Governing Games Like a Boss

• In Event: The Messy Intersection of Games and Governance, Both Within and Surrounding Games (High-Density)

Abstract

My work focuses on the social interactions among gamers, and on the business side of how industry uses those data. In this talk, I will briefly introduce the Social Value metric, which shows how individuals impact others, and can be aggregated up into community-level measures, as well as correlated with game features and marketing channels. I will describe my experience on the industry side of this research, providing examples from approximately 900 million player accounts. These data are relevant to the ways in which game companies approach the governance of their players through the game rules that they enact. Unlike in national governments, these companies have near-perfect information about their citizens’ activities. In addition to providing insights that are relevant to governance by game companies, the research I will describe is also relevant to national governance outside of gaming contexts. I will conclude my talk by explaining some potential parallels.

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Dmitri Williams is an associate professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he is a part of the Annenberg Program on Online Communities (APOC). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2004. His research focuses on the social and economic impacts of new media, with a focus on online games. Williams was the first researcher to use online games for experiments, and to undertake longitudinal research on video games. He continues to study the psychology of online populations, with projects involving community, identity, sexuality, economics and neuroscience. He is also the CEO of Ninja Metrics, a university start-up focusing on big data. He has published in the Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Communication Monographs and others. His work has also been featured in several press accounts, most recently on NPR, and in publications including the Economist, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times and others. Williams testified before the U.S. Senate on video games and served as an expert witness and consultant in two federal court cases.

Author

• Dmitri Williams, U of Michigan