Nick_Yee

Misconceptions debunked:

• Online gamers are mostly teenagers: No. Their average age is around 30.

• Online gamers are anti-social: No. 80% of online gamers regularly game with someone they know in the physical world (friend, romantic partner, sibling, spouse).

• Online gamers spend too much time gaming: Not really. The average MMO player spends about 20 hours each week gaming. The average American watches 33 hours of TV each week.

Writing about Games: I think most news articles about games start from the tacit premise that games are a waste of time, frivolous, or that virtual worlds are not real. So we get stories like: How can someone fall in love with a night elf? Can you believe that the government cares enough to spy in online games? So we get trapped in this cycle of repeating this premise rather than engaging with what happens in games on their own terms, by providing the proper context for why these things make sense if you understand gaming culture.

One finding from MMOs: I was studying players who have a physical, real world relationship with someone they had met in an MMO. One finding that jumped out at me was that 60% of these players said that the relationship wouldn't have happened if they had first met face-to-face in the physical world. The predominant reason was a physical trait; the other person wasn't their physical "type": too tall, too short, too blue-collar, too pale, too old, etc. It was because they met in an MMO without the distraction of physical appearances that allowed them to get to know the other person before making that snap judgment. So we often think that it's difficult to get to know a person in a fantasy world where everyone is pretending to be someone else, but less can be more in this case.

One meta-finding from my research: Because MMO gamers are used to text chat, they are incredibly articulate and thoughtful in online surveys. Over the years, I've been able to accumulate some really insightful and powerful player narratives because of this.

Figure out other ways to play the game. I think we often approach a game and see one path to completion or winning. And we play that path and we're done. I think one way to replay games is to set up different goals (even goals that aren't tracked explicitly by the game).

In Dark Age of Camelot, a group of players created a singing/dancing group. They would go into PvP areas and just sing/dance. If they were killed, they just came back. Eventually people stopped killing them. And they were having fun and people watching them were having fun.

So I guess the broader message is that the most obvious way of having fun in a game is not the only way of having fun.

When I was at PARC, we did a study on understanding the variables that lead to guild survival (vs. death) over a 6 month period. The most significant factor was managing churn. Players always leave, so the most crucial thing about guild survival is making sure there is a steady stream of new recruits across the levels to replace the churners. (http://nickyee.com/pubs/Ducheneaut,%20Yee,%20Nickell,%20Moore%20-%20Chi%202007.pdf)

I've also interviewed guild leaders and written about how games can end up being a great deal of work. I want to highlight one interview I did was a high-end raid guild leader in WoW, who brings up the (controversial) processes he implemented to manage his guild: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001334.php

I think it's a genuine concern--some gamers do spend so much time playing games that it has a negative impact on their work/school/relationships, but I feel that the media and many psychologists tend to frame it as a technology problem rather than a psychological problem.

Studies have repeatedly shown that it is people who are already suffering from depression, social anxiety, or stress that tend to develop problematic gaming issues. So in this sense, it's a failed attempt at self-treatment. Or put another way, taking the game away in and of itself doesn't solve the problem.

I would argue that the technological framing mistakes the symptom for the cause, and in the end creates more confusion over this issue.

Right now, it's hard to put a number on how common this problem is because it's hard to study this highly politicized topic. Whether we can assign "gaming addiction" by simply borrowing a scale from alcoholism or gambling is one of these issues. How do we compare a social community (virtual worlds) with an ingested substance? Or should we to begin with?