From the Press Release
In THE PROTEUS PARADOX: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us—And How They Don’t (pub date: January 7, 2014), game researcher Nick Yee shows online games do not always deliver on the freedom and escapism they evoke. Instead, Yee shows that virtual spaces perpetuate social norms and stereotypes from the offline world, transform play into labor, and inspire racial scapegoating and superstitious thinking.
“Games are becoming an integral part of our lives—they are where we play, where we work, and where we fall in love,” he writes. “But technology isn’t a neutral tool that simply bends to our will…As millions of people spend increasing amounts of time in online games and virtual worlds, we need to be vigilant about whether these new environments are fulfilling their promises of freedom and reinvention, and if they’re not, we need to find a way to change them.”
Nick Yee is well-known for the Daedalus Project, a long-running survey study of over 50,000 online gamers. Using player surveys, psychological experiments, and in-game data, Yee breaks down misconceptions about who plays fantasy games and the extent to which the online and offline worlds operate separately.