We Can Fix That with Data

Did you know they’re data mining our children?

Just as adware often incorporates spyware, games can also be used to gather various types of user information. Through data-mining, chat analysis and other forms of automated surveillance, player input can be turned into valuable market research data. This can range from statistics on player demographics and in-game activities to more nuanced findings about the ideas and opinions players communicate while gaming or participating in related forums. With advergames, this transformation can also lead to direct and detailed feedback on the effectiveness of particular ads and techniques. The feedback loop between advertiser and player is thereby brought full circle, from market research to reception analysis and back again.

The horror! The author doesn’t say whether or not Neopets and the like use the data to improve gameplay, but who cares? They’re data mining our children!

I hadn’t heard about it before, but California Assemblywoman Lori Saldana’s “new bill making it illegal for companies to embed spyware in their games” sounds a little broad. Will fear of marketers lead to an outright ban of client-side data collection?

I’m not too worried, because as an MMO designer, I don’t care about the client a whole lot — the settings I want to know, like which abilities you have on your hotbar, I like to store on the server anyway. But this could hamper our ability to look at your machine settings — data programmers use to reproduce client crashes and estimate system requirements. And it could hamper our ability to keep games fair.

Does anybody have any more information on the California bill? Should gameplay analysts be worried?