When I met with Nick Yee last week to discuss his fight against The Barbarians at the Gate, we ended up going down a lot of tangents. One of the more interesting ones was his paper on superstitions in massively multiplayer online games.

Yee told me about how MMOS, which he says are in many ways a fancy Skinner Box, create a lot of odd superstitions in gamers. Not superstitions in the spiritual or religious since, but repeated behaviors driven by strong beliefs that doing one thing will lead to a certain outcome, despite evidence to the contrary.

A good example of this sort of non-religious superstition is a study B.F. Skinner did in which he instilled superstition of this sort into pigeons by feeding them pellets every 15 seconds no matter what they did. After several days each pigeon had developed its own independent superstition about what produced this manna from heaven. One though circling clockwise was necessary, another that it had to attack a spot on the cage to get the pellets. Gamers do the same thing, it seems.

Nick Yee had an unenviable task last week.

The Stanford research assistant and massively multiplayer online gaming expert was flown in to Denver to explain online gaming to a room full of criminal investigators, educators and internet safety experts from area district attorney offices, police departments and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Yee, whose landmark Daedalus Project continues to study behavior in MMOs, hoped to present to these members of Qwest Colorado Coalition for Online Safety a take on online gaming that they may not have heard before: That it can actually be good for you.

Surprise! Most Roleplayers are Drama Queens