavior and norms in virtua...
This article examines the phenomenon of Virtual Interpersonal Touch (VIT), people touching one another via force-feedback haptic devices. As collaborative virtual environments become utilized more effectively, it is only natural that interactants will have the ability to touch one another. In the work presented here, we used relatively basic device...
An empirical model of player motivations in online games provides the foundation to understand and assess how players differ from one another and how motivations of play relate to age, gender, usage patterns, and in-game behaviors. In the current study, a factor analytic approach was used to create an empirical model of player motivations. The anal...
Empirical research on human behavior in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) is in its infancy. Historically, one of the more valuable tools social scientists have used to evaluate new forms of media is longitudinal studies that examine user behavior over an extended period of time. In the current study, three triads of participants came to th...
A representative sample of players of a popular massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft) was interviewed to map out the social dynamics of guilds. An initial survey and network mapping of players and guilds helped form a baseline. Next, the resulting interview transcripts were reviewed to explore player behaviors, attitudes, and opinio...
World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the most popular massively multiplayer games (MMOs) to date, with more than 6 million subscribers worldwide. This article uses data collected over 8 months with automated “bots” to explore how WoW functions as a game. The focus is on metrics reflecting a player’s gaming experience: how long they play, the classes a...
The realism of avatars in terms of behavior and form is critical to the development of collaborative virtual environments. In the study we utilized state of the art, real- time face tracking technology to track and render facial expressions unobtrusively in a desktop CVE. Participants in dyads interacted with each other via either a video- conferen...
Online survey data were collected from 30,000 users of Massively Multi-User On- line Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) over a three year period to explore users' demographics, motivations, and derived experiences. Not only do MMORPGs ap- peal to a broad age range (Mage 26.57, range 11- 68), but the appeal is strong (on average 22 hours of usage per week...
Experimental subjects evaluated a political candidate whose face was digitally altered to absorb the subjects' facial structure. For half of the subjects, the photograph of the candidate was morphed such that the image presented was a blend composed of 60% of the unfamiliar Caucasian male and 40% of the subject. For the other half the photograph wa...
In social psychology, perspective-taking has been shown to be a reliable method in reducing negative social stereotyping. These exercises have until now only relied on asking a person to imagine themselves in the mindset of another person. We argue that immersive virtual environments provide the unique opportunity to allow individuals to directly t...
Video games are often framed as sites of play and entertainment. Their transformation into work platforms and the staggering amount of work that is being done in these games often go unnoticed. Users spend on average 20 hours a week in online games, and many of them describe their game play as obligation, tedium, and more like a second job than ent...
Previous research demonstrated social influence resulting from mimicry (the chameleon effect); a confederate who mimicked participants was more highly regarded than a confederate who did not, despite the fact that participants did not explicitly notice the mimicry. In the current study, participants interacted with an embodied artificial intelligen...
Background Over time, our mode of remote communication has evolved from written letters to telephones, email, internet chat rooms, and video-conferences. Similarly, virtual environments that utilize digital representations of humans promise to further change the nature of remote interaction. virtual envi- ronments are systems which track verbal and...
Citations
... As with most aspects of human decision making and behavior (e.g., choice of literature, body language, leisure-time activities, decoration of personal space), personality traits play a central role in shaping how users respond to stimuli and experiences in virtual worlds [70,71]. Therefore, even though players typically assume a fictional identity in video games -in terms of role (e.g., king, soldier, race driver), species (e.g., human, orc, elf), and other attributes (e.g., gender and age, body features, special abilities) -their individual playing styles often contain discernible traces of real-world personality [70,72,73]. ...
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... Furthermore, this expressed culture can demonstrate remarkable long-term resilience in the face of significant threats and pressure, which seems to challenge the 'social network'-type descriptions often used to explain the persistent groups seen in many online games (e.g. Ducheanaut & Yee, 2009). ...
... 406). This level of immersion is achieved through two main characteristics of IVR: first, the user is unobtrusively tracked so that their head and body positions are recorded, and consequently, the virtual environment is updated to reflect the orientation changes; and second, sensory information from the real world is minimized as much as possible [8]. The HMD (e.g., Oculus Quest or HTC Vive) is primary to IVR technology in that it shuts off the physical reality to immerse the users in the virtual world and provides real-time visual images that change as they move through the virtual world environment [9]. ...
... In other words, it is possible to Transformed Representation 6 specify faces that contain a 20% or 40% contribution from a participant's face. The impact of this facial-similarity manipulation has been tested in a series of studies in voting behavior (Bailenson, Garland, Iyengar, & Yee, 2006; Bailenson, Iyengar, Yee, & Collins, 2006). The results of both studies showed that facial similarity is a powerful cue, changing voting behavior even in high-profile elections where a great deal of other information and partisan biases exist, such as the 2004 presidential election. ...
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... This work also shows the advantages of using tailor made digital games over commercial non-educational games as learning resources; the collection of in-game analytics is only possible if researchers have access to the development team because events must be called from the source code of the game. This is a limitation for initiatives willing to use commercial games as their main learning resource; this issue can be mitigated by the creation of mods collecting in-game data whenever possible (Yee, 2014), but the level of detail data will hardly be achieved by these technological solutions. ...
... Early studies in the field used clinical terms such "pathological gaming" or "video game addiction" (for example, see Grüsser et al., 2007;King et al., 2013;Kuss & Griffiths, 2012). Viewing gaming through concepts such as "pathological" and "addiction" indirectly pre-constructs the player as an individual "at risk" both of losing control to the temptations of gaming and of ultimately abandoning social and physical activity (Williams et al., 2008). These studies tend to emphasize single "risk" variables when attempting to measure problematic gaming. ...
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... Yee and Bailenson introduced the Proteus Effect theory [61][62][63] stating that users may conform to expectations and stereotypes associated with the appearance of their avatars (both in 3D and immersive virtual environments). Ratan et al. [48] conducted a meta-analysis and concluded that, among the 46 studies considered, the Proteus Effect was a reliable phenomenon with a small to medium effect size. ...
... Interestingly, the embodiment of avatars with stereotypical characteristics can even change users' behavior, attitude, and perceptiona phenomenon known as the Proteus effect [100,101]. Kocur et al. [49], for example, found that the embodiment of muscular avatars increased users' grip strength and reduced their perceived exertion while holding weights. Similarly, Kocur et al. [46] revealed that users who embodied an athletic avatar had a lower perceived exertion and heart rate (HR) response while cycling in VR than those who embodied a non-athletic avatar. ...
... WoW gameplay also provided participants with a mindless activity that helped them process their stress: "just logging in and sitting in WoW helped me immensely" [P29L]. Yee and Ducheneaut [63] suggest that immersion as a motivator to play MMORPGs correlates with in-game exploration. In the current study, immersion featured via involvement in the narrative of the gaming world and through quest completion and the process of gaining player power. ...
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... For example, repeated exposure to VR has been found to decrease simulation sickness . Collecting such data can occur through long-term field studies with interviews (e.g., Wetsch, 2008) or longitudinal lab studies (e.g., ) that include repeated behavioral measures (e.g., Yee and Bailenson, 2008). However, few longitudinal studies in VR exist (with important exceptions, e.g., Fruchter, 2018). ...
