Because of course they do
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So, a PR person from my tech blogging days emailed me a press release — even though I’ve made clear that I’ve moved on and also I hate this kind of thing — announcing a new development toolset that will allow game studios to ship off their gameplay data to a third party which will turn it into “AI-ready behavioral data.” Naturally, they’ll sell this and split the revenue with the studio.
Everybody gets paid except for the player, who forked over cash for the privilege of creating all this data in the first place. Neat.
To be honest, I’m surprised the industry isn’t further along in this direction. It’s my understanding that there’s a bit of a widening chasm between smallish businesses and big ones when it comes to the feasibility of working on in-house AI and any hope of making actual money from it, but it seems like exactly the sort of thing publishers would tell a studio to pursue like their jobs depended on it.
We know behavioral data has been big business for some time, though rarely with the benefit of the actual player in mind. More often, studios and publishers hire psychologists to analyze gameplay and “optimize engagement,” or y’know, manipulate players. A real credit to the field.
But, honestly, I didn’t even like when Telltale was telling us at the end of the game how many players made a given choice during the story. They went to all of this effort to create these moving stories and reward really stepping into a role, only to tap on the virtual clipboard at the end and tell us how many of our fellow lab rats sniffed the door hiding each kind of cheese.
This latest development won’t be restricted to the big, obvious games. You expect data shenanigans when you play Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. A service like this brings player commodification to the developer masses. Big AI would no doubt be as interested in teaching the machines how players approach twitchy indie platformers as it is in exploring which Battlefield map correlates to the most slurs. It’s difficult to imagine many studios declining to take the deal.
This is both bad for the player and bad for gaming. Even as a reasonably educated player, I have no idea whatsoever how my behavioral data is used, and for a while I’ve assumed it was always being used in the worst way possible. But then, I’m an unapologetic no-AI guy. Someone asked on Threads recently, “would you press a button and destroy all AI today for a million dollars?”
“That’s pretty steep,” I told him. “But if I can make payments on it, yes.”
We’re creating a situation in which, for all we know, Microsoft could update GoldenEye from 1997 and, the next time you play it, you may be training Grok or Claude or some shit the military came up with to teach drones to stalk the southern border. After a time there will probably be some standard: mark it on the product page, put it in the Terms of Use, don’t track kids, etc., but by that time, the industry has traded away even more player trust for a little bit of cash.
They used to say, “if you’re using something for free, you’re the product.” Now players are going broke just trying to stay the product. Console prices are up, PC hardware prices are up, online network prices are all over the place, and game prices are increasing. In return? Enjoy this free-run route in Assassin’s Creed: Vegas or whatever. We designed it using behavioral data to collect a more valuable type of behavioral data. Chop chop, everyone. We’ve got quotas to hit.
Hey, maybe they could rerelease Enter the Matrix and you could use your brain and body to power the machines in real life!
Anyway, here’s some free behavioral data for ya: I’m going to start shopping for game stuff at antique stores and ride out the continued collapse of the modern industry. We’ll see how it goes on the other side.
Photo Credit: Robynne O on Unsplash