Nick Yee Visits Metanomics

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

This Monday, March 17th, 2008, at 11:00AM-12:00PM SLT (2:00-3:00PM EST), Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics will host Dr. Nick Yee, research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center. Dr. Yee recently received his Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University, where he conducted experimental research on social interaction and self-representation in immersive virtual environments.

In preparation for this week's event, there is a wealth of background reading available on Nick Yee's website:

The Daedalus Project is an ongoing study of MMORPG players. MMORPGs (an acronym for Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) are a video game genre that allow thousands of people to interact, compete, and collaborate in an online virtual environment. Over the past 6 years, more than 40,000 MMORPG players have participated in the project.

At Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, I work with Jeremy Bailenson in using immersive virtual reality (VR) as a platform for conducting experiments in social interaction and self-representation. In particular, we are interested in exploring how to break the rules of physical social interaction to enhance interactions in virtual environments.

The PlayOn Group is a research group at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) that explores the social dynamics of Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). In the group, I parse and analyze large data sets from longitudinal in-game census snapshots.