Meet Nick Yee, Ph.D.

Over the past nine years, Yee has studied virtual environments in a variety of ways. At Stanford, Yee’s dissertation work involved studying how the avatars people use change how they behave. For example, he found that users in more attractive avatars become friendlier in a virtual space. At the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), he was part of a project that used data-mining techniques on World of Warcraft data to understand the social dynamics of play. And Yee is also well-known for The Daedalus Project, an ongoing survey study of over 40,000 online gamers on issues such as demographics, relationship formation, avatar creation, and problematic use.

One of few experts in this field of study, his varied research on the behavioral characteristics of online gamers and the boundary between virtual and real worlds has led to national recognition for his work.