Mentorship is a key concept in organizational communication and business. Proteges tend to do better with one, but the real-world challenges of studying this objectively are tough. Mentorship also exists in gaming, where the data on the mentors and proteges and their actual actions and results are easier to track. This project investigates those relationships, and generally finds that time spent with a mentor leads to better outcomes, regardless of the mentor's characteristics.

Gaming clans, like individuals, strategically accumulate and mobilize social capital for optimal performances. Drawing ideas from team social capital theory and evolutionary theory, this project focuses on how various types of team social capital (i.e., team bridging social capital and team closure) evolve and affect clan performance. The results indicate that clans of different evolutionary statuses vary in social capital building and effectiveness.

Do receiving messages and sending out messages help players develop social capital? If so, are they equally important? This project examines the implications of message directions for relationships and social capital accrual in a large virtual world.

Using an actor-based gaming toxicity categorization, this study aims to understand whether pure perpetrators, pure victims, and aggressive victims enjoy the game differently, and whether they continue to play the game in a similar pattern.

Real-world well-being has been declining in the US over time, but dropped sharper still during the pandemic. How did game players fare? Our study of World of Tanks players found that they fared better than the general population, achieving a buffering effect. Given that the game is not particularly socially supportive, the results suggest games can offer real social support to some in some contexts.

This study aimed to examine how certain gameplay motivations and behaviors associated with social relationships predict social capital within the mobile massive multiplayer online game, Sky: Children of the Light.

This project explores how players of World of Tanks interact with the historical aspects of the game. Specifically, what does World of Tanks teach players about the past, and how do gameplay features allows players to play with alternate and speculative histories?

How social identities might influence players' in-game behaviors? In this study we explore the effects of three types of social identities (i.e., political ideological identity, military identity, and national identity) on the choice of different tanks in World of Tanks.

This project examines how patterns of information exchange in teams affect their performance over time. We are investigating the networks and dynamics of interactions amongst team players to understand how these factors contribute to their success or failure.

Using multiple co-evolving social graphs, we designed a friend recommendation system with dynamic graphs representations.

Using chat data and in-game behavioral data, we examine the relationship between communication patterns and group performance in the context of clans.

How does age predict what players talk about, and how does that in turn affect their well being? Marrying in-game chat and survey data, we hypothesize that when each group gets to talk about what it wants, it will predict better well being.

Combining players' network position data and in-game toxicity report data in a multiplayer online game, this project examines how does structural factors predict players' gaming toxicity behaviors.

This project explores how PvP and PvE games differentially impact well-being by satisfying different types of intrinsic psychological needs. We analyze surveys and behavioral data collected from two games during the pandemic.

This research focuses on using a small sample of the surveyed users to estimate the general public in-game motivation by their behaviors. The goal of this research is to automatically detect players' motivation types so that games can better match their goals.

Reciprocity and how people influence each other is a central question in the social sciences. This project implements a new way to assess social value by desegregating intrinsic playing time with that derived from external influence.

This study examines how horizontal/vertical individualism affects a player’s homophilous gaming behavior, and if horizontal/vertical individualism is associated with higher wellbeing of players when moderated by homophilous gaming behavior.