Nicholas Yee

Bio

Nick Yee has an extensive research background in the psychology of virtual environments and online interaction. He’s worked with PARC’s PlayOn group and Sony Online Entertainment to examine large data sets of behavioral data from online games. At PARC, he’s also studied how people use and react to context-aware mobile applications. At Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Nick conducted experiments in immersive virtual reality to explore digital self representation and social interaction. He is also well-known for the Daedalus Project, a long-running survey study of over 50,000 online gamers exploring demographic patterns, play motivations, and emergent social phenomena. His interest in online interaction began when a personality psychology professor in college asked students to create their own webpage (this was back in 1998) as a tool to understand identity projection online. Nick received his Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University. His work has been cited by the New York Times, CNN, the Discovery Channel, and Science, among other news outlets.