Communication professor Dmitri Williams, whose ongoing work on the social and economic impact of online gameplaying has received considerable nationwide attention, shared findings from his recent studies at the 59th annual conference of the International Communication Association, held in May in Chicago. Annenberg Agenda asked Williams about his research.

Annenberg Agenda: You’ve released a lot of new research in the last year, finding similarities between economic models in online games and the real world, as well as troubling portrayals of minorities in virtual worlds. What has been most surprising about the results?

Dmitri Williams: To be perfectly honest, there haven't been a lot of surprises to the research team. Games have such strong stereotypes and associations that those who study them have very different expectations than the general public. We expected to see complex social worlds with both good and bad things going on, and that's exactly what we found. There have been some oddball findings here and there that none of us saw coming. I think the most interesting ones were finding that the players were healthier than the non-players, and that men and women have very different happiness outcomes when playing together.

AA: You were the first researcher to use online games for experiments, and to undertake longitudinal research on video games. How did you start to see the connections between behavior in video games and behavior in real life?

DW: Back when I was playing games using a dial-up modem in grad school, I was using them to keep in touch with friends back home. It struck me that this was a new and kind of odd form of relationship, and might be worth looking into. Everyone else was looking at aggression, but it always seemed to me that the big picture was about social networking – for better or worse.

AA: Describe the experience of testifying before the U.S. Senate on video game violence, as you did in 2006. What’s your opinion of the process of translating your research into government policy?

DW: The political process is obviously just that – political. There were some people who were interested in learning about the science, but many already had a preconception or a position and they were merely looking for information to back it up. Research institutions like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health do a good job at creating and supporting basic research which can inform policy, but they can't make policy makers read it or take it into account.

AA: You have shared a vivid picture of the past and present of video gaming with your peers and with the public. What kind of future do you see for this industry? How do you think it might look?

DW: I see a continued expansion of social factors and networking, where playing with people becomes more and more common and accepted. I also see a continued rise of mobile platforms for gaming. And future technologies will continue to change the human experience. New streaming and cloud-based games are going to eventually change the industry, and will probably also have some impact on how we play together.

AA: Is there an area of online behavior you have not yet touched upon that you would like to explore now?

DW: I'd like to look more into what makes female gamers tick. There appear to be two very different kinds of them, playing for different reasons and in different ways. I'd also like to explore how the medium can bring people together for a richer social experience. Right now there are a lot of shallow, surface relationships forming online, and if they take the place of solid offline ones, that's going to be a net negative.

AA: What kind of role can Annenberg play in presenting the world of gaming behavior to a new generation of users and perhaps even designers?

DW: Annenberg is well situated to connect the professional and the academic aspects of gaming to harness the troves of data that games now generate. We can understand behaviors, outcomes and motivations in this space in a way that has been infeasible for older media. And if we understand these things, we can offer solid policy and family advice about how to best use the medium, as well as solid results to developers about what works.