Tencent Technology Corporation cause a stir last year with the announcement that they would comply with a Chinese directive on incorporating facial recognition technology into their games in the country. The move is in line with China’s strict gaming regulation policies, which impose limits on the amount of time minors can spend playing video games — an attempt to curb behavior. addictive, as the game is labeled by the state as “Spiritual opium.”
Of course, the state’s use of biometric data to police the population is intrusive and especially destructive to the privacy of underage users — but Tencent isn’t the only video game company. tracking its players, as this recent case is by no means a new phenomenon. Worldwide, video games, one of the most widely adopted forms of digital media, are installing surveillance and control networks.
Basically, A video game is a system that translates physical inputs — such as hand movements or gestures — into various machine-readable or electronic outputs. Users, by acting in ways that comply with the game’s rules and hardware specifications, are parsed into data by the video game. Written almost a decade agoSociologists Jennifer R. Whitson and Bart Simon argue that games are increasingly understood as systems that easily allow the reduction of human action into known and predictable formats.
Thus, video games are a natural vehicle for tracking, and researchers have long argued that large data sets of players’ in-game activities are a rich resource for understand the psychology and perception of players. In research Since 2012, Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, and Les Nelson have been collecting player activity data recorded on the World of Warcraft Armory website — essentially a database that records everything a character does. of what the player did in the game (how many monsters do I have) killed, how many times I died, how many fishes did I catch, etc.).
The researchers used this data to infer personality traits (in combination with data obtained through a survey). The paper shows, for example, that there is a correlation between survey respondents classified as more conscientious in their approach to gaming and a tendency to spend more time performing repetitive tasks. repetitive and dull in the game, such as fishing. In contrast, people whose characters often fell to death from high places were less conscientious, according to their survey responses.
The correlation between personality and quantitative game data is certainly not without problems. The relationship between personality and identity and video game performance is complex and idiosyncratic; For example, search shows that player identities intersect with gender, race, and gender. In addition, there was a general outcry against claim of Big Data produces new knowledge derived from correlation. Even so, game companies are increasingly realizing the value of big data sets to gain insight into what players like, how they play, what they play, what they are likely to spend. money in (in free games), how and when to deliver the right content, and how to appeal to the right kind of player emotions.
Although there are no numbers on how many video game companies are surveying their players in games (although, Recent articles suggest, major publishers and developers such as Epic, EA, and Activision explicitly state that they capture user data in their licensing agreements), a new industry of companies selling middleware “data analysis” tools, commonly used by game developers, have sprung up. This data analysis tools that promise to make users more adaptable to continued consumption through the use of large-scale data analytics. As if analysisonce only available to the biggest video game studios — can hire data scientists to collect, clean, and analyze data as well as software engineers to develop internal analysis tools suite — now ubiquitous throughout the industry, touted as “accessible” tools that provide a competitive advantage in a crowded market by companies such as Unite, GameAnalyticsor Amazon Web Services. (Although, as a recent research shows, the extent to which these tools are truly “accessible” is an issue, requiring technical expertise and time to implement.) When there is a need for data-driven insights growing, so also a variety of offerings—dozens of tools in just a few years, providing game developers with different forms of insight. One tool– essentially Uber for gaming – allows companies to outsource quality assurance checks and provide data-driven insights into results. Again supposedly uses AI to understand player value and maximize retention (and spend, with a focus on high spenders).
