Principal Investigators
Nic Ducheneaut is a Senior Research Scientist in the Computing Science Laboratory at PARC. His research interests include the sociology of online communities, computer-supported cooperative work, and human-computer interaction. He has studied social interactions in a wide variety of environments ranging from real-time, massively multiplayer games to large bureaucracies. These studies led to the design of novel technologies to better support electronic communication in virtual environments. Nicolas’s research is based on a combination of qualitative methods (ethnography) with quantitative data collection and analysis (such as data mining and social network analysis). He obtained his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of California, Berkeley.
Nick Yee is a Research Scientist in the Computing Science Laboratory at PARC. Nick graduated with a PhD from the Department of Communication at Stanford University where he focused on social interactions and self-representation in immersive virtual reality. He has surveyed over 35,000 MMORPG players on a wide variety of issues, such as age and gender differences, motivations of play, relationship formation, and problematic usage over the past 5 years. These findings are available at the Daedalus Project.
Alumni
Bob Moore was a sociologist in the Computing Science Laboratory at PARC (he is now a researcher at Yahoo! Labs). He specializes in the micro-analysis of social interaction and practice in virtual worlds and in real life. In the area of online game research, he examines the mechanics of avatar-mediated interaction as well as shared player practices through screen-capture-video analysis and virtual ethnography. Bob has conducted video-based ethnographies in a variety of settings including massively multiplayer online games, copy shops, automobile assembly plants, and survey research call centers. He obtained his Ph.D. in sociology in 1999 from Indiana University, Bloomington, where he was trained in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.
Eric Nickell was a computer scientist in the Computing Science Laboratory at PARC (he is now an independent contractor working on XP coaching and on-site incubation). Since receiving a B.S. from Caltech in 1980, he has spent time as a video game designer, developing high-speed imaging software, and creating research software prototypes, as well as living and doing language- and culture-learning for several years in an isolated village in Southeast Asia. He also holds an M.A. from Fuller Theological Seminary. As well as an interest in developing and using tools to understand the social nature of online role-playing games, long-term interests include algorithms, and the processes and tools by which groups of people develop high-quality software and enjoy doing it.
Cabell (rhymes with “Scrabble”) Gathman is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her MS work was a conversation analytic study of the interaction between telephone survey interviewers and respondents following cognitive tasks in a long-running longitudinal study, focusing on the interviewer practice of complimenting respondents’ performances. She is interested in technologically mediated social interaction, particularly how people use multiple technological channels, including MMORPGs, to develop and maintain relationships, as well as how people perform identities such as gender in online spaces.
Don (Ming-Hui) Wen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Human Factors Laboratory at Department of Industrial Engineering & Management of Nation Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan. His research interests include user experience design in massively multiplayer online games and user interface design for consumer appliances. His Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the MMORPG design factors influencing a player’s experience in terms of positive (e.g. fun, challenging) and negative experience (e.g. game addiction). He was a visiting researcher at PARC doing research on avatar customization systems in multiuser online virtual worlds from January to November 2008.
Greg Wadley was a visiting researcher at PARC from July to October 2008. He teaches in the Information Systems degree at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and in the past few years has researched for his PhD on how people use communication media in virtual worlds (now in write-up phase). At PARC he was researching group collaboration around complex objects in Second Life. For more information about Greg’s work please see his UniMelb page.