The Social Network Show

The Social Network Show welcomes Dr. Nick Yee to the May 19, 2014 episode.

If you are an online gamer, you will find this show very interesting. Dr. Yee has done a tremendous amount of research on online gaming and gamers and shares some of the interesting behavior that he has found in online gamers. If you want to read more on his recent research, take a look at a recent article in Slate, "Virtual Worlds Are Real: Avatars have consequences offline. No wonder U.S. intelligence agencies are looking into them".

For more than a decade, Dr. Nick Yee has studied online games and virtual worlds using a wide range of social science methods. His survey study of over 50,000 online gamers, the Daedalus Project, examined who these gamers are and why they play these games. At Stanford University and the Palo Alto Research Center, he used psychology experiments and large-scale data analysis to explore how our virtual and offline selves are related. Dr. Yee has over 40 peer-reviewed publications on virtual worlds and online games, and his work has been mentioned in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN International among other media outlets. He is the author of The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us--And How They Don't and is currently a senior research scientist in Ubisoft's gamer behavior research group.