Nick Sherefkin

I study game play as the most basic unit of intentional social construction. Game players seek to engineer specific social situations and sociologists can learn from their folk expertise. 

My dissertation consists of three papers that examine how features of game play facilitate or inhibit community formation and change. The first paper takes playfulness, a familiar concept in game communities, and proposes broader use in analyzing competitive contexts such as markets, elections, or scientific research. The second paper studies longitudinal data on board game publishing to understand the emergence of cooperative interaction in a community initially organized exclusively around conflict. The final paper uses data on video game achievement hunters to develop a general method of measuring the difficulty of achievements in settings where participation and effort are voluntary. 

Outside of academics, I enjoy pranking, chasing, wrastling my two kids as well as (surprise) playing games.