Nick Yee’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

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 and stereotypes from the offline world, transform play into labor, and inspire racial scapegoating and superstitious thinking. And the change that does occur is often out of our control and effected by unparalleled—but rarely recognized—tools for controlling what players think and how they behave.

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. This is all the more interesting when considering that most of the activities offered in a MMOG, such as killing monsters, leveling up a character, gaining more powerful abilities and gear, etc., are all already available in single-player games: from an individual standpoint, one could have a strikingly similar experience playing a MMOG like World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004), for instance, and a single-player role-playing game (RPG) like Dragon Age (Electronic Arts, 2009). Therefore, what makes MMOGs so unique and interesting is their social architecture: the way each game world is designed to maximize opportunities for player-to-player interactions. In turn, it is these repeated player interactions that keep subscribers coming back – and paying their monthly fee: as previous studies have shown “it is the players that are addictive [in MMOGs], not the game itself (Lazarro 2004).” Understanding the nature and structure of player behaviors and interactions in online games is therefore not only an interesting (and fun) sociological question: it is also potentially a very lucrative one, since a better understanding of player behavior could lead to improved social architectures with even higher attractiveness to the players and a corresponding increased retention (and profit).

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 provide a cross-cultural validation of the developed scale. Analysis of actual in-game behavioral metrics is also provided to demonstrate predictive validity of the scale.

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 "gamifying" applications, we believe these findings are relevant for both gaming and non-gaming research.

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 period. Many behavioral cues in VWs were found to be related to personality. For example, Extraverts prefer group activities over solo activities. We also found that these behavioral indicators can be used to infer a player's personality.

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 that the correlation between perceived usability and time-on-task is stronger when participants are more familiar with the phone model. While not significant when initially inspecting a new phone model, a negative correlation between time-on-task and perceived usability becomes significant with as little as an hour's time doing tasks on the unfamiliar phone. This suggests that designing the UI to make time-on-task as short as possible may not have much effect on the purchase decision, but as experience increases, it may increase the loyalty of existing users.

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 in-game behaviors for both healing and player-vs-player activity.

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 manifested in SL, participant's Big Five scores were correlated with their virtual behavioral and linguistic metrics. For example, Conscientiousness was corre-lated with many metrics related to geographical movement; however, there was low overlap with findings from previous studies. The authors provide some reasons for this low concordance. Their study hints at the potential of leveraging VWs to understand the link not only between personality and behavior but also among other social and psychological phenomena as well. Every morning, at exactly 7 o'clock, Stella treks to her farm to harvest and plant a new crop of peas, but in the popular Face-book harvesting game FarmVille, she can do this without even breaking a sweat. And over in the virtual world (VW) Second Life (SL) where users create all of the world's content, Marcus is wondering whether his new Mohawk hairdo would send the wrong message at the academic panel he is attending or whether it would be considered stylish in the context of SL. As VWs become mainstream, a critical psychological issue is whether and how personality manifests itself in VWs.

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 employed modality of delivery - SMS. We also examined the underlying variables that increase the perceived quality of content and found that the factors interest, entertainment, relevance and actionability influence people's receptivity significantly. Our findings inform system design that seeks to provide context-sensitive information or to predict interruptibility and suggest the consideration of receptivity as an extension to the way we think and reason about interruptibility.

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. Female players in such relationships had higher general happiness than their male counterparts. Contrary to stereotypes and current hypotheses, it was the female players who played the most. Female players were also healthier than male players or females in the general population. The findings have implications for gender theory and communication-oriented methods in games and online research-most notably for the use of self-reported time spent, which was systematically incorrect and different by gender.