6/24/2023 0 Comments Unity web player spyware![]() One tool-essentially Uber for playtesting-allows companies to outsource quality assurance testing, and provides data-driven insight into the results. (Although, as a recent study shows, the extent to which these tools are truly “accessible” is questionable, requiring technical expertise and time to implement.) As demand for data-driven insight has grown, so have the range of different services-dozens of tools in the past several years alone, providing game developers with different forms of insight. Such analytics, once available only to the largest video game studios-which could hire data scientists to capture, clean, and analyze the data, and software engineers to develop in-house analytics tools-are now commonplace across the entire industry, pitched as “accessible” tools that provide a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace by companies like Unity, GameAnalytics, or Amazon Web Services. These data analytics tools promise to make users more amenable to continued consumption through the use of data analysis at scale. While there are no numbers on how many video game companies are surveilling their players in-game (although, as a recent article suggests, large publishers and developers like Epic, EA, and Activision explicitly state they capture user data in their license agreements), a new industry of firms selling middleware “data analytics” tools, often used by game developers, has sprung up. Whitson and Bart Simon argued that games are increasingly understood as systems that easily allow the reduction of human action into knowable and predictable formats. ![]() ![]() Writing almost a decade ago, the sociologists Jennifer R. The user, by acting in ways that comply with the rules of the game and the specifications of the hardware, is parsed as data by the video game. In basic terms, video games are systems that translate physical inputs-such as hand movement or gesture-into various electric or electronic machine-readable outputs. All over the world, video games, one of the most widely adopted digital media forms, are installing networks of surveillance and control. The state’s use of biometric data to police its population is, of course, invasive, and especially undermines the privacy of underage users-but Tencent is not the only video game company to track its players, nor is this recent case an altogether new phenomenon. The move was in line with China’s strict gaming regulation policies, which impose limits on how much time minors can spend playing video games-an effort to curb addictive behavior, since gaming is labeled by the state as “spiritual opium.” Tech conglomerate Tencent caused a stir last year with the announcement that it would comply with China’s directive to incorporate facial recognition technology into its games in the country.
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